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3、别做完美主义者

　　我经常对互联网企业家说，“如果你总是对产品吹毛求疵，那么你的产品肯定已经推出的太晚了。”作为一家企业，你有必要尽快推出产品，和消费者进行沟通，了解他们的意见反馈。这有助于指引你的发展

During the dot com boom I founded a software startup with some friends - with me as the CTO. We developed a software for knowledge management. It was a combination of blogs, wikis, a document management system, link managment, skill managment and more. We started in 1999 which was quite early for wikis and blogs (Moveable Type was announced 2001). The link management system was essentialy the same as Delicious later. Beside all those new ideas (for 1999 at least) there were three great features:



• Everything could be tagged. Skills, people, links, documents, blog posts, wikis, something which is today called folksonomies. Tags could refer to other tags to form onthologies. Tags could link to other documents, blog posts, persons.
• Everything could be rated from 1 to 5
• We had a clever fuzzy search based on tags and ratings. Searching for “people with oracle knowledge” would also reveal experts for SQL Server - for example to stuff your project if an Oracle guru wasn’t available

So the most important thing is to sell - a fact lots of startups forget. And we did too. After much thought it comes down to these six reasons why we failed (beside the obvious one that the VC market imploded when we needed money and noone was able to get any funding):





1. We didn’t sell anything
2. We didn’t sell anything
3. We didn’t sell anything
4. The market window was not yet open
5. We focused too much on technology
6. We had the wrong business model

But—as Levchin no doubt knew when he made this point—the visionary is usually the one that gets the shaft in Silicon Valley.

Napster changed the music world, but it was iTunes that profited off of it. Google was one of the last companies in the Internet bubble to try their hand at building a search engine—and was laughed out of some VCs’ offices as a result. Palm pioneered the smart phone, not Blackberry. And Friendster was the social network pioneer before Mark Zuckerberg even entered college.

两人都是执著的完美主义者，都能把一个产品做到惊天地泣鬼神。卖了10年的脑白金仍是中国最畅销的保健品，而iPod则占据了数字音乐播放器市场的70%。此外，两人还是洞悉人性的营销天才，只不过一个靠发掘人性的美好赚钱，而另一个利用人性的弱点来抢金。

　　曾经有那么一段时间，史玉柱看起来就要成为中国的“乔布斯”。从1989年起，他每一年都要推出一款自主开发的产品，从M-6401桌面排版软件、M-6402文字处理软件到巨人汉卡，再到巨人中文手写电脑、巨人财务软件等等。巨人飞快地成长为一个年产值10亿、利润数千万的高科技集团公司，其年度销售商大会更成为全国规模最大的电脑盛会。

　　几乎与此同时，乔布斯只剩下几千万美元的现金，和两个面临着裁员重组的问题公司，他完全可能成为美国版的“史玉柱”，比如在加州搞房地产，去拉斯维加斯开赌场，到中东倒腾石油。但他什么都没有干，只是继续掏自己和别人的腰包来支持两个长期赔钱的公司，固执地等着它们出现转机。