
If we work day and night, we can match our competitor's features within 12 mos. - kevindication
http://dilbert.com/fast/2009-12-09/
======
nroach
I got a good laugh out of that comic, and it's frighteningly familiar for a
lot of enterprise developers.

But taken too literally, it sends entirely the wrong message to a startup. In
some cases I guess you really do want to swing for the fences and bypass
everything that's been done in your industry. However, I suspect that the
failure rate among those that take a completely divergent approach is pretty
high.

Maybe you don't have to match the competition feature-for-feature, but you do
need to match them need-for-need. If you don't address customer needs, good
luck with your conversion rate. And in the end, a feature matrix is just one
company's articulation of what it thinks those customer needs are. Maybe you
disagree or maybe you have a better way, but if the same 70% of features show
up over and over again amongst your competition, you'd better find a way to
satisfy those needs.

In the interest of not posting a tome, I've elaborated on my blog (see profile
for link).

~~~
patio11
_you do need to match them need-for-need_

I disagree. In particular, you may not be addressing the same niche that the
"competition" addresses.

To use an example I've been thinking a lot about today: it is stupid and
suicidal for any startup to go head to head with Google on a core Google
competency, right? Well, Wingify just released an A/B testing product which is
about 5% as featureful as the Google Website Optimizer/Google Analytics tag
team o' doom. It lacks on enterprise features, it doesn't have the Google ops
team backing it, etc etc. It also won't be free due to a cross-subsidy from
Google AdWords.

Instead of trying to reach feature or need parity with Google, they said
"There is a portion of the market here which is untechnical and knows they
want to do A/B testing but whom are undeserved by EVERY vendor. We're going to
make A/B test easy enough for them to incorporate it into their businesses in
a few minutes." With respect to those users, they're going to eat Google's
lunch. Granted that might only be a couple hundred thousand customers but,
well, how many customers do you really need, anyhow. ;)

~~~
nroach
Well, my surreply would be that for those customers, there is only one one
need, and Google's feature matrix attempts to address more needs than actually
exist in that segment of the marketplace.

But segmentation is a good point that I hadn't really addressed. I'd presumed
competitors going after the same market. A more mature competitor may simply
be seeking a bigger market (and thus requires more features). If you're
satisfied with attacking just one segment, everything else is extraneous.

------
mrcharles
I've had this conversation in the game industry more times than I can count.

------
SamAtt
We were just talking about this in my office the other day. How "feature
match" is such a popular strategy because it's something a non-technical
manager can say without having to rely on his technical staff (which in many
managers' eyes makes them seem weak)

------
Anon84
Or... you can work just as hard to find a new approach to the same problem
that gives you an edge over them.

------
mnemonik
Ah! A modern example of Zeno's Paradox!
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeno%27s_paradoxes>

I bet Douglas Hofstadter would appreciate at this one.

------
seasoup
37 points for posting a dilbert?

~~~
kevindication
It's my opinion that this dilbert is fairly relevant to HN. A lot of pg's
early articles were addressing this feature-matching sentiment and how they
approached it at viaweb.

