Breaking the mould

I like 'mould' there. It has the 'forming' meaning, but also the 'decaying' sense. Quite appropriate. Although breaking small spores seems to be taking the idea too far. Anyway...

Sig who has this Thingamy software out there has this nifty little reminder of the great 3G revolution. Vodafone paid 34 billion on 3G licenses. Last quarter, 3.8% of their business is 3G. Only 5.4% of mobile users in Europe use 3G. It was an expensive strategy. And a very visible failure.

Park that for a minute. One of my contracts at the moment is looking at public services to land managers, mainly farmers. One of the ideas is a cutting edge product. And the questions that keeps coming up are, who is our audience, what do they want to know? How will they use it? I've taken their pilot, which is web-based, and sat with a couple of groups of people that should be the audience for it and asked them what they think. They came up with some good stuff. Very enthusiastic. My client wants to work out more stuff about who its for and what they want etc. I thought we should get a little something with a bit more content out there for them to use and keep the conversation going,and we can all work it out together. And I'll keep suggesting that.

So then let's go back to Sig and see what he says next.

"Perhaos the most dangerous part of a strategy is taking it too literally, too narrow, too early.

Dangerous stuff. Very dangerous stuff.

To make it simple, there is no way you can outguess people. How they are going to use your stuff. Who are going to be the first users" etc. etc.

So, he says,

"Build what you think is some valuable stuff, get it out there as early as possible with no limits to who the user might be - listen attentively, find out how it's used, wo uses it -tweak and reapeat until it sticks in reality, then crank up, only then. That's where the funding should go, fund the time you need.

In my view the only kind of planning with a reasonable chance of success. For big and small."

Couldn't have put it better myself. Cheers Sig.