

Pivoting - beh
http://cdixon.org/2010/06/14/pivoting/

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staunch
He's referring to Loopt (and others I suppose) when he says _"The other
companies built elaborate infrastructures: e.g they partnered with wireless
carriers so that users’ locations could be tracked in the background without
having to “check-in”."_

This is the kind of mistake that burns so badly. You find yourself saying
something like "You mean you just _ask them_ to update their location manually
and that works?"

It reminds me of when Ballmer was bragging about how sharing songs via WiFi on
the Zune could get you a date. Then Steve Jobs recommended simply giving one
earbud to the girl.

The differencing between trying to untie the The Gordian Knot and taking a
sword to it.

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jmm
The timing of the iPhone (its OS and its app store ecosystem) played a
significant role in the check-in model, I think, as it encouraged developers
to [finally] sidestep the carriers, and also prevented background processing.
Though this is kinda irrelevant to Chris' bigger point of pivoting towards a
perceived advantage.

(It will be interesting to see how things change with OS4's background
processing. I'd guess users will continue to prefer for check-in based over
continuous gps logging, though there may be some interesting/appealing
applications of continuous logging. Haven't really looked into the specifics
yet.)

~~~
kylemathews
Google Latitude on the Android follows the continuous logging model. It's
interesting but for very different reasons than Foursquare. Foursquare's
appeal to me is more keeping a record of interesting places I go and sharing
that with others. Latitude's appeal is, oh, where are my friends right now.

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jack7890
#2 is a big one. If there's one HN ethos that I disagree with, it's the idea
that a better engineered solution is always a better solution (full stop).
Unless you have infinite time and developers, that's not true.

~~~
frossie
A better engineered solution _is_ always a better solution. What he is
describing is _over_ -engineering.

I am failing to remember who said: the perfect racing car falls apart the
moment it crosses the finishing line - all others else are over-engineered.
The point is that _good_ engineering is _appropriate_ engineering. All the
things that PHBs sometimes think off as the geeks going off on their own
obsessions - maintainability, clarity of design, low fault tolerance, high
scaling ability - these are either good engineering or over-engineering
depending on the stage of the lifecycle, the purpose of the project (air
traffic control systems anyone?), the future staffing estimates and so on.

For example in my own area of acedemic-(ish) software engineering,
maintainability absolutely trumps delivery dates. Clearly, if you are chasing
ramen profitability, it may not.

Context matters.

~~~
samlittlewood
Has been said of Colin Chapman, and also attributed to Ferdinand Porsche:

[http://forums.autosport.com/lofiversion/index.php/t63818.htm...](http://forums.autosport.com/lofiversion/index.php/t63818.html)

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thiele
He hits on a powerful question: “If we were to start over today, would we
build our product the same way we had so far?”

~~~
moolave
I'm certain that over time, our product would have evolved through user
feedback and bug fixes. But he's definitely referring to the products that did
launch, because I am also considering the products that we thought would
create market share yet went south. This is where Chris's rule #1 applies.

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ssp
_2\. The Bridge on the River Kwai syndrome._

How is this counteracted by asking whether they would build the product the
same way were they to start over? It seems it would do the opposite: Bring all
the warts to their attention and make them rewrite the code even though it
works perfectly well.

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necrecious
What if your business is going pretty much like you expected? I am actually
kind of stressed out that things are going smoothly, does that mean I am not
finding the weakness in my business fast enough? Or are things actually going
smoothly?

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roachsocal
There's also the danger of pivoting too fast. Don't continually half-ass
things without letting them bake and mature. Something's to be said about
following through and executing your vision, right?

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pkulak
The startup that I work for started out as a video upload site. On a whim one
of the developers added the ability to use an embed code instead of uploading
a video from your computer. When that became popular, it got promoted more and
more until now, where there isn't even the option of uploading your own videos
anymore. I always thought that was a hell of a pivot.

