Popular Web Strategies That Don’t Work

But you will eventually become irrelevant, which makes new customer acquisition extremely difficult.

Most companies that profitably lead by following the pack do so by leveraging other products they produce as their way to the customer.

If you have a handful of "leading" products and a handful of "following" products, this can be a very good strategy as it allows you to produce "solutions" that leverage the sales of the leaders. On the other hand, it rarely works for a single product and doesn't work for long when all your products follow.

In general, following is usually a result of poor product management (doesn't understand the customer) or poor executive management (doesn't invest in product development). Rarely is it part of a well-considered strategy.

Repeatable process: Hire brilliant people!

I interpreted that it meant, especially concerning usability, that those strategies are not things you can easily differentiate with, they're rather commodities.

The difference is that in the #1 point he was talking about not simply implementing the features of a competitor. If you notice company B has feature X and therefore decide you must have it as well, you may be in trouble if it turns out feature X isn't useful and is hard to implement.

So, it's obvious that while Google wasn't the first search engine, they also weren't simply copying Altavista's feature list.

I think you can build remarkable products by really understanding your customers and the people who would never buy from you. If you build relationships, you learn about their pains, and solving customer pains makes you remarkable, no epiphanies required.

Well, now that I've written this, I realized what you might have been thinking (eg "The Four Steps to the Epiphany" type of thing). To the extent an epiphany is an insight about your customers gained by understanding your customers, I completely agree with you. To the extent it is a "brain wave" out of nowhere that is going to magically save the product (which is what I think the article meant), then I agree with the article.

I think it is more targeted along the lines of what Amazon does. They create new products, but do it in a way that they don't bet the house, so its great if they work, but controlled if they fail.

You don't need to have epiphanies to be remarkable, but they sure can come in useful. The key point being don't bank on them, with the unwritten subtext of don't ignore them.