Built to Fail: What Google, Ideo, and 37signals have in common
andrewchenblog.com
andrewchenblog.com
Their releases are not cheap - once you announce a new iPhone, you cannot change the hardware before release so you really need to get it right. The soonest you can update it is a year or so.
Most of all,Apple is the canonical example of the 'great man theory'. Apple has several of them - Jobs, Ive and several others whose names generally don't get publicity.
Now, this is not to say the original posts points aren't valid - most people don't have the talent or expertise that Apple do. But I just couldn't resist throwing in the obvious counter-example.
They even say so in their jobs faq: Apple hires quality assurance engineers for internal product testing...We also create focus groups to provide feedback on our products.
http://apple20.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2009/07/01/a-fireside-c...
For example, I remember reading a story about someone testing out the iPhone UI alone in a contraption in a box as opposed to the real hardware.
Why is this a problem? Other than having multitouch capability, the UI didn't depend on the hardware at all.
People and companies still need to have long term vision of what to do "in case" your product is actually good, your startup actually gets funded, and of success in general. This turns you into a proactive player.
If all one does is have a system in place that reacts when something goes wrong, then this is really being reactive.
I believe Andrew is missing the bigger picture.
"This area of thinking started out with the hiring process, and the idea that maybe interviews don’t work at all – there’s a bunch of academic research that implies that, actually. So if how would you build a failure-tolerant system around the hiring process, if you assume that good interview candidates actually have no correlation to successful employees?"
I have been partial to contract to hire. You still have to do interviews, but you have a fallback position.
Think about interviewing for a job (not from an entrepreneurial mindset) - what you're looking for is the safety and security of a job and what the company is giving you is a contract position that can be terminated at any time without severance or notice.
It is a great idea but there is stigma (possibly unsubstantiated) associated with it.
This is especially true for computer programming and Business Analysts. The normal 3 month span will show you a minimum of competence, but it doesn't show anyone's final working level. The exceptional individuals will still stand out, but most companies don't have that kind of draw or the salaries to focus on them.
Be ruthless, and whatever you do, make sure it passes the deer-stuck-in-the-headlights-of-an-oncoming-car test. If it doesn't stir emotions to spread life, stick it out until you get that polished diamond in the ruff.
iPhone wasn't an overnight success, there's no such thing. Plan accordingly.
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And there's one thing missing from that comic strip. "I see... well laugh as you may. Eventually I'll be laughing all the way to the bank."
A system being fault tolerant, like googke, just means that it can rollforward/rollback when an error occurs. It is nothing more than a technical concept.
People in design industry often use brainstorming to generate and screen ideas. IDEO is just one of them. Brainstorming is not an explaination of either how they succeed or why they succeed.
And the framework Ruby on Rails characterizing convention over configuration and don't repeat yourself even has nothing to do with "failure-tolerance", thought it emphasizes fast iteration in development.
The over generalization in the article make its conclusion very unconvincing.