Corner cases kill innovation
For weeks after reading this post I kept being reminded of it. It covers how difficult the balance is between planning for long-term goals at the expense of short-term success.... example - we plan to go worldwide so we should have a multi-language solution.
In my opinion, we see this all the time in enterprise efforts. Some call it overengineering but I prefer to think of it as having lost perspective to what is really valuable. We seem to get carried away with more and more rich features that are only used by a very small subset of users (assuming they have the patience to find out which of the 100 features they will use).
231 views and 3 responses
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Dec 6 2009, 9:45 AMWolf Cramer responded:Andrew Chen recently posted about this concept of product design "debt" versus technical debt (http://andrewchenblog.com/2009/11/25/product-design-debt-versus-technical-debt/). I think this feature-rich/scalability balance also ties in with the corner case post.
In both cases, the optimal approach is defined by TIME rather than strategy. Something that works incredibly well when you have a well-understood user base or content volume may not be the best solution (it may even be a very bad solution) if things exponentially grow organically or by design.
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Nov 15 2010, 3:42 PMWolf Cramer liked this post.
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Dec 17 2010, 2:50 PMHutch Carpenter liked this post.