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Re:Failure Is the Mother of Invention by paulpauper on Tuesday June 21, 2022 @05:43PM (#31829436)
this notion that you need to fail seems wrong. Facebook, Microsoft, google never came close to failing and never had big failures yet still had innovations.
Re:Failure Is the Mother of Invention by cableshaft on Tuesday June 21, 2022 @05:54PM (#31829532)
> Facebook, Microsoft, google ... never had big failures

Google: Wave, Orkut, Google+, Google Video, Google Glass [1]

Microsoft: Band, Bob, Kin, Zune, Lumia, Windows 8 [2]

Facebook: Poke, Parse, Beacon, Credits, Paper, Slingshot, Libra [3]

That's just products. If you go into security breaches, lawsuits, and operating procedures, you could list several more.

These companies are large enough to have big failures and still keep kicking, and have people start to forget the failures over time (I had forgotten several of these myself). But they definitely aren't immune to having big failures.

[1]: https://www.lewis-lin.com/blog/2018/2/26/googles-product-fai...

[2]: https://gizmodo.com/microsoft-failures-windows-vista-cortana...

[3]: https://startuptalky.com/facebook-failed-products/

Re:Failure Is the Mother of Invention by paulpauper on Tuesday June 21, 2022 @07:11PM (#31830185)
The iPod was a do or die moment for Apple. It's not like there was much margin for error. Fakebook's main product was an immediate and huge success. Its other product failures were tiny compared to this huge success.
Re:Failure Is the Mother of Invention by danielmarkbruce on Tuesday June 21, 2022 @05:59PM (#31829580)
I think his point was their very first product was a success. No failures required.
Re:Failure Is the Mother of Invention by jjulius on Tuesday June 21, 2022 @06:07PM (#31829652)
>I think his point was their very first product was a success. No failures required.

Except those companies, or the people who founded them, also had early failures. For instance, Zuckerberg's original site was more akin to "Hot or Not" than Facebook and got shut down by Harvard. Gates certainly had failures, as did Larry and Sergey. Just because the company they founded was successful from inception doesn't mean it wasn't a struggle to figure out how to get there. It would be wild to me to assume that there are people out there, walking among us, who have never failed.

Re:Failure Is the Mother of Invention by danielmarkbruce on Tuesday June 21, 2022 @06:52PM (#31830025)
Gates was a teen, as was zuckerberg. They were tiny failures. I don't believe Larry or Sergey failed at anything much before google. It was a little problematic afterwards because their mental model for building businesses was pretty distorted by their immediate, crazy success.
Re:Failure Is the Mother of Invention by jjulius on Tuesday June 21, 2022 @05:44PM (#31829450)
Re:Failure Is the Mother of Invention by sgarman on Tuesday June 21, 2022 @05:53PM (#31829524)
This post makes me realize you really need to define success before you do anything else.
Re:Failure Is the Mother of Invention by antihipocrat on Tuesday June 21, 2022 @05:55PM (#31829542)
How many iterations of search engine algorithms were tried before finding a solution that beat the competition? Google now kills many of its own products that don't live up to expectations.

Microsoft has had a number of failed products, even some versions of windows are considered to be failures.

Each company has learned from the failures though, which I think is a main point of the article.

Re:Failure Is the Mother of Invention by soSadm4n on Tuesday June 21, 2022 @06:54PM (#31830043)
It’s a poetic take on relativity and knowledge acquisition.

Can’t be here until you observed back there, because here does not exist without having moved from back there to here.

Qualifying it as failure is subjective and crap poetry coupled to contemporary productivity culture. It’s a success in that you learned. It’s only a failure because it didn’t unicorn.

Re:Failure Is the Mother of Invention by taneq on Tuesday June 21, 2022 @07:59PM (#31830521)
You don't need to fail catastrophically overall in order to make mistakes and learn from them.

If you aren't making mistakes, you aren't making anything.