My last post got me thinking about the question of getting to market first versus getting to market right. The oft parroted common wisdom is that to succeed you need to get your thing to market first. I generally skeptical of anything oft parroted. Sure the early bird gets the worm, but it’s the second mouse that gets the cheese. Here are a few examples:
- VHS. Worse than betamax on nearly every level. What’s a betamax?
- Quicken. At the time of Inuit’s 1984 release of Quicken there had already been over 40 commercial software packages for personal finance
- Office. Know anyone who still uses Lotus123, VisiCalc or WordPerfect?
- World of Warcraft.Released at a time when there were countless MMORPGs, most of which also fantasy based, and it left them all in the dust
- Dyson Vacuums. Upstart company is devouring the tired old vacuum cleaner market
- Del.icio.us. Blink.com came first by years, had vastly more users, and more funding, but its long gone now and Del.icio.us is the gold standard for online bookmarking.
I suppose I am just a little biased. As a designer I seek to optimize the user’s experience with a product and the value they get from it. But in a true first-to-market context the value is in the raw capabilities the new product’s functionality exposes (i’ll post on the related basis of competition issue shortly). So, first-to-market scenarios are primarily marketing plays, while best-to-market scenarios are iNPD (engineering, marketing and design) plays.
But if you really are first to market, that means your latent market has lived well enough without your product all these years. So would a few more days or weeks spent on design really be too much to ask?
One argument might be that “we have to ship 1.0 to start realizing revenue, then we’ll let the designers do their thing.” Of course downstream redesignings are, generally speaking, drastically more costly than upstream design.
Another argument might be “we need to move now and capture market share before our competitors do.” Forget the myopia of letting your competitors define your product strategies, but if your competitors are in fact that hot on your heels then now is the time to start redesigning your product, not after you and your competitor both deploy roughly the same product at roughly the same time for roughly the same customers. Competition then becomes a big stalemated game of rock, paper, scissors.
Check out Ari Paparo’s post about how his experiences at Blink show how it is more important to get it right than to get there first.
Super analysis. Now how about some thoughts on the WHY behind the ‘second comers’ success vis a vis the first movers. I’ll start with those I have some idea about…
Dyson – definitely design, *but* not design alone, it was design coupled with an entirely new engineering solution to the suction problem faced by existing bag based vacuums. He solved a problem. The design, to be honest, in this case, was the casing for the essential problem solution paradigm he invented. But on the side of your iNPD plays – his pricing, his promotion, his product were all “rule breakers” too. It was a clean sweep so to speak, to indulge myself.
VHS vs Betamax – Here, at least from what little strategic analysis we did in class, the rationale given for vhs success vs. beta’s decline was the proprietariness of the hardware solution. While VHS tech was spread out amongst far more mfrs, sony held on tightly to the beta, and only beta tapes would work on it. plus price. one of the earliest examples of the success of open source and viral spread of something that was universally exchangeable, so to speak.
I loved the case study on product design ref Blink and del.icio.us, especially as an ardent delicious fan I can see what it’s about. thanks, I intend to steal it for this shameless link http://www.designdirectory.com
Another fascinating dimension of this issue is the effect on brand. If you launch a crappy product early, it harms your brand. But this percpetion can be mitigated by calling the product a “beta”! And it offers the added ability to gather valuable intelligence about usage patterns. So instead of thinking of it as time-to-market, think of it as a public product test 🙂
Also, anytime you talk about first-to-market you should consider time-to-market, i.e. the time value of money says that a dollar today is worth more than a dollar tomorrow. Sony keeps stupidly coming out with proprietary technology (a friend of mine there confirms it is a mentality) but the money they make can be pumped into being first to market with the next new gadget. And with gadgets, newer is better (to gadgetheads).
Yeah, Microsoft got a reputation for always shipping premature software, a reputation that continues to infect its brand despite enormous recent quality impovements. Of course the brand damage didn’t really translate into business damage.
One of the frequent responses to my questioning of first-to-market is the time value of money. Of course the corrollary to the time value of money should be the time value of recovery–how much more does it cost you to recover from premature market release than it would have cost you to just do it right the first time? So fixing a design flaw when customers are paying for your product is way way way more costly than fixing the design flaw or more fully developnig the design in the first place, before a commercial release.
I’m certainly not saying first-to-market is wrong–I’m just saying it isn’t always right. Now, how do we develop a theory to help determine when it is or isn’t the right strategy to follow?
Here are some more examples…
– AOL Compuserve was around first, but who acquired 20 million customers?
– PayPal Plenty of earlier attempts at making online money transfers, but can you name any of them?