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dan b
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2 months ago
in “Stealing MySpace” and my personal experience monetizing MySpace ads on Futuristic Play by @Andrew_Chen
Great post Andrew, and the "behind the scenes" insight is great. I am surprised no mention of Facebook, though. Do you think the same lessons apply there (lack of commercial intent, though high engagement and growth). How about those big brand deals that Myspace was willing to do -- Facebook not so much?
1 reply
7 months ago
in The Cult of the Product on 20bits
Great post, amongst you're many other great posts here...however I am not too sure if NeXT (or Apple) is the best example of this.
Although hindsight has proven that indeed Jobs' prediction of a new class of computer buyer was emerging in the early 90's, NeXT did a poor job at gaining sustainable market share growth. So what went wrong? It was not execution, as they made a product that was far beyond its competitors. But it excelled in metrics that were unimportant to that market. This should be an indicator that their design process may not be very empirically driven.
I would argue, in fact, that the areas in which Apple has performed the best are those where a consumer's sentiment and emotion drive a purchase decision. A product design process that optimizes for emotion is immensely difficult, especially in consumer electronics. Rather, Apple's success comes from the irrational "insanely great" process that seems to find that emotional connection with its consumers.
Thoughts?
Although hindsight has proven that indeed Jobs' prediction of a new class of computer buyer was emerging in the early 90's, NeXT did a poor job at gaining sustainable market share growth. So what went wrong? It was not execution, as they made a product that was far beyond its competitors. But it excelled in metrics that were unimportant to that market. This should be an indicator that their design process may not be very empirically driven.
I would argue, in fact, that the areas in which Apple has performed the best are those where a consumer's sentiment and emotion drive a purchase decision. A product design process that optimizes for emotion is immensely difficult, especially in consumer electronics. Rather, Apple's success comes from the irrational "insanely great" process that seems to find that emotional connection with its consumers.
Thoughts?
1 reply
Jesse Farmer
Dan,
I do agree that part of Apple's success is that its design process focuses on the softer things, but I don't think it's irrational. Rather, it takes its cues from fields like psychology and anthropology, rather than the hard sciences.
There's nothing wrong with that so long as you know its strengths and weaknesses.
I do agree that part of Apple's success is that its design process focuses on the softer things, but I don't think it's irrational. Rather, it takes its cues from fields like psychology and anthropology, rather than the hard sciences.
There's nothing wrong with that so long as you know its strengths and weaknesses.
We actually did a meeting with Facebook when they just got started and were like 15 people or so? I remember that they were running remnant ads and ran a lot of online poker ads back then ;-)