The vast majority of products that people don't understand and believe to be useless are in fact useless.
The first time I used Google I knew it was amazing and never used altavista again. When Facebook came to my campus it spread like wildfire.
These stories are quite interesting but at the same time what are they suggesting? An investor wants you to spend your whole life chasing a dream because they don't care if it fails and get paid if it succeeds. If you love doing something, do it regardless of what people think. But don't let an investor convince you to waste years working on something that nobody wants because that is what all successful entrepreneurs do. In a few cases it works out but the vast majority of the time it doesn't.
I think you are missing the point, as the author states the same thing halfway in:
Things that are instantly adored are usually just slight variations over existing products.
It's not that every huge shift is also accompanied by a lengthy doldrums. Uu chose clear outliers-and yes while VC is predicated on outliers this post is actually a counter balance to what VC mostly decide on which is traction. So I'm not so cynical about this post because it's not saying " do what sales" and all the other typical VC tropes which are more in line with what you describe. Most successful entrepreneurs do something incremental so I think your analysis is wrong there as well.
The only problem I see with this post is that more than likely, they don't actually invest on this ethos so it's giving entrepreneurs with vision a false hope.
> Things that are instantly adored are usually just slight variations over existing products.
But that doesn't apply to Google. Although there were many, many search engines when Google first appeared, none worked like it -- in fact, none worked, at all.
Google worked from day 1 and everyone who used it, saw it very clearly.
On a technical level that might be true, but to the average user I think the edge google had over its competitors was that its product was vastly superior. How they built better search results was a matter of implementation, while the end product didn't stray far fom the public idea of a search engine.
What was different about Google eventually made it popular, but it also got a lot of people to avoid them over the lack of control of the query. It was not nearly as clear cut initially.
Google was initially much better on simple queries, but not competitive with "expert" users who knew how to use Altavista's query operators properly, or who were familiar with metasearch engines when looking for very specific material.
Google succeeded because they were similar enough that it was easy to try them, but met resistance because they were different enough that for a portion of the user base it was not clear that the advantages they had on simple queries was worth it.
The superiority of their approach first became "universally" clear as the number of pages exploded and tweaking your queries became an exercise in frustration, coupled with the explosion of users not familiar with how to compose a more specific query.
I know a lot of people - myself included - who took a long time to switch to Google from the first time we tried it because other search engines worked better for us at the time.
This too is a common pattern: Early adopters get so caught up in specifics of early products that when an evolution of the concept arrives that has profound impact on usability, it gets met with a shrug or dismissed because it doesn't fit into the usage patterns those early adopters have learnt in order to overcome the limitations of earlier products.
Often something will look like a step back for the expert users making up the bulk of users of its predecessors (because you either become an expert user, or give up), and first gains traction by expanding the market to users for whom the features who look like flaws to the former group is what makes the product usable to them at all.
E.g. I remember early PDA adopters being dismissive of the iPhone on-screen keyboard, because it was "pointless": Grafitti worked so much better on a small screen.... for those of us who had spent a couple of years or more learning how to write fast with it. For everyone else, the iPhone keyboard made it usable in ways Palm devices weren't.
The point is people understood what Google was from the get-go, because they had used similar products to serve their needs before.
On the other hand, the invention of the internet was not immediately popular because it was so different that people couldn't relate it to their prior experiences.
Oh yes, sort of like the Internet was an obvious instant hit! IIRC the Internet/web/etc slow cooked in a Crockpot for several decades before it became commercially viable. Somebody please correct me if I am missing something.
The first time I used Google I knew it was amazing and never used altavista again. When Facebook came to my campus it spread like wildfire.
These stories are quite interesting but at the same time what are they suggesting? An investor wants you to spend your whole life chasing a dream because they don't care if it fails and get paid if it succeeds. If you love doing something, do it regardless of what people think. But don't let an investor convince you to waste years working on something that nobody wants because that is what all successful entrepreneurs do. In a few cases it works out but the vast majority of the time it doesn't.