Thanks to the miracle of RSS readers, one of my readers was alerted to and then responded to yesterday’s post.  Though it would have been nice to have him post it directly in the comments section, he did give me permission to republish his comments.  So here it is, name withheld, formatted, but otherwise unabridged:

Just read today’s blog entry (aren’t RSS readers amazing?).

There is a problem with marketing “always” driving product development. Marketing talks to customers and customers lack imagination.  They know what they have and they can project from what they have to what they say they want.  The problem with sales driving product innovation is that you get incrementalism. With marketing you get slightly better incrementalism. But you don’t get game changers.

Marketing wants better buggy-whips. They want faster horses that don’t eat as much hay and have more endurance. They don’t want “horseless carriages”.  

Marketing wants bigger computers in the 50’s or adding machines.  But they don’t want a computer for the desktop.  According to marketing, the worldwide demand for all computers is 5.

Sometimes engineering needs to make an offer that marketing can market. Not always, just sometimes. The trick, I think, is to know when to listen to who!

The “five computers” quote is often attributed to Thomas J. Watson, Sr., the former president of IBM.  Just a note, the current biography posted on Wikipedia alledges no credible source for the quote.  And for the record, Wikipedia reports that Thomas J. Watson, Sr. was called the “world’s greatest salesman when he died in 1956,” not the greatest marketing executive.

Still the reader makes good points, which is why I mentioned the amazing inventions that come out of Almaden and some of the other great labs of the world.  I believe in basic science.  But I also believe that product development should be based not on what is possible, but what people will buy at the time or at least within the foreseeable future.  The PDA was a great thing.  The Apple Newton was a good first example.  Not very remarkable in terms of sales, however.  The Apple iPhone comes a bit closer to hitting the mark, both from a feature and function perspective and a timing perspective.  I think it’s fine for labs to create prototypes, but it’s important to avoid the trap of “right product, wrong time,” as well as the trap of “wrong product, right time.” 

At the end of the day, I still go back to lessons learned from Clayton Christensen and a day spent with Tony Ulwick.  What job does your product, your tool, your service do?