3 ms·
It's an object lesson that in order to create a winning new product, it has to be 100-200% better than the existing ones, not just 10-50% better.
by mgenzel 17y ago
It's an object lesson that in order to create a winning new product, it has to be 100-200% better than the existing ones, not just 10-50% better.
- Elessar 17y agoThe other thing is to judge your customer base properly. Once customer satisfaction is positive, it is a big hurdle to overcome. To supplant "Good enough", it appears that the new product has to be the 100-200% you stated. Microsoft has had the same issue with its own upgrade (Windows XP), although that's a bit more debatable. I think it's a similar lesson though.
- zhyder 17y agoI've heard the same argument stated as 'must be 3x better' before, but it feels overly simplified. I think how much better you need to be depends on: - How painful the status quo is for the market; do existing solutions have a perception of being 'good enough' or are folks screaming for something better? (People feel Google is good enough: a -ve for MS.) - What are the switching costs? (Switching between search engines is relatively easy: a +ve for MS.)
- mgenzel 17y agoObviously, any pithy observation is by necessity overly simplified :) However, there's a lot more truth to it than otherwise. E.g, your first point, the painful status quo. My previous company addressed the job search market, in which most people are very unhappy with the status quo solutions; and our particular solution, I feel, was about 40-70% better than existing ones (and also a new paradigm), nonetheless, people weren't really readily jumping ship. With search engines (including a vertical one, like ours) evaluating comparative quality is actually pretty hard, which washes away a bit the easy switching cost (I don't mean expert comparisons; I mean average user looking at average queries).