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February 06, 2004
Side projects are the key to success?
Here's something I've been wondering about. Why do some of the most successful companies or products succeed because of what could be called "side projects" or at least projects that weren't the original focus of the company? I'm listening to the Second Coming of Steve Jobs right now. Not really that exciting but the Pixar stuff is pretty neat.
Pixar is a great CG movie making company. They made movies because it was a good way of showing off their storage computer. (Not only were movies secondary at Pixar, but Pixar was a secondary company, first to NeXT and then when Steve returned to Apple.)
Microsoft has the dominant desktop OS. They have a dominant OS not necessarily because their OS is the best, but because they make some excellent developer tools and generally make it easy to develop for their OS.
Sun created Java and it is one of the most popular programming languages today. But their main goal wasn't to make a great development language, but to abstract away the OS so Windows wouldn't matter anymore. Then they could sell more hardware that ran their OS.
In much the same vein, Apple is hardware company that also makes an OS that runs on their hardware. But most of the people that buy a Mac don't buy it because of the processor but because it runs OS X.
So if I want to sell SWOOSH, should I focus on some other complimentary piece, make it really great, and not worry about the quality of SWOOSH. Then the sales of SWOOSH will come rolling in because everyone has to have my little side project?
Posted by mikel at February 6, 2004 10:26 AM
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