What is your favorite failure?
As entrepreneurs and hackers, the road to success is paved with failure. However, I think we can all agree that these failures are merely things that didn't really work out but led to a different solution.
When I was first starting out on my journey to becoming a successful hacker, I was strategizing and designing a platform to make getting digital marketing deliverables simpler. The idea was great (in my eyes, of course), but the execution failed from the start. I planned everything according to what I wanted and how I would like the product to be, instead of placing the customer first.
This led to the entire project taking months of time, but bringing in absolutely no success (quite literally $0).
However, this taught me a valuable lesson: failing doesn't mean that you are a failure or that you aren't good enough. It means you tried something, it didn't work, and now you have eliminated one thing from your checklist that you no longer have to worry about. You are then one step closer to the ultimate solution.
What is your favorite failure? What lessons have you learned from struggles and difficulties in your side hacks?
Nice post Blake! Agree with your take on failure! One of the biggest failures to me is not mine but it belongs to a very large company. IBM had and may still have Lotus Notes/Domino. I was a developer for this product and really thought it was amazing. It was collaboration before it was trendy. Sharing documents, media and everything for mobile and nomads. I loved it. Yet they failed to market it well and their focus was entirely wrong. They are also responsible for the biggest failure in tech history believing the money was in hardware and allowing Mr. Gates the opportunity to create software. (I know he didn't create it) Failure is not limited to just small time hackers! (no offense). This is my favorite failure story!
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I agree. One of the many products that were very much better but lost out to marketing dollars. I usually have other examples ready but caught me off guard. But IBM has made the worst marketing decisions consistently. I have talked and talked with them all on deaf ears. They currently have no offerings for a small to medium sized business. They do but nobody knows about them and are very difficult to find because you have to sit through very long a complex presentations (and stay awake).
This comment was deleted 7 years ago
Well, actually big corps like banks still think same.
I am an IT specialist, working for IBM. Usually, managers on client side, make their decision in that way, Because IBM has a better support and services in countries like Turkey, Brazil, Africa etc.
This comment was deleted 7 years ago
Not with Lotus product family :)
Websphere is still leading app server. IBM security solutions are leading market, still. I am not sure about every product but IBM is still very popular in emerging markets.