Not bothering to be the best you can be

Lovely piece today by chum Matt Ballantine on the false assumption that better tech wins. Particularly like the way he challenges the technophiliac gurus that have dominated the business world for more than 3 decades. Go check it out.

Regular readers know that this is one of my hobby horses so let me rehearse some of my points on it briefly:

1. It’s far from true that the best stuff always wins (very often the most widely adopted technology is the not the best).
2. Contrary to what the forecasters say, it’s genuinely very hard to predict what will win at scale ahead of time – most tech predictions are too precise (jetpacks) or too vague (the future is mobile) to be tested. By contrast, after the fact it seems really clear why the winner stormed it (“survivorship” bias)
3. This is because adoption is shaped by humans, rather more than the tech itself – humans in companies, in those financing them, in distribution channels and – Lordy, No! – real live people who are supposed to use the tech. Humans are both satisficers (for whom good enough is good enough) and social creatures (who choose what others choose).
4. This implies that making a better mousetrap maybe a worse investment than working on encouraging the social forces driving adoption.
5. Equally, it means that giving yourself as much chance to get lucky as possible – thinking like a options trader than a red-misted gambler, staking all on one roll of the dice. Lighting lots of fires, as Duncan Watts and Matt Salganik suggested.