[DividesByZero]

There is no such thing as an entrepreneur with a top down idea. You can be an ideas guy, but you can't be an entrepreneur without taking what you have to customers and iterating on it until it's right.

Please give an example of a game changing idea that came about 'top down' ? Where do these ideas come from, in your opinion?

[khitchdee]

An example of a game-changing idea that came top-down was the use of the touchscreen interface in the iPhone. Someone thought this would be a cool way to interface, worked down to a cool product and people liked it and used it a lot.

[noelwelsh]

The iPhone is just one point in a long line of evolution that started way back with Doug Engelbart's work, if not before.

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.

[jacques_chester]

See, now we're well into the realm of arguing by warring definitions.

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.

[nemothekid]

I'm not sure that is entirely valid. Most smartphones before the iPhone were touch screen - resistive and needed a pen, like the Palm Treo, and the many Windows Mobile Phones before it, - but still touch screen.

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.

[DividesByZero]

Touch screen interfaces on smartphones existed long before the iPhone.