I remember when I first saw the Wave promotion, the 90 min video demo'ing the product, it even showed the technical meltdown that happened during the demo which I thought was ballsy - but in the back of my head I kept saying "huh" like Tom Hanks in Big said during board room - "I don't get it" and I didn't get it and I had a few years on the "child like" approach Hanks portrayed in Big.
I tried for about a month to get into Wave but it just didn't click. Evidently I wasn't alone but I'm not commenting about that today, what I am thinking about is how Google, as discussed in this Harvard Business Review, had the gumption to pull the plug and move on.
Innovation is good, failure is part of the formula - we all trip and fall before we walk so why don't we celebrate our failures more often in the tech world? Isn't that how we learn and grow? How many of us have tried to implement or move tech in a direction that utterly failed and we tried to forget or bury it rather then celebrate the attempt and learn from it?
As the Matrix Group http://www.matrixgroup.net so eloquently said on a recent Facebook post: " . . . they ( Google ) have the courage to shut down initiatives that don't quit succeed, without punishing the project owners and learning a lot from the efforts! Impressive, indeed! Is your organization holding on to any dead horses?"
Admitting you have a lame duck software solution in place is a hard pill to swallow, stepping up or rather standing up for change that may go against the culture . . . now that takes balls!
- Michael Sola heads up the IT Dept at NWF, blogger, invited presenter and speaker - he also rarely has to show ID to walk into a pub. Follow him at http://twitter.com/michaelsola : his views and comments are his own
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