This is Violence

Related to the previous post: I feel like Gruber is usually pretty solid in his reasoning, but I have to ask here: why, exactly, “Flicker could have - should have - been to mobile photography what Instagram became.”?

This seems to me to be exactly the same sort of logic that leads all sorts of companies to all sorts of bad strategic decisions. The sorts of decisions that often result in them getting torn to bits on Daring Fireball.

How many people have told Apple they needed to be X? Apple COULD have made iOS an open platform. Android did, and Apple lost a certain number of customers to Google. I don’t think any one would say that Apple SHOULD have done that.

Yes, Flickrs numbers are down. But Flickr has actual paying customers, Instagram does not. That seems important to me.

So yes, Flickr COULD have been Instagram, but whether or not they SHOULD is entirely dependent on what success means for them and the customers they want to serve. Just because a company is successful in an adjacent space doesn’t mean any given company could have or should have been there. Herman Miller shouldn’t be Ikea, Rolex shouldn’t be Casio.

I’m not sure whether I like this site or whether it’s gimmicky. But I would put money on this getting linked to nearly infinity by agency folks. I would put further money on there being about 1 million creative brainstorming meetings over the next 6 months where “let’s do a scrolling site, like that Beetle site.”

But the idea, so common in this week’s media coverage, that Jobs was an inspired savant who succeeded by taking big risks on personal hunches, is way off the mark. Rather than worship at the altar of inspiration and “going with your gut,” the rest of us should use this moment to consider the fundamental strategies that drove Apple’s success.

Good article on how great ideas - in this case Apple’s - actually happen.

via Daring Fireball