
Real artists ship - smysore
http://counternotions.com/2008/08/12/concept-products/
======
brc
Reminds me of a guy I once knew. He was unemployed and as far as I could work
out - a sponge on everyone he knew, including his parents and girlfriend. He
kept telling me that he hated 'real' jobs and wanted to be a writer.

I asked him what he had written. He couldn't answer me. This struck me as very
odd (I was young). Of all the things in the world to do, writing has to have
the lowest cost of entry. Just pick up a piece of paper and start writing. Of
course, getting published is another matter altogether, but you would think
writing something - anything- and submitting it for publishing would be the
first step to being a writer.

Back to the article - I think they gloss over the utility of a concept a
little too much. Certainly for car manufacturers, the example cited, launching
concept cars is a very good way of gauging reaction to a certain style or type
of vehicle. It's also a very long bow to string to say that GM is bankrupt
because it spent time designing concepts while the Japanese spent time
improving their cars. The Japanese love wacky concepts as much as the next
place, and have created many concept cars with no thought as to production.
It's an important way of introducing (and de-sensitising) the public to a new
design language before it reaches a production model. And there are many cars
which have been built as concepts and unveiled to the public, only for the
public to demand it be built by placing down real money. There's plenty of
examples where frustrated designers have used a secret concept car to ambush
their management by conducting a very public focus group.

And onto software - launching simple prototypes and concepts is a very good
way of testing the market for an idea.

So yes, real artists ship, but they also dabble as well. Smart dabbling is the
right way to go. Perhaps if Apple had launched a concept Newton it mightn't
have been such a monumental flop.

------
momotomo
Disagree. This is not binary unless you are a small shop. Operational
activities produce tangible products via shipping. R&D Departments produce
concepts.

Concepts as a "product" are just a useful marketing opportunity on the back of
your research. Everything else that went into the research, and all the
learnings that come out of it, flow into your future products, even if its
years down the track.

The two examples they provided don't hold water either. Nokia and Microsoft
produce concepts: yes. They both have significant research departments, it's
to be expected. It completely discounts their market share (historical or
current) and the sheer volume of released products.

Any business that grows to a point will start doing concept work and research.
It's the same as any creative or product process - sometimes you have to bang
through a whole lot of useless concepts before you have worked through enough
ideas to understand which parts of which end point work as a whole.

Concepts are basically like any other form of failure - they're the pile of
learnings that help you get closer in the next iteration.

------
nandemo
This is a very weak essay. Here's the conclusion, or "Kontra's law":

> _A commercial company’s ability to innovate is inversely proportional to its
> proclivity to publicly release conceptual products._

This is nonsense since conceptual products _are_ innovative by definition.

What the author maybe is trying to say is that working on concept products
isn't a good idea in the business sense. But the examples he gives are all
companies that have been wildly successful: GM, Microsoft and Nokia. While
those companies' performance declined, there might be dozens of different
reasons for that.

~~~
bobbin
>> A commercial company’s ability to innovate is inversely proportional to its
proclivity to publicly release conceptual products.

> This is nonsense since conceptual products are innovative by definition.

but they're not real products. The product of a company like microsoft is the
products they produce and sell.

------
Aramgutang
The author severely overestimates how much of a risk the iPhone was for Apple,
and how unexpectedly it changed the way we interact with mobile devices. He is
forgetting the iPod Touch, which _was_ Apple's "concept" model (that actually
shipped).

If the response to the iPod Touch wasn't as positive as it was, the iPhone may
have never been released, or would've been delayed until a few more iterations
of the iPod Touch product line.

~~~
Synaesthesia
But the iPhone came out before the iPod Touch!

~~~
Aramgutang
I'm having the unpleasant sensation of my neurons rearranging themselves to
account for the realisation that my memory of the relevant events was so
fundamentally incorrect. I do apologise.

I'm fairly new to commenting on HN, is it bad form to delete my comment to
avoid the downvotes? EDIT: just realised that I don't even have that option
anymore.

~~~
Synaesthesia
No biggie ;)

Back on topic - I think the iPhone was a risky launch. It was really unknown
at the time whether it would succeed. I didn't think it would, but I didn't
think the iPod would succeed either when it was launched in 2001.

------
vacri
"Although Nokia and Microsoft gave us an endless supply of concept products
over the years, they haven’t produced, for example, anything like the TiVo,
the iPod, the iPhone, OS X, the iTunes App Store, or created brand new user
experience paradigms, transformed calcified markets, captured the imagination
of people, and so on. They didn’t have the organizational and intellectual
discipline to go from concept to product."

Pure fanboyism. Nothing like OSX? Windows isn't like OSX? It's a gui system
for running programs on your personal computer. Nothing like the TiVo, iPod,
iPhone? Well... they see themselves more as a software company. Apple doesn't
have a product that can even remotely compete with MS Office - like it or hate
it, it is MS's 'killer app'. Transform calcified markets? MS IS the calcified
market! They had so much of the market there was nowhere for them to go but
down. Captured the imagination of people? People being led by the nose to say
"ooh, shiny glass and brushed metal" are showing the same level of imagination
as the people playing in the MS-corned PC games market.

"Real artists ship, dabblers create concept products" Nonsense from the
outset. Unless, of course, you think that a painter of masterpieces should
never have once produced a preliminary sketch.

------
barista
Agree AAPL is one of the most innovative company yet they don't release any
"concept" products but tht's probably because they are fiercely secretive
about their new products and major updates. Nothing to do with real artists
shipping.

> "One of the latest Microsoft concept products is Surface" That's no longer
> the case. The surface is going to be a real product that you will be able to
> buy this year. Cost ~2K. I think this was announced at the CES this year.

[http://www.engadget.com/2011/01/05/microsoft-shows-off-
next-...](http://www.engadget.com/2011/01/05/microsoft-shows-off-next-
generation-of-surface-has-per-pixel-to/)

~~~
bhickey
The Surface is 'in the wild' -- the Broad Institute has had about six of them
in the lobby for the past year.

