Customer Development is Not a Focus Group

That's a badass failure story! Steve Blank perpetuated the Endian War!

I saw Dave McClure give a talk at FOWA 2009 with these slides:

http://www.slideshare.net/dmc500hats/startup-metrics-for-pir...

He takes an even more brutal approach to customer development: you should remove features until your customers scream at you!

This might be a bit too severe but I think that it summarises the core philosophy behind customer development pretty well.

This article does little to prove that doing both was the wrong choice. What evidence are we given that it was a bad decision? Both groups of users bought the chips, didn't they?

I doubt that MIPS Computers was in a position to dictate standardization to their market, so building a flexible but less simple product may have been the right call at the time.