All recognized famous inventors had capable predecessors and successors and made their improvements at a time when society was capable of using their product.
The fundamental truth for developers is they will build if there are users.
I've made my best personal investments when I've been a user of the product. Like Apple. The epiphany for me came when I purchased my fifth iPod and I hadn't unwrapped my fourth. It was still in the plastic case.
Nobody knew they needed a smart phone, an automobile, or even a cheeseburger from a drive through window.
As we looked at the server market, we know very well that the data-center market takes time to ramp with any new product.
It doesn't matter how good your product solution is if users don't enjoy or understand how to use it.
Having the best product means nothing if the people won't buy it.
Integrating breakthrough technology into everyday products is always a challenge; at the same time, this is exactly how design makes tech products easily adoptable in life.
Just as producers often give consumers things they want but didn't think to ask for, consumers sometimes come up with surprising uses for new inventions. When a new product appears, it can uncover dissatisfactions and desires no one knew were there.
You want people using your product because it's a part of your life, then they can't stop using it.
As great as you believe your new product or company is, the world got along just fine without you. The greatest competition every startup faces is convincing consumers that there is a better solution to the problems that vex them.
I want to see one of my products being taken by people across the world. I want to see them improving and leading a better life. It's like playing God.
If you think your users are idiots, only idiots will use it.
But if people are buying the products, naturally they're gonna use them.
You can keep 'consumer' DNA at the center of your product. That will always mean that adoption is easier.
The question is, once you have this idea, is this enough? Is it something people would actually switch just to have?
If you develop a product that gets what the customer is trying to get done, you don't have to advertise; people will just pull it into their lives.
The crucial people to get your product started for the first 6 months are not who will be using it 3 years later.
Now, before sliced bread was invented in the 1910s I wonder what they said? Like the greatest invention since the telegraph or something. But... the thing about the invention of sliced bread is this - that for the first 15 years after sliced bread was available no one bought it; no one knew about it; it was a complete and total failure.
This is true for most new products. The majority of people you're competing with are non-users. They are people who have never used your service before. And what they say is actually the most important. What they say is the thing that blocks you from expanding the size of your market with your features.
Over time, our emerging high-usage products will likely generate significant new revenue streams for Google as well as for our partners, just as search does today.
For most companies, the hard thing is making the product work well enough to convince a single person at a time to switch to it.
If one engineer at a startup tries Slack and says, 'I hate it. I am not going to use this,' that's it for us. We won't get evaluated.
We provide many options in many product areas that they seem to want to adopt, and that's working well for us.
It took 10 years to go from building the initial Smartphone to reaching the mass market. BlackBerry came out in 2003 and it didn't get to about a billion units until 2013. So I can't imagine it would be much faster for VR.
