Of course, by “infinite“, we mean “never“. This article, highlighting some incidents from the career from Microsoft’s new superstar, Ray Ozzie, mentions this in passing.
“no small company can afford to develop multiple products that never reach the market – there aren’t the resources to do that.”
The article says that Ozzie left DataGeneral in order to join a company where products would actually reach market. When I was at Nortel, the engineers there worked on some REALLY COOL products that were canned because the market wasn’t ready for them. We’re talking about 10 years ago but some of the products would still be cool and innovative in broadband-soaked 2006. Eventually Ozzie found himself at Lotus where he developed Notes. Now he’s the big Kahuna at Microsoft. Funny how things work out eh?
We certainly can’t afford to be creating products that will never be sold. Or at least, products that will be ignored (because we don’t intend to SELL everything. Some things will be free…). I can see how demotivating it would be to the team here if that was the case with anything. I know how galling it can be to have wasted even a nights work.
Technorati Tags: products