Malcolm Gladwell has written a great article for the New Yorker titled,
The premise of the article is that by their very nature the David’s of the world have to play by their own rules in order to succeed. Gladwell admits that this rule-changing mentality isn’t the exclusive domain of underdogs. Anyone can adopt an unexpected and unconventional strategy to win.
What makes this article relevant to us here at Heed is that great Design always uses unconventional strategies to create groundbreaking products and services. The result of great design thinking always seems obvious in heinsight. “I’m surprised no one thought of this before”, is a common reaction to a great product.
The following are 3 examples of underdog products and services that have won (or are currently winning) because of smart Design (read: unconventional strategy):
They’re the talk of the town. Millions of people are signing up for accounts and simultaneously questioning the relevance of said service, “They let you post 140-characters at a time, how can you call that real business?” The CEO of Twitter is Evan Williams. You might remember him as the guy who invented the term ‘blogging’ and sold his service, Blogger, to Google in 2003. Back in 2003 the idea of blogging was about as absurd as ‘tweeting’ is now.
If you’re unconvinced how disruptive Twitter has been to the tech industry, you need look no further than the March 2009 redesign of Facebook. The redesign places status updates front and center on users’ homepages. Facebook is not limiting updates to 140 characters, but they’ve definitely shifted their strategy.
And Twitter is the underdog to Facebook not only in the number of registered users each has (over 200 million for FB, around 20 million for Twitter), but also in the scale and range of content you can post to each. Facebook lets its users upload photos, video, text, import blogs via RSS feeds, create events, calendars, groups and interactive games. Twitter lets users post 140-character entries (you can post images via third-party services like ).
What is also admirable about Williams, is his vision to build Twitter into a strong, profitable company – on his own terms.
From:
When people ask me when Twitter will make money, I tell them, “In due time.” They forget that we’re only 30 employees who have just gotten started. Right now, anything we would do to make money would take our time away from acquiring more users. We have patient investors.
It’s easy for Davids to take the road towards acquisition when their Goliath realizes they can’t can’t go toe-to-toe with their little competitor. , Twitter seems uninterested in taking that route.
Flip video cameras
When the iPod debuted in 2001, it just played music. It was met with a lot of harsh criticism on everything it couldn’t do and didn’t have. Now it’s the most popular portable media player in the world. Pure Digital is charting a similar course with its simple-to-use Flip video cameras. While the iPod was expensive when it launched, Flip cameras do differ in that they’re super simple to use and inexpensive.
Pure Digital could have chosen to launch high-end camcorders and compete with companies like Canon, Nikon and Sony, but they decided to change the rules and create just the opposite. It seems to be working, having sold more that 2 million units since 2007.
Unlike Twitter, . Let’s hope they continue to create great products.
iPhone
When Apple created the iPhone and iPhone OS, they didn’t have a legacy to work with. They didn’t have to hit reset like they did with the transition from OS 9 to OS X and shake up their user base. They could do whatever they wanted. They could establish a new paradigm that made sense with the lifestyles of the digitially connected.
Granted Apple is a large corporation, but they were less than an underdog in the mobile sector in January 2007. The iPhone was deemed so insignificant when it debuted that only now, 2 years later, are some companies being to play catch-up – altering traditional and antiquated strategies, but for the most part, they’re just weakly copying the iPhone and still not ‘getting it’.
