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.
>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.
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/