There have been some products that I’ve loved that just didn’t get as popular as I had hoped. I really thought Google+ was a fantastic product, but it didn’t get enough traction and they killed it. I fear the same is happening with Stadia; it’s an amazing product, but it just isn’t getting enough use.
It doesn’t matter how good a product is – if customers don’t buy it, then it’s not good enough (hence the full meaning behind “the customer is always right”).
In his book “Homo Deus“, author Yuval Noah Harari put it this way when talking about cars:
In a free market the customer is always right. If customers don’t want it, it means that the car is no good. It doesn’t matter if all the university professors and all the priests and mullahs cry out from every lectern and pulpit that this is a wonderful car – if the customers reject it, it’s a bad car. Nobody has the authority to tell customers that they are wrong, and heaven forbid that a government would try to force its citizens to buy a particular car against their will.
It can often be a hard truth. You’ll see two products on the market, and you’ll watch the inferior product win. Maybe it’s something you missed, maybe it’s better marketing, or maybe it’s just pure luck, but it’s ultimately irrelevant.
At the end of the day it’s not about making the best product, but about making the product that people (right or wrong) want to buy.
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