I’m not convinced that’s a good rule of thumb at all, because there’s so many examples where it applies and is wrong, and many where it doesn’t apply but the tech was revolutionary.
Not to mention the greater point: Im not even that convinced tech is ever really revolutionary (at least at the same time it gets mainstream adoption). Usually the big improvement it made existed years earlier or in competitors but the timing was right for it to appear.
Youtube was doing the same thing as daily motion and another (I think Vimeo?). Facebook was just “cool MySpace”, blogs were personal webpages that got suddenly popular: a lot of these just popped up and executed at the right time and in the right way.
My point is: without looking at the technology at all or knowing anything about it, you could perfectly tell what “revolutionary product” would suddenly become the next big thing simply with perfect information about the market and how it will shift at each step.
You could invent the fastest most efficient and cheapest way in the universe to launch spaghetti, but the “revolutionary” nature of your invention doesn’t matter at all because there’s no market for it, even if the very technical spaghetti enthusiasts suggest “why don’t you just build your own spaghetti railgun?”.
Markets matter, products derive their value entirely from those markets and are worth nothing alone.
Consequently, knowing which products WILL BE revolutionary (here I deliberately define revolutionary after the fact, because amazing product with no market isn’t revolutionary) is very hard because even if you know the initial market, you won’t know how things change.
I suspect the best you can do to make or identify revolutionary products is to really know the initial customer and early market, rely on some long term perceived trend that aligns broad markets closer to your early market, then iterate quickly keeping the pulse on the market onwards towards the mass market - which means we’ve just re-derived the lean startup process.
I think the big thing about these innovations was that the nay-sayers didn't expect how big a demand there would be for specific implementations of them after the network effect kicks in. Social media? Technically it is very simple. But now everyone is on it so the dominant platforms are making billions with advertising.
We didn't need a social media platform. We needed a social media platform where most of the interesting people (including our friends) are on.
In many cases what people failed to anticipate was simply how successful online advertising would prove to be. Many of these ideas were just ways to lose money when they were first implemented.
Not to mention the greater point: Im not even that convinced tech is ever really revolutionary (at least at the same time it gets mainstream adoption). Usually the big improvement it made existed years earlier or in competitors but the timing was right for it to appear.
Youtube was doing the same thing as daily motion and another (I think Vimeo?). Facebook was just “cool MySpace”, blogs were personal webpages that got suddenly popular: a lot of these just popped up and executed at the right time and in the right way.
My point is: without looking at the technology at all or knowing anything about it, you could perfectly tell what “revolutionary product” would suddenly become the next big thing simply with perfect information about the market and how it will shift at each step.
You could invent the fastest most efficient and cheapest way in the universe to launch spaghetti, but the “revolutionary” nature of your invention doesn’t matter at all because there’s no market for it, even if the very technical spaghetti enthusiasts suggest “why don’t you just build your own spaghetti railgun?”.
Markets matter, products derive their value entirely from those markets and are worth nothing alone.
Consequently, knowing which products WILL BE revolutionary (here I deliberately define revolutionary after the fact, because amazing product with no market isn’t revolutionary) is very hard because even if you know the initial market, you won’t know how things change.
I suspect the best you can do to make or identify revolutionary products is to really know the initial customer and early market, rely on some long term perceived trend that aligns broad markets closer to your early market, then iterate quickly keeping the pulse on the market onwards towards the mass market - which means we’ve just re-derived the lean startup process.