

Customer Development is Not a Focus Group - prakash
http://steveblank.com/2009/11/30/customer-development-is-not-a-focus-group/

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pchristensen
That's a badass failure story! Steve Blank perpetuated the Endian War!

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richardburton
I saw Dave McClure give a talk at FOWA 2009 with these slides:

[http://www.slideshare.net/dmc500hats/startup-metrics-for-
pir...](http://www.slideshare.net/dmc500hats/startup-metrics-for-pirates-long-
version)

He takes an even more brutal approach to customer development: you should
remove features until your customers scream at you!

This might be a bit too severe but I think that it summarises the core
philosophy behind customer development pretty well.

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GavinB
This article does little to prove that doing both was the wrong choice. What
evidence are we given that it was a bad decision? Both groups of users bought
the chips, didn't they?

I doubt that MIPS Computers was in a position to dictate standardization to
their market, so building a flexible but less simple product may have been the
right call at the time.

