Squish Like Grape
Daniel-san, must talk. Walk on road, hmm? Walk left side — safe. Walk right side — safe. Walk middle — sooner or later, get squish just like grape.
©John G. Avildsen, Columbia Pictures Corporation
Ah, the immortal words of Mr Miyagi (Pat Morita) from The Karate Kid, cherished movie of my youth. My ears ring as I say this, but…
…sometimes it’s okay to go halfway. In my post from yesterday I consider how to answer the question, “When Are We Ready?” Well, we have done this with regard to the launch of our first product, and the answer is: we are ready now. But the answer is also, “We will launch first as a public beta.”
Yup. We’re going to launch next month, but we’re also going to call this version a “test” — i.e., not the final product.
So, what could possibly possess us to make like grapes and walk down the middle of the Interstate? The answer came as we considered those two questions: 1) is it valuable enough? and 2) can we afford to fix it?
The answer to the first question is yes. We think we have a really fun product that will be valuable to people every day. But the answer is also that we feel that a subset of the overall population will find its problems more tolerable than others early on. These are people who are willing to dive into a setup process that will be slightly more involved and tedious than what we have planned for the “final” product.
They are also people who are willing to deal with a few warts that will surface. This goes to the answer to the second question. This product is a new kind of accessory for the iPhone and iPod touch. At this point we are comfortable that the hardware design is solid. But the nature of this accessory is that it must interact with literally thousands of other kinds of devices, and there is no way that we could test all of the possible combinations beforehand. Therefore we anticipate that we will need to update the software to improve compatibility and squash a few bugs.
Actually, this last part is one of the most exciting things for us, because the ability to roll out software updates with new features and tweaks will be groundbreaking. We have many ideas of ways that we can make the product more fun and elegant. But what we want the most is to hear what other people think after using our product. We are launching in “beta mode” because we want the chance to hear our customers’ ideas about how the product can be better. We expect that they will have suggestions that we would not have considered otherwise.
And so that is the real value of going halfway — at least in this case. We can offer something useful as early as possible, and we can give our customers the chance to influence the design of the product so that it can be even more useful to them in the long run. I suppose some people might see that as a dangerous proposition. But for us, it’s mostly just exciting.