Be like Apple.
560 words
Ignore the hype men. Sometimes it’s not worth being first.
Apple wasn’t first with the smartphone or touchscreen phones or smart watches or VR glasses or cars. They did a huge amount of research and patents first and watched how the market reacted to something. They worked on many projects and did testing and then dropped some of them. They didn’t release something to the market just because they spent so much on it. They were happy to just learn and move on. Sunk costs and all that. Sometimes Apple was too early and sometimes they decided it would never work. Apple let others be first, noted their flaws and where they could do better and then launched. Some of the original iPhone team were actually in another company building an iPhone nearly 20 years before Apple but the tech wasn’t ready. So be like Apple when it comes to the shiny.
I see all these charlatans breaking their necks being web 2.0 consultants, being Periscope experts, being Facebook Live gurus, being TikTok experts, being Clubhouse consultants (remember Clubhouse?) and now being NFT or Metaverse or something that smells of horseshit. People who are the first to grab on to the next big hype cycle and drop everything else, why do they do that? For some they run to this because in an established and stable system, you can spot they’re full of shit so they’re running away more than running to something. Don’t be fooled by these people telling you to drop your website or that you need an app or to get into VR or the Metaverse. When it fails they’ll have an excuse like being too early or that you weren’t full invested. Wait for someone like Apple to open the door and turn on the lights.
The big big social media space in 2021 was TikTok. It’s gigantic and will get bigger. It’s also a lot of work to create something and then get traction. Consider running ads on it instead. The big issue with TikTok is you can go from zero to 1000s to 10,000s to a million followers faster than any other place online ever but you will go out of fashion just as quickly. The birth, stardom, and death cycle is hyper-accelerated. The place is full of one hit wonders. If you look at the YouTube superstars of the past while, those stars used to get 10m views on a video and now some of them are barely getting 5000 views. They made their money on Youtube ads and you got more money per view if you had big numbers. They’re earning nothing now.
Oculus from Facebook did very well this Christmas but this is still a small-fry piece of tech that’s not got a lot of games or developers. While it is good to work on apps for Occulus in order that you have the IP to port to Apple, once Apple comes along it’s probably game over for other headset makers. Remember Nokia? Do you want to pour money into a Nokia app? Consider that developers that made apps for Apple devices have made $230 billion since the app store opened in 2011. That’s the company you want to hitch your wagon to.
Hold fast.
As per this clip from Master and Commander. Hold fast. Be like Apple.