Better

Potential investors often smile knowingly at me and say, “Let’s assume for the sake of argument that the Thummer is better than every other musical instrument available today. So what? Being ‘better’ really doesn’t matter. Entrenched standards are impossible to displace.”

Common sense tells us that this conclusion can’t be true, or we’d all be living in the Stone Age – so why does this urban legend persist?

One reason is that consumers and experts disagree on the definition of “better.” Consumers tend to prefer solutions that are cheap, simple, and powerful, in that order, but experts & specialists tend to prefer “power” alone. As a result, experts’ published reviews tend to rate the most powerful products as being “better” – yet consumers keep buying the cheap & simple stuff. This can create the impression that the “best” products aren’t winning in the marketplace, when really it’s just a disagreement over the metrics of better-ness.

Another reason the urban legend persists is that being “just a little bit better” is not enough. To quote W. Brian Arthur, a leading academic expert on the subject, a new product has to be “200 or 300 percent better than its predecessor before it can take over. Without that shift, the old product stays locked in. The best technology is not necessarily the winning one.”

That is, if your product is 10%, 20%, or even 50% cheaper, simpler, and more powerful than its competition, then it’s going to lose, because it’s not enough better. Your product has to be enough better to overcome the inertia of the status quo, and that requires being at least two or three times better.

But what if your product is, say, three times better than its competition in ways that were important to its potential consumers? Say, three times cheaper, three times simpler, and three times as powerful? If your product were that much better, in those ways then it would be the odds-on favorite to win.

That’s why I’m so excited about Thumtronics’ Thummer and ThumMusic System. They have the potential to make music-making three times simpler, three times cheaper (counting instrument & lesson costs), and three times as powerful (in terms of expressive potential and new tonal effects).

So if you’re trying to decide which innovations have the best chance of market success, don’t get trapped in the Stone Age. Use your common sense to see that being ‘better’ matters. It is one of the most important predictors of an innovation’s rate and extent of market acceptance, giving an innovation the potential to disrupt its industry and topple its market leaders.

[Note: The original version of this posting claimed that the Thummer was ten times better, not just three times better, which attracted comments that this was perhaps gilding a lily -- so I reduced the claim from ten to three. Underpromise & overdeliver, as they say.]