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Don't kill projects... Morph them

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In a very nice -old- speech for Marissa Mayer (VP for Search in Google) she said that Eric once asked her "what will you do about these products that are not really gaining user base?"
she said: "well, either we cancel them, take them back to our labs, think about other ideas.... etc"
he said: "don't kill them, just morph them..."
What he meant is, if you have a smart group of people who worked hard to develop an idea and turn it into a product, it's more likely that this product has something inside that makes it successful. Failing to gain users base doesn't mean it's a bad idea/product, it's just that we didn't do it the right way, we didn't do it as people wants to see it..
We need to think about how to morph the product into something that people will actually like, and use happily everyday...
Wine 1.0's just been released today, this project took 15 years of development to see the light...
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For those who doesn't know what Wine is, its an open source implementation for Windows APIs on Linux, it aims at emulating the windows environment so that any application that works on windows can work just fine under windows Linux.
This product was around for so many years, I've been watching it from a distance, seeing the 0.0x advances that happen, wondering if it'll reach a safe side or will wipe away.
Wine's 15 years of active development, proves -at least for me- that if someone has the passion to "finish" something as he dreams of, he will..
Wine is not perfect yet, nor is the only example about active development that could change something unusable into a really productive product that market needs.
Marissa was talking in Stanford University to CS students. She is a Stanford Graduate too. I believe this still applies to everybody out there.. we all had some crazy ideas that we soon gave up when we got no "nice" output...
The moral is "Don't give up, target people from a another viewpoint"
Thanks
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Comments

  1. Mohammed MoussaJune 19, 2008 at 5:05 AM

    Nice Post Man, and it really triggers a lot of things, may be you are writing it too because it matches with something inside and may be its just a coincidence :).

    But I wonder why they took 15 years :D, I think because exactly as you said "it aims at emulating the windows environment so that any application that works on windows can work just fine under windows" :D, so they entered in an infinite loooooop :D :D :D

    Hope you the very best luck...

    ReplyDelete
  2. Haytham AlaaJuly 19, 2008 at 9:22 AM

    Actually it does match things I face... I felt it's important to share this :)

    :D :D... fixed the English mistake :D
    Windows is HUGE, a lot of APIs don't really work as they were intended to be. However, people were able to understand and tweak these APIs for the needs, win APIs usage became a history, emulating just that was really hard I believe.
    So far not "every windows application" works but a lot of them do.

    It's one of those impressing projects I like to visit from time to time.

    ReplyDelete

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