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> Doing the same thing as everybody else, and doing the same thing year after year after year, is trivially easy. No, it's almost impossible. Doing the same t
by anamax 14y ago
> Doing the same thing as everybody else, and doing the same thing year after year after year, is trivially easy.
No, it's almost impossible. Doing the same thing for year after year is impossible because someone comes along and does some part better from the customer's point of view, and then you don't have a business.
> Slicing bread is a dead easy business to be in. You buy a bread slicer, and you let it run. innovation, no matter the sector, is what is hard.
There are no "easy businesses".
For starters, there's no "bread slicing" biz. Slicing bread is a small part of whatever it is your customer is actually paying for.
Never confuse "units of billing" (suc as "loaves of sliced bread") with the business. For example, the biz is often making sure that they can serve their customers profitably. Fresh, on-time, small-inventory, etc is what makes a difference, not the bread slicer.
There's innovation in every biz that lasts. Technology is usually the easy part.
- tjic 14y agoAwesome response / explanation. Thank you.
- notatoad 14y ago>No, it's almost impossible. Doing the same thing for year after year is impossible because someone comes along and does some part better from the customer's point of view, and then you don't have a business. That's what I'm saying. Nobody in the pc OEM game has done that lately, that's why it has been so easy to be a OEM.
- anamax 14y ago> That's what I'm saying. Nobody in the pc OEM game has done that lately, that's why it has been so easy to be a OEM. You're wrong. You seem to think that PC OEMs just order some parts and slap them together. That's no more true than "buy a bread slicer and you've got a biz". Being a PC OEM has always been hard and the ones that have survived have innovated. (Consider Starbucks. Pouring coffee isn't their biz.) Never confuse "I don't know what they do" with "they don't do anything".