Winning by sucking less?

I've been reading Paul Graham's book Hackers & Painters this weekend. This book really resonates with me—I'll write more when I've finished, but here is a taste:

Big companies want to decrease the standard deviation of design outcomes because they want to avoid disasters. But when you damp oscillations, you lose the high points as well as the low. This is not a problem for big companies, because they don't win by making great products. Big companies win by sucking less than other big companies.

That's on page twenty-three, by the way.

—Michael A. Cleverly
Sunday, February 06, 2005 at 19:37