[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.