Yesterday’s Failures Are Today’s Successes

And some technologies that make this possible

Steven Sinofsky
Learning By Shipping

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It is super tough to see something you thought you dreamed up and developed fail only later go on to be someone else’s big success. Total gut-wrenching moment, and one you can’t help but obsess over.

Actor Rod Taylor “tests” a time machine from the 1960 film The Time Machine.

Today we are seeing a lot of successful startups building products and services that we saw the first time back during the Dot-com bust, and back then they failed pretty spectacularly.

@pmarca said:

“Nothing makes a founder or VC more upset than an idea she failed with a decade or more earlier, suddenly working.”

But, for two reasons you don’t really need to feel too bad. Rather, you can take this as an opportunity to force yourself to think broadly about all the ingredients of a successful product.

First, the culture of technology permeates our psyche to an incredibly high degree as technologists growing up. So many ideas appear in science fiction, movies, games, and more. My favorite, Star Trek showed off flat screens, removable storage, voice control, and more (and HoloDeck seems around the corner!). The foundational works in forward-thinking technology such as As We May Think, Dartmouth AI Conference, DynaBook, Hypertext Editing System, or 2001: Space Odyssey (to name just a few) continue to be realized generations later. For this reason, it is always a good reminder that there are few true inventions, but rather a technology stream of innovations, each one building on the past in novel recombinations.

Second, in hindsight we often neglect to consider how today’s technology context significantly changes a concept’s execution or implementation, or an innovation’s ability broadly diffuse (in a technology diffusion sense).

In that spirit, many of the products and services that were crazy ideas 15 years ago — ideas at the core of companies or products that crashed and burned — are only possible today because of a set of technologies that form the foundation everyone can rely on.

These technologies are why today is so much more than what is old is new again and why there is so much innovation even if at 50,000 feet the idea was tried before.

Mobile compute power. Everything about the first consumer internet was enabled by desktop (and laptop) PCs. Even with the prevalence of Wi-Fi, the ability to use the Internet was limited to being tethered to a pretty hefty 5lb device that cost $2000. Fast forward to today and 10X that computational power is what 2 billion people carry around with them all the time. Today’s mobile compute is greater than the typical PC of today whereas 15 years ago being mobile meant finding ways to do much less and do so offline perhaps synchronizing by cable with a PC later (for example with a Palm Pilot).

All day battery life. It would be pretty cool to have something small to carry around, but 15 years ago the best one could hope for was to have an entirely offline experience with a cached copy of data from a prior sync with a PC. The advances in both hardware and software, from the chipsets and batteries to the modern mobile OS model dramatically changed the realities of battery life. Even today, most laptops are still stuck in 4–6 hour usage compared to 16-20 hours for a smartphone.

Touch user-interface. Touch user-interface itself was neither new nor a big advance as a technology (ATMs had been using resistive panels for years). The real change was the design to utilize touch technology that caused a major reset in how complexity is presented to people. Forcing those design constraints compared to endless menus and toolbars, or links and pop ups dramatically expanded the reach and diffusion of today’s applications.

3G connectivity. The rise of, eventually low-cost, 3G dramatically altered the view of how bandwidth can be used. Prior to the iPhone, bandwidth was viewed as a scarce resource the way RAM or disk space was viewed during the early days of Windows — something to be conserved at all costs. While this is far from diffused globally, the dramatic decision by Apple to effectively treat bandwidth the way Windows came to treat RAM/disk 15 years ago (or how Unlimited Voice Plans treated voice minutes) fundamentally changed how scenarios would come to be realized. We don’t think twice about seeing pictures of items we are shopping for or watching videos on our mobile devices.

Location services and maps. Most probably don’t remember, but for the first 10 years or so the primary use of internet maps was to get directions “online” (at your desktop) to print them out for a trip. The combination of GPS location services (and subsequent Wi-Fi accuracy) along with maps (with travel time, traffic, and more) on mobile devices was a sea change to everything “on demand”. Back 15 years ago, most of the web delivery services were still using Thomas Street Guides to find your apartment for that WebVan delivery or MyLackey appointment.

Social graph. While there were plenty of messaging services and even the enormous MySpace back in the day, the modern social graph, Facebook, changed the nature of “social proof” for many services. The ability to both authenticate as your real Facebook profile or to use a service where you have some notion of “is this a real person” changes the way people think about identity. The rise of services built on legitimate uses of this graph is a huge change from relying on an AIM Screen Name.

Flash storage. The rise of flash storage created two positive trends. First, devices with flash were way more reliable as storage was the last moving part in a laptop and the most fragile. You could never carry around a pocket-sized spinning drive with any reliability over time. Second, Flash technology could grow way faster than spinning disks and thus in the span of just a couple of years met all of our individual storage needs. This latter change was a major change to how software and services were designed. Video, photos, rich interactive games, and more could be an integral part of an experience without constantly worrying about how much space was left.

PayPal. The first time anyone bought something with their credit card on the late 90’s web it was truly magical. With SSL security, shopping carts, and just typing in all those digits, your billing/shipping address, and more you could have stuff sent to you. After the 10th different web site saving your credit card things became a nightmare. All this was even worse if you were a merchant trying to figure out how to write code to accept credit card transactions. PayPal accelerated the spread of web merchants in a huge way and radically transformed the ability to reliably, securely, and robustly pay and accept money on the web. Today PayPal processes over $80 Billion dollars a quarter in transactions.

Sharing. It is hard to believe, but 15 years ago the whole idea of sharing was still pretty new. If you had built a product or service predicated on sharing, publishing, or anything “user-generated” then for the most part society at large was skeptical (best case!). Even though many technologies existed to make it easy to share, with a few exceptions most everything on the internet was point-to-point through contact or buddy lists. Sharing did not become mainstream until well into the 2000’s with Wikipedia and YouTube. Perhaps the biggest change that makes old ideas new again is not as much a technology change but a culture or societal context—people share and we find great value in sharing what we create, think, believe, feel, and more with other people even beyond our immediate “legacy” social circle. The olds might never get used to this, but certainly this change has made a lot of ideas from 15 years ago seem much more relevant today.

These are just a few things that are fundamentally different from 15 years ago. We should always want to remind ourselves when claiming to have had an idea long ago, that execution is not just an idea and code, but the complete set of Product, Price, Place, Promotion which we today think of as Product-Market Fit. It takes more than that old screen shot or pulling something out of Sent Items to have had an idea.

To sort-of-steal from Buckaroo Banzai, no matter what happens, someone always said it would.

The best thing is to be the person, team, or product that makes today happen and not dwell on why today didn’t happen yesterday.

Steven Sinofsky (@stevesi)

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