Fred Oliveira on More Failure Please

Fred raises an interesting issue over at WeBreakStuff: do we need to have (or at least more quickly acknowledge) failure of Web 2.0 apps?

[from Web 2.0 and the necessity of failure]

Web 2.0 has made it extremely easy to launch products. It isn’t hard to bootstrap development costs, so people with ideas pursue their ambitions of getting them out there. This is creating an atmosphere of innovation dilution (you’ve read it here first) where key forward-thinking ideas don’t get the attention they need (or deserve) amidst all others.

[...]

Now, even though I love web applications and love it when people decide to pursue their intentions of launching new ones, I believe we do need more failure happening in order to learn with the experience and truly innovate.

Despite the fact that we may indeed need failure to learn with our mistakes and create the path for a new wave of innovation, we still need new products. We still need people to try their best, and make compelling solutions to everyday problems.

I guess what I mean by all of this is that we should all keep innovating, but we (as in, the mass of people doing new things with the web) shouldn’t be afraid to call something a failure and move on. And we do need to create new things and avoid the me-too’s we’ve been seeing lately. Lets fail more in order to learn faster and create more and better web applications.

It has been observed in the past that failing fast is a sign of high intelligence (attributed to Tom Peters, I think). So Fred's notion is that the Web 2.0 community, collectively, needs to become more selective, or more judgemental, about the viability of Web 2.0 apps. We need to be willing to state that some once promising experiment has failed, and that it's time for its creators to drop it and move on, or make radical revisions at the very least.

Perhaps we need a dark doppelganger to TechCrunch -- a TechMunch -- a blog that religiously revisits every app that debuts in TechCrunch exactly six months later, and determines if these apps are now failures or successes. Of course, most apps are not unambiguously either, so TechMunch would be hard to pull off. Much harder than simply heralding new apps as they appear.

So the hard work of finding failure, as a necessary component of the Darwinianism that supposedly underlies any marketplace of ideas and products, still will fall to the collective and inchoate decision making of the individuals making up the market. Although it wouldn't hurt if the gurus would stop their handwaving occasionally, like the third Thursday of every month, to celebrate failures explicitly. That's my suggestion: Third Thursday shall henceforth be set aside to identify the poorly architected, the badly realized, and the outright silly apps out there. Anyone can join in.

tags: third+thursday, fred+oliviera, web+2.0+failures, fail+fast, tom+peters, techmunch

Comments

[Paul]

In a certain way, the business model whereby the web2.0 companies make $$$ is also an important factor. Ultimately a company need to make $$$ to survive. It's great if you come up with a great tool or software for everyone, but if it does $$$ for the company. Where's the $$$ needed to keep the software to come from?

[Lutz Winter]

Hi Stowe,

your idea of a TechMunch really sounded compelling to a colleague and me (two internet-entrepreneurs from good old Germany). In our opinion such blog would be a useful contribution to the blogosphere.
We will rise to the challenge with "Techcrush". I guess we will launch this week at http://www.techcrush.com.

Check us out, cheers
Yves and Lutz