Lead Bullets

http://techcrunch.com/2011/10/25/lead-bullets/

by aaronbrethorst • 15 years ago

362 45 15 years ago

Famed chef Gordon Ramsay has a show called "Kitchen Nightmares" where he rescues restaurants that are in trouble. There's a fair share of drama and spectacle in every episode but much of what he does is apply the same fundamental changes to every restaurant. And it's not silver bullets, it's just sound execution of basic, common sense practices. Keep the menu simple, make stuff fresh, keep the kitchen clean, keep service timely, keep spending under control, etc.

If you have a product that has traction in the market it's not necessary to try for silver bullet features. It's only necessary to get your ducks in a row and execute well. Execution tends to be multiplicative along every aspect. If you can deliver solid features AND solid usability AND solid performance AND solid reliability AND solid customer service then there's no reason why you shouldn't do well.

Ultimately I think the search for silver bullets comes out of a sense of denial. People like to think that the reason their restaurant is doing poorly is some external problem they have no control over, rather than because they. Don't clean their kitchen and their food is bland.

jamesaguilar2• 15 years ago

The same phenomenon occurs in online games like Starcraft. People in the lower leagues of Starcraft constantly go to message boards like the TeamLiquid forums and ask for advice on strategy, critiques of replays, etc. But in 99% of cases, basic fundamentals like always making workers, constantly producing out of existing production buildings before making new ones, and not becoming supply-blocked (a form of production bottleneck) are the real problem. But they have the same sort of denial you are referring to where they want to believe that if they just _knew_ something that they don't know, they could win.

It's actually kind of sad that these biases towards easy thoughts exist, because often the fundamentals are more accessible than the silver bullet is to any given practitioner. In other words, almost anyone can execute on fundamentals with practice, but the grand silver bullet strategies are often beyond the capabilities of a typical person.

robryan• 15 years ago

I think thats a case of perceiving the basics to be to hard to properly execute on. Maxing out build orders in multiple buildings in multiple locations while optimally planning for expansion and getting the right balance of things being built is hard. I guess how this applies is that people want a short cut so they don't have to be the best they can be at the fundamentals.

ohashi• 15 years ago

It's funny because in this example, there are silver bullets that show up every once in a while. Extremely overpowered and specific things you do in a very specific order (a build) which wins an overwhelming majority of the time. There are a few shortcuts, but they don't make you better in the long run, they allow you to exploit information asymmetry, temporarily.

hga3• 15 years ago

In a DEC Press book covering the history of minicomputers (Gordon Bell was one of the authors as I recall), the most interesting observation was that the companies that survived let alone thrived in the frothy period for them were the ones that did an acceptable job of every essential thing.

E.g. make great hardware but don't document it well enough, you fail. DEC's forte at the time was CPUs, most of the rest wasn't so hot, but it was all good enough.

0x123• 15 years ago

The end of DEC was the end of an era.

Alpha was (and possibly still is) one of the most elegant cpu architectures ever designed.

It just arrived too late to save DEC and that's a real pity.

DEC pretty much pioneered interactive computing and for that alone we all owe them a great deal.

It's weird how the DEC legacy got passed from company to company, now HP owns it, like an old cupboard passed on through inheritance.

Engineers went to both Intel and AMD.

Being able to engineer CPUs at that lefl is probably not the kind of skill that will see you without a job from time to time, those must be very desirable people.

dillona• 15 years ago

Do you have any idea about the title of the book?

wisty• 15 years ago

I think the search for silver bullets is a great instinct. People always look for the solution that gives them most bang for their buck.

There are a couple of problem, though.

Silver bullets are often mutually exclusive. No-one wants to be the AirBnB for gay vegan business travellers in Ohio - there's nothing wrong with being a niche player but you still need a reasonable market.

Silver bullets can also be an sign laziness, as you say.

Ultimately, you have to see what the rest of the market is doing. Some people do well with low costs, a small team, and a cheap (but usable) alternative. Others do well with an interesting twist, and a good execution. Then there's the big companies, with boring but well polished products.

Ultimately, no-one here should be misled enough to get into a business without having an edge. Once you have the edge though, it's a matter of getting everything else right.

CJefferson• 15 years ago

Normally I would never post a youtube link, but this sketch from the UK comedy show Mitchell and Webb sums up my opinion on this perfectly:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1NfWIaYed8

Cooking good food well, using simple ingredients, isn't something that anyone can do well.

anarchitect• 15 years ago

Thanks, I hadn't seen that one before! "King Lear is just English words put in order!"

gamache• 15 years ago

“Yet our best trained, best educated, best equipped, best prepared troops refuse to fight. As a matter of fact, it’s safe to say that they would rather switch than fight.”—Public Enemy, Fight the Power

Seriously? Public Enemy sampled it, they clearly didn't say it. Thomas N. Todd did. http://www.njcdlp.org/Thomas_N_Todd.html

TruthElixirX• 15 years ago

Yeah, that is a pretty huge over sight. Who would want to make a reference to PE without realizing that?

zackattack• 15 years ago

Because he intentionally made the reference to PE to pick up on PE's context. He "sampled" PE, he didn't "sample" Thomas N. Todd.

ctide• 15 years ago

All of his blog posts start with a line from a rap song. It makes a lot more sense in the context of his blog (http://bhorowitz.com/2010/04/28/why-we-prefer-founding-ceos/, for example) than it does on Techcrunch, but I assume he just did the same thing out of habit.

oconnor0• 15 years ago

Do you have a transcript of Thomas N. Todd saying that so I can see some context?

kreek2• 15 years ago

It's from the late 70s so you probably won't find a transcript online. The speech was delivered at a Nation of Islam temple. See footnote #22 in the link below.

http://books.google.com/books?id=r_p_Q6TUrQoC&pg=PA261&#...

kenjackson• 15 years ago

Nice. I never looked it up, but always just assumed it was Farrakhan. Always good to have assumptions proven wrong.

larrys• 15 years ago

"They did not want to hear that, but it made things clear: we had to build a better product. There was no other way out. No window, no hole, no escape hatch, no backdoor."

This is simply known as "not resting on your laurels".

Or as Andy Grove would say "Only the paranoid survive," ... "Business success contains the seeds of its own destruction," ... "Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure."

(And all of the above also leads to missed opportunity.)

dmk23• 15 years ago

TLDR summary of the article:

"Confront reality and focus on execution of your product/sales plan to get competitive. No pie-in-the-sky strategizing would save your bacon if you fail to get stuff done."

ctdonath• 15 years ago

Methinks this is the core of why Apple is so successful: they do everything RIGHT. By not looking for shortcuts and silver bullets, they minimize things going wrong.

mahyarm2• 15 years ago

They do many things that are consumer facing right, but there are somethings that are developer facing that are just wrong. You don't know how much pain and confusion iOS provisioning profiles and signing give to my coworkers and myself initially. It's the majority of the questions I get asked about in relation to iOS.

robterrell• 15 years ago

That's off-topic, but this this is a pet peeve of mine, I'll bite. Have you tried code signing Blackberry apps? Desktop apps, java apps? Shockwave xtras, god forbid? Apple made something really complicated & poorly documented into something that was only moderately difficult and mostly automated, and with Xcode 4 it's possible to know basically nothing about it and develop apps on your own devices, so I'd say Apple did it pretty well.

mathattack• 15 years ago

Interesting. Focus on the fundamentals and fight in your markets, rather than chasing magic. I hear it a lot. "We should do an ASP", "We need to be a services company" and "We should buy company X."

I wonder if the last point is why buyers tend to do worse than sellers in M&A. Of course buyers chasing silver bullets probably helps HN readers on the margin. :-)

liamk• 15 years ago

Techcrunch looks terrible on my iPad. Divs on top of content and text that goes blurry when I use the iPad's zoom function.

cellis• 15 years ago

Is this the best you can do to add to the discussion?

dazbradbury• 15 years ago

Comment pulled from techcrunch:

Chris Zaharias · Having worked in sales at Netscape for four years (1995-99) I have to very respectfully disagree with Ben. Netscape did not recover from a better, faster, free IIS by building a better web server (called Netscape Enterprise Server, or NES). That helped to a small extent, but much more important were a) competitive advantages in email servers, proxy servers and directory servers; b) bundling of those solutions into a server suite (SuiteSpot); c) effective management of inbound lead flow (kudos to Todd Rulon-Miller & Bill Kellinger); and d) stellar, massive, but arguably long-term damaging OEM sell-thru by Ram Shriram's team that allowed Netscape to continue to grow overall server revenues.

Of those $400M server revenues, very little was NES, and as the graph at the below link shows, NES was always in decline relative competitors.

http://www.securityspace.com/de/s_survey/data/man.200909/htt...? mod=TmV0c2NhcGUtRW50ZXJwcmlzZQ%3D %3D

kb101• 15 years ago

I recall working at a growing company that suddenly stopped blowing its forecasts out of the water and sales began to tank (part of an overall market downturn). C-level executives were slaughtered and we were soon treated to a blustery, military-metaphor-laced "hardass" speech to rally the troops, courtesy of the new VP who was keen to let us know that business was war and we were in it to win it, etc. It was lead bullet time.

Fast forward some quarters later, after three rounds of layoffs, a refocusing of the product line on the core brands, and a general slow rebound of the market, and the company was back in the black... but: the blustery VP in question had nothing to do with any of this and had been shown the door (with a nice golden parachute).

Additionally, opportunities to take advantage of new market directions were missed. The company's strategy was to bundle sales around the best-selling products and continue incremental development around those. Ancillary, low-selling products were cut. Which is all well and good, but the company is now vulnerable to several new competitors who took advantage of new directions in client demand that the VP of War Metaphors missed... and now the company is finding itself making acquisitions of technology and (more importantly) cultures that are completely foreign and incompatible. (Windows-centric old-school company trying to absorb open-source Linux-based startups.) So far the solution has been to leave the acquired companies relatively intact... "synergy" is non-existent and culture clash is evident, with top brass from the acquired startups fleeing as soon as their contracts permit.

Additionally, the company is now facing the looming threat of cloud services and large-scale computing becoming cheaper and more commoditized. Unfortunately, nothing is being done to innovate or reinvent where reinvention is necessary; the current leadership does not perceive the threat (yet). (Disclaimer: I no longer work there, so they may have some stealth project to address this; but based on my contacts I doubt it.)

After reading the other recent HN post by the same author entitled "Nobody Cares" and now this latest little bit of bullet-based sophistry, I must say flatly that I do not find these observations helpful. First of all, the war metaphor and language is distracting and obfuscates issues. But if we must stick with this metaphor, there are times when what hulks in the door must be brought down in a hail of lead, and times when the monster in the door is wearing a bulletproof vest-- so you better hope you have a silver bullet and the ability to accurately aim between the eyes.

What strikes me most about the subtext of the OP's commentary is how lonely and unnecessarily self-limiting it is. I would not like to be running one of his portfolio companies and be faced with a challenge. It seems the likely response would be "you're on your own, nobody cares about your excuses, it's lead bullet time, not silver bullet time" etc. In other words, get me my return, I don't need to hear about anything else.

Real insight is knowing who cares and who doesn't, and maximizing your connections to the former, disconnecting from the latter. Real understanding of when to use lead and when to use silver and when not to fire bullets at all is what guides a company through tough times, but more importantly, allows it to seize opportunities for growth. Simply spouting "tough"-sounding platitudes and militaristic mantras about winning wars does nothing to help, and is distraction more than anything else.

Retric• 15 years ago

His point is simply sometimes the issue is strategy and some times it's execution. If you make a great MMO that people love but it's crashing all the time then fix the bugs and you just might end up making money hand over fist. If you make a solid but older MMO that people enjoy but the subscriber numbers are incontinuous decline then you might want to pivot into free to play etc.

hga3• 15 years ago

The market share graph starts at least 3 years after the release of IIS, it was in NT 3.51 SP 3 (and I gather released before that) and NT 4.0, which was released 29 July 1996 according to Wikipedia. I know IIS was solid for intranet use by mid-late 1997 when I started using it.

It also starts near the end of the year "[ Apache ] became the first web server software to surpass the 100 million website milestone." (Wikipedia again and Apache was indeed what I was using in 1999.) That suggests both of those established a price of about $0 for a web server.

I'm not sure the two accounts are mutually exclusive, as the further reply by George Scott suggests. A competitve web server, even if it was no longer going to make much money, was I suspect necessary for Netscape to sell or at least get established a lot of the rest of its set of servers (by the time the graph starts I can only remember people talking about their LDAP server). I.e. it's quite possible that if they hadn't expended those lead bullets the silver ones would have been wasted.

Geee• 15 years ago

At least you have to be very careful where to shoot those lead bullets. You can't just pull through with lots of work without having some fundamental idea or vision of how to beat your competition. I think being lean is all about looking those small silver bullets in everything you do. I'd hate it if someone told me to stop looking for silver bullets.

numeromancer• 15 years ago

On a related note, the Cascade of Attention-Deficit Teenagers: http://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html.

russell• 15 years ago

"No Silver Bullet", Fred Brooks, http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~cah/G51ISS/Documents/NoSilverBulle...

He did hold out hope that a bunch of silver bullets might do the trick. Read the article. Most of them seem quite quaint. Nonetheless, Brooks's writings saved me from a lot of self-inflicted grief.

Lead Bullets

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