There are two basic classes of strategy to doing anything:
* Commit all your resources in advance
* Incrementalism
In situations of uncertainty, the latter is a simple risk management strategy. Armies have scouts, marketers work in test markets, engineers build prototypes.
What Eric Ries is selling isn't strictly new. But it's a cohesive repackaging of extant ideas that in my opinion is useful for making a single universal feedback loop the basis of a business.
How?
But basically the failure rate on it is atrocious. If you find a different new market that is immediately adjacent, what's the smart move?
When I studied nature-inspired computation, my professor quipped at one point that nature-inspired optimisation algorithms usually show what you got wrong about your problem definition.
Markets are the same. Nobody swoops down like Batman with a flawless plan and mastermind insight that turns out to be perfectly correct. The airport business books might give that impression, but it's total bullshit. What actually happens is that millions of men and women swoop down like Batman and discover that they're not backed by Bruce Wayne and a friendly script editor.
Once in a while somebody stumbles onto something good and then their history is rewritten to fit the monomyth.
Please give an example of a game changing idea that came about 'top down' ? Where do these ideas come from, in your opinion?
Apple would like you to believe the iPhone sprang into existence fully formed, but that is complete bullshit. Apple experimented with touch screen interfaces with the Newton in the late 80s / early 90s, and completely failed. Palm showed how touch screens could work in the mid / late 90s. Numerous academic projects worked on touch screens. The iPhone was the right product at the right time, but it was not truly innovative in a technical sense.
One of the points of the lean startup book is to go where the evidence points to go. Apple et al throw lots of features at the market and a lot of them die with a whimper.
Touch screens turn out to be really popular, so Apple has progressively doubled down on that.
And that's pretty much what the lean startup is arguing they should do. The main difference is that Ries made it an explicit loop that covers all activities in a company.
To me the most useful analogy is simulated annealing. Each startup is dropping into a chosen neighbourhood of the stupendously large space of possible businesses in possible markets in possible societies. Each strikes off in the direction it thinks is where the optimum lies.
What happens is that if you don't periodically check the slope, you'll run out of money. And if you don't periodically jump around the solution landscape, you may well miss out on a better optima and become stuck in a local optimum.
But like all multi-objective optimisation problems, both the solution and the search for the solution are riddled with unpleasant tradeoffs.
Having a capacitive screen only seemed like the next logical step, and of course to do it well, you will need to the change the UX.
In any case I think its disingenuous to contribute the iPhone's success to the top-down touch screen when many of the game changing features were brought to light after the iPhone went to market, such as the Apple-Controlled App Store.
Lastly, there is no way the touch screen could have been considered top-down from Apple in 2007. The touch screen interface had already been iterated numerous times starting in 1987 with the Apple Newton.