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Purple Cow
rized in Doonesbury as a bizarre technological dead end), the
folks who invented the Palm Pilot had their work cut out for
them. Early models didn’t work. Early co-ventures failed.
They blew a trademark fight and lost their name to a
Japanese pen company. The easy and smart thing to do
would have been to give up and go do good work at some
R&D lab. But the founders persisted, continuing to make
their device single-minded (when conventional wisdom
demanded multi-purpose devices) and cheap (when conventional
wisdom demanded expensive high-tech introductions).
The founders were exceptional, and they won.
Only when Palm tried to play it safe did they start to
stumble. Three years in a row of incremental feature creep
has cost them market share and profit.
Compare these successes to the Buick. The Buick is a
boring car. It’s been boring for almost fifty years. Few
people aspire to own a Buick. The Buick isn’t easy to criticize,
but it’s also not very successful, is it
Drugstore.com is another boring company. They have a
boring Web site, selling boring stuff. (When was the last
time someone got excited about Braun launching a new
toothbrush) Is there much to criticize about the way they
do business Not really. But there’s no Cow there. As a
result, very few new customers go out of their way to do
business with them.
So how are you going to predict which ideas are going to
backfire and which are guaranteed to be worth the hard
work they take to launch The short answer: You can’t.
Hey, if it was easy to become a rock star, everyone would
do it!
You can’t know if your Purple Cow is guaranteed to
work. You can’t know if it’s remarkable enough or too
risky. That’s the point. It’s the very unpredictability of the
outcome that makes it work.
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