Is it just me, or was the point of this meandering ditty that "You should introduce adaptations at the same rate that people want to adapt"?
I mean, that's not very helpful. I can figure that out myself.
Even the analogy of Milo is broken, given what we know about strength gains (Olympic weightlifting is my hobby). In particular, strength gains are non-linear. Any developmental curve is the consequence not of some given simple multiplicative factor but of a complex set of feedback loops that govern adaptation.
And so it is with technological advancement. I'd be amazed to see a single number governing adaptation to novelty (which is what we're discussing here).
If anything it's going to depend on who is adapting, what they've seen in the past, what they're adapting to and so on. If it seems like a smooth, linear process, that's because we're looking at it from an overly compressed time frame. Lots of phenomena look smooth if you squish them up.
I think that would be a fair way to summarise it, but be careful not to reduce something to obviousness and then say it's too simple.
The interesting point for me is that much of startup marketing wisdom seems to say "make things people want", whereas there's another school that says "make people want things" - aka the Blue Ocean strategy and kin. How is it that both of these things can exist? Why did Google succeed by beating the dead search horse? Why did Twitter succeed at selling SMS-meets-chat-meets-blog-meets-I'm-on-acid?
Likely everyone with an eye to marketing has some sense of a rubber band connecting the ambition to the zeitgeist. You can pull the market with you a little, but go too far and you lose it. It is, in fact, quite a popular idea that Twitter and Google just happened to be in the right place at the right time.
But "right place at the right time" is a bit hand-wavy and qualitative. Perhaps it would be better to find a more structured way of thinking about it. That, to me, is the point of this article - not so much Greek calves or the order of growth curves.
What if the success of the lean startup movement isn't that it lets you develop faster, but rather that it forces you to develop slower. That is, that by bringing customers and product closer, it prevents you from stretching the rubber band too far. If so, perhaps you could yield better results by reallocating effort from product iterations into determining and exploiting those limits.
I suspect where Venkat is going is that instead of asking "what do people want?" on one side and "how can we make them want it more?" on the other, you could treat marketing and development as being simultaneous complementary processes; much as a good video game will always present content at the limit of your skill, you could position your product at the limit of customer tolerance for change.
My guess: this was all inspired by Facebook's hilarious mismanagement of that limit.
However, I'm in agreement with the other commenters: major weak sauce that this wasn't examined further. Since when did Ribbon Farm leave the apple cart wheels-down? Conflict-averse indeed!
I mean, that's not very helpful. I can figure that out myself.
Even the analogy of Milo is broken, given what we know about strength gains (Olympic weightlifting is my hobby). In particular, strength gains are non-linear. Any developmental curve is the consequence not of some given simple multiplicative factor but of a complex set of feedback loops that govern adaptation.
And so it is with technological advancement. I'd be amazed to see a single number governing adaptation to novelty (which is what we're discussing here).
If anything it's going to depend on who is adapting, what they've seen in the past, what they're adapting to and so on. If it seems like a smooth, linear process, that's because we're looking at it from an overly compressed time frame. Lots of phenomena look smooth if you squish them up.