Forget plans for the next 5 years. Scrap plans for the next 10 years. Look at BlackBerry. They knew they had to change their product but their competitors were fast and focused on delivering dreams, not upgrades. With a new product on the market BlackBerry may be getting some buzz but it’s taken a massive hit because of the time it took to execute. Fail fast, learn fast, fix fast.
You don’t always need a new idea or strategy to stay competitive or take on the competition. When Facebook came along there were already players in the social networking space. Remember Bebo and Friendster? Hazy memories but once legitimate contenders. A similar product or service can be approached dozens of different ways. “There are not that many ideas for internet products that will be really good. It is really all about execution. Facebook too wasn’t a new idea but I think we took the idea and we focused on execution, focused on quality and getting to scale,” said Facebook’s previous CTO Adam D’Angelo.
Hear that? Focus on execution, delivering on quality and growing scale. Sounds good to me.