[MCRed]

1. YES!

2. Well this seems like one of those questions you could always say yes to. "Do you think you should have saved more money in your 20s?" "Do you think you should have worked out more over the past 5 years?" Who isn't going to say yes?

That being said, the failure of our business came about because the business model of the market we were serving shifted, as a result of a new piece of technology. Our customers didn't anticipate this shift (customers don't know what they want until they see it in some cases) and we, when the other business model came about, didn't recognize its significance. So, alas, I don't think customer development would have helped because nobody had invented the thing that killed us at the time we would have been doing customer development.

3. YES! I would love to buy a customer development as a service type service. Part of the problem for me is that customer development is sometimes very hard, it's not always easy to identify the customers for a particular idea.