
No Plan Survives First Contact With A Customer – The 5.2 billion dollar mistake - joshuacc
http://steveblank.com/2010/11/01/no-business-plan-survives-first-contact-with-a-customer-%e2%80%93-the-5-2-billion-dollar-mistake/
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RiderOfGiraffes
Dup, third time over, more comments here:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1856327>

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omergertel
It's really hard to do lean satellite development. There's a set of
constraints that prevent this type of problem from being developed and
deployed iteratively.

Except for identifying the fact that the opportunity has been missed and
closing shop earlier, I can't really think of what I would have done
differently.

What do you suggest? How would you lean the process?

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morisy
It's a tough question, but I think the key is "customer development." Lock in
users and use cases with contracts before launching the satellites, and map
out what could be emerging threats. With the mobility space, it was already
rapidly, rapidly changing, and I think their customers were more this
imaginary, high-flying James Bond-style business executive.

How many people really need a phone that covers them in "middle of the Arctic
Ocean to the jungles of Africa to the remote mountain peaks of the Himalayas"?
The answer is: "Not a sustainable market."

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easp
I don't know if the numbers pencilled out, but Teledesic, another company with
similar ambitions, but, I think, using satellites in lower orbit, was trying
to get some long term customers from countries with a lot of wide open spaces,
where the cost of providing wired infrastructure, or even wireless
infrastructure strung together with point to point microwave connections, was
prohibitive.

Australia was one of their targets, but I think also some of the telcos in the
western US, which had obligations to provide service, even in sparsely
populated areas.

but yeah. big Fail

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morisy
Wow. I covered the telephony industry for a while, and had no idea that
Iridium's ambitions had once been this great. When I spoke with them a year or
two ago, they were selling themselves as a last-ditch backup, trying to
penetrate the enterprise market by saying, "Hey, we're expensive but you don't
have to use us until you need us!"

Satellite rates are incredibly high relatively speaking, and it's just amazing
to see how this company, which comes off as an 80s relic, actually came to be.

