Thomas HansenIf you're a software developer like me, chances are you have an aspiring entrepreneur inside of you, waiting to show the world some brilliant piece of innovation, having everybody using your stuff, while you cash in a fortune on delivering it to them. If so, I will give you an advice, arguably provided in the title of this article, which is as follows; Do NOT give your customers what they want.
It's a little bit of an exaggeration of course, and for those having seen some Steve Jobs quotes, it might be easily recognisable, since Steve said "your customers don't know what they want before you show it to them". However, Steve stole it from Henry Ford. Henry had a slightly different twist on it, which was as follows ...
If I was to give people what they wanted I would breed faster horses
Ford's quote is better I think, since it illustrates a fundamental problem with innovation, which is that (most) people only want incremental changes to their existing products, such as with their phones for instance they want ...
- Longer battery life
- Water resistance
- Less weight
- Etc ...
If Apple was to build phones according to what customers wanted, we'd never have iPhones in this world. Hence, if you want to truly innovate, you have to ignore what your customers wants - At least for a while. If you focus exclusively on what your customers wants, it becomes impossible for you to frog leap your competitors, and invent for instance "the 'flying' phone" (or whatever really, that completely changes the way the world interacts with their phones). And whomever invents the "flying phone" will inevitably steal the entire market when they go to market.
You could copycat the existing iPhone and make it a billion times better than Apple - Still, 5 seconds after the "flying phone" hits the shelves, you'll be obsolete and irrelevant, and nobody will remember who you even are!
About Aista
If we had focused on "what the market wanted" as we invented Magic, we would have ended up creating either yet another O/RM library, yet another message broker, yet another Saga library, or (sigh!) yet another NoSQL database. In fact, when we started out, everybody thought we were fundamentally insane. Something you can see from the disclaimer from Microsoft's side as I published my first article about the base innovation facilitating for Magic.
I'll repeat its most important parts below.
When I approached MSDN Magazine Senior Contributing Editor James McCaffrey to review the preliminary draft of this article, he came away fairly outraged by some of the opinions and ideas put forward by the author
To translate; "This guy is probably bat sh*t crazy". James wasn't the only one who was "outraged" for the record. In fact, almost an entire world of software developers were "outraged" by my code initially. Still today I sometimes hear statements such as ...
- It has no use cases
- It's too simple
- It's madness
- Etc, etc, etc ...
Of course, today I'm hearing less of the above, and more of the following ...
- It can be used for everything
- It's easy to use
- It's brilliant
- Etc, etc, etc ...
When the Wright brothers started creating flying machines, I'm sure they heard similar objections - Without comparing myself to them for the record. However, it illustrates the innovator's dilemma, which is as follows ...
They'll think you're bat sh*t crazy the first decade!
Which of course should just encourage you more, and avoid listening to them, and move forward using their objections as fuel to make you even more dedicated. In order to be able to do this, you have to base your life around a simple axiom, which is as follows ...
I am right and everybody else is wrong!
Unless you can truly believe the above, you can never invent something truly brilliant. We had t-shirts created for the whole team to embody this idea. You can see us wearing our t-shirts on our last kick off below. The idea of course is us trying to explain our competitors why they're only seeing our backs as they do ... ;)
Our vision
Within 5 years we will have automated 80% of all (manual) software development world wide
Still today the majority of the world thinks I'm crazy. However, more and more people are starting to believe in us now. People are gathering around our tools and uttering "Wow!" more and more, and I hear less of the "bat sh*t crazy" parts. The advantage of course being that once the people who have no other capacity beyond simply copying existing innovations understands what we've done, it's already too late, and we're miles ahead of all competition on the planet, and they'll spend the next 5 decades playing catchup with us. Hence ...
Never give people what they want, because what they want, is to bury great ideas, destroy disruptive technology, that is endangering their abilities to make money on yesterday's technology ...
When you have invented something truly brilliant of course, and everybody sees it for what it is, then you can start listening to them, as they provide you with feedback, bug reports, and feature requests. However, until that time, ignore them, because ...
You are right, and the whole world is wrong! ;)
Psst, want to play with our stuff to see what all the fuzz is about?
