Fail fast, fail early.
Refer to title for the new model tech investors need to follow, if they can keep up.
Examples of such behavior:
- Create a thousand free G-products and hope that one sticks. Dump them quickly when they don't.
- Write 60 losing apps until you create an Angry Birds and hit the jackpot.
- Find a tired, over regulated industry like taxi transport and hotellery with expensive start up costs and barriers to entry. Create a mobile app like Uber or AirBnB to leverage peoples' under-used private resources and compete on the newly levelled playing field.
Build a platform where everyone supplies free content and you charge for the advertising.
Ker-ching!
Traditional large OEMs and IT business models will have trouble thriving in this new environment unless they change too. The current strategy for them seems to become smaller and divest.
The thing to be noticed here is not how badly people bet on tech investments. People always bet badly on tech investments, it just took longer to separate the dogs from the winners. Probably because things were slower back then, as were the economic/business models, development methods and CEOs.
I am old enough to remember when it used to be very, very expensive to write monolithic apps and create compute systems that sold for gazillions.
Much easier to hire a zero-hour web developer, some java programmers and rent a bit of CPU, RAM and disk space on Azure. Then become a startup software company and try out your idea(s).
If you are lucky, smart and time it correctly, you might even get rich!
Biting the hand that feeds IT
