I've been involved as founder and/or CEO of several software companies over the past 21 years and have been fortunate enough to work with smart, energetic people that created innovative "first" offerings in several markets. These products were financially successful, solved real business problems, and more often than not garnered industry awards of excellence. First it was development tools (a visual user interface builder called "Prototyper" in the late 80s), client/server PIMs (Now Up-to-Date and Now Contact in the early 90s), and numerous offerings for creative professionals at Extensis (including a portal called creativepro.com.) What's the point? There were many, many failures at these businesses too. And I can say without regret that all of these failures were worth the risk and ultimately we all learned more from those failures than the commercial wins. I know I certainly did.
"How Failure Breeds Success" is a great feature article in the July 10 issue of BusinessWeek that showcases numerous "failures" by known industry leaders. I believe firmly that leaders must allow their people to fail by encouraging them to push the envelope. And, I practice what I preach.
We took (are taking?) a huge risk at Attensa with our technology strategy (and laser focus on business) and its clear to me that most folks who track our little corner of the industry have no idea how significant this risk really is (and admittedly don't care either.) We invested heavily up front in our technology both in infrastructure as well as in portable client-side architectures. And, as our name suggests, "attention" is the foundation of everything we are doing. It is our bet that truly useful, real-time utilization of attention meta-data cannot be "bolted on." That's it. That's our bet.
Without describing future products and/or strategies - or defining what true "attention" really is - let's just say we think our approach will deliver significant advantages for customers. I believe our investment in a true "platform" up front was the right move. I believe our early, deep work with massive quantities of transient meta-data we call "AttentionStreams" is a revolutionary development and will enable "game-changing" capabilities that will be extraordinarily difficult for our competitors to replicate.
So, the net-net in my book is that failure is necessary. If you haven't lived through a failed product/business/service then you simply aren't pushing hard enough. And in most businesses, especially software in my experience, the risk takers are the ones that usually win.
