How many iconic, break-out products are ever "technological breakthroughs"? Behind virtually every iconic product is a string of lesser known antecedents with the same fundamentals but imperfect packaging, pricing, or timing.
Counterexamples? Would love to hear them.
Otherwise, this is an extremely banal observation on Thiel's part.
How many iconic, break-out products are ever "technological breakthroughs"? Behind virtually every iconic product is a string of lesser known antecedents with the same fundamentals but imperfect packaging, pricing, or timing.
Reminds me of one of the themes in the book "Blue Ocean Strategy": the importance of value innovation, where the stress is on both low cost and differentiation.
What I think you mean to say is that breakthroughs should be about discoveries leading to an expansion of mind, that has yet to be known by any individual.
It's about breaking through the known, and can occur in any field of endeavour and will lead to new information: with that information a product should be created - Steve was, and Peter is looking for those products. They are in the position to do so, but neither will have that initial expansion of mind.
Seems like extracting the financial wealth of a breakthrough is why investors seek them.
Penicillin is produced, distributed and sold. I've bought it more than once and consider it to be a product. What do you feel is the necessary criteria for something to called a product?
The Mac. Nobody is disputing that every product relies on previous products.
But the Mac is a good example of a technological break thru that had imperfect packaging, pricing AND timing.
The packaging was too restrictive for the time. Jobs' vision was right, but the industry hadn't developed far enough that you could ship a machine without internal slots and be successful.
The pricing was out of line with the rest of the market, and the rest of the market didn't recognize sufficient increase in value due to the GUI to make the pricing make sense.
And of course, both of those issues were issues of timing. The Mac took several years to be successful, and depending on how you measure things, some would say it has never become successful (still only being %23 of the market or something like that.)
But the Mac was a technology break thru. In fact, it contained many such breakthrus, both in hardware and software.
Google. The search engine's algorithm really was a technological breakthrough in comparison to its antecedents which were better priced, packaged, timed, and marketed.
Counterexamples? Would love to hear them.
Otherwise, this is an extremely banal observation on Thiel's part.