iLike – No! Never Surrender To Your Users, Facebook

A business lesson for those that are interested in that sort of thing:

While I don’t fully agree with Michael Arrington’s application to Facebook of the concept posted in a recent article over at TechCrunch, he does pose a very valid point of innovation versus customer appeasement.  I’ll be writing up a more full blog post in my WorldOfTech blog in the next few days.  Here I wanted to highlight the intelligence of Michael’s post and encourage others to “look beyond” what customers are literally saying, and figure out what they really want.  You can never innovate if you don’t apply some real creativity to solving the problems presented by customers, instead of simply saying “if they want X, we’ll give them X”.

So next time you are presented with this type of situation, dig deeply to find what the customers really need instead of simply what they’re asking for.  If you’re really feeling innovative, you’ll fundamentally change their needs and improve their habits and methodologies all at once.

NetworkGoalie Labs

I’m now working on getting my creative juices flowing, I have decided to setup a virtual laboratory to track ideas that I come up with, or that my friends come up with and want to colaborate on.  I am hoping that I’ll get at least one or two good ideas out of it for projects, but it should be an ongoing project in itself that I’ll be treating as a project incubator of sorts.

Along with my virtual laboratories I’ll be stepping up my efforts to actually interact with my peers to come up with new and fresh ideas.  I’ve been playing the role of lone small business IT gun-man for too long without venturing out to keep up with the outside world.  I’m hoping I can both provide my network of peers some added insight, and gain valuable vision from them.  Maybe we can come up with some projects that benefit others in various ways, and make us a bit of living ourselves.