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by gchamonlive
1390 days ago
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I was about to write that in case of Bezos with Amazon, the customer was simpler and the answer was to just pour money into it until you substituted the market, but I realise now that that is not that simple. It seems simple because we have hindsight. My main idea though is that it is very hard to foresee what the customer will want after you deliver the product. Not what the customers want now, because sometimes they don't understand it until they experience it, and that makes me think that there is a LOT of luck at play here and a good deal of continency in prototype product design. Experience alone could be overrated. Think Kodak, I don't think they didn't have experience in product design, that they didn't understand their customers. I think they only didn't risk their luck and didn't think about what their customers would want in the future. And that is always a gamble. - Things are more nuanced and complex than I am putting it here, but bottom line is that I am trying to tap into survivors bias. |
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(Disclaimer: I used to work on a customer sentiment analysis team at Amazon, doing a lot of surveys.)
Amusingly, the two paragraphs after what I cited agree on that danger:
> The outside world can push you into Day 2 if you won’t or can’t embrace powerful trends quickly. If you fight them, you’re probably fighting the future. Embrace them and you have a tailwind.
> These big trends are not that hard to spot (they get talked and written about a lot), but they can be strangely hard for large organizations to embrace. We’re in the middle of an obvious one right now: machine learning and artificial intelligence.
I don’t think the digital revolution was lost on Kodak — I think that for organizational reasons they couldn’t pivot.
> The first actual digital still camera was developed by Eastman Kodak engineer Steven Sasson in 1975. He built a prototype (US patent 4,131,919) from a movie camera lens, a handful of Motorola parts, 16 batteries and some newly invented Fairchild CCD electronic sensors.
https://www.cnet.com/google-amp/news/history-of-digital-came...