Why acting different isn't always a good advice

mynameisricky (65)in #life • 7 years ago

I was reading on the internet a very interesting article, in fact the title caught my attention. "Think different is a bad advice", title that caused me suspicion, since we often hear that one of the keys to success is to think differently. The article points out that companies like Apple and Google are related to this individualistic term of "different thinking", in fact, Steve Jobs had Apple's motto "We do not do better, we do different." Actually these companies are true that they innovated constantly, made of the technology something more and more practical and simple to use, then they were cataloged to these company like visionaries.

However, the creator of the first smartphone was not Apple, but IBM. The same thing happens with the Google internet search engine, today the vast majority of people in the world use google, if there is something you do not know, you simply go to Google and it connects quickly with the information you were looking for, that simple. But despite being the most efficient in this area, Yahoo and AltaVista already had search engines on the web much earlier than Google.

I got to say that Apple and Google were not the ones who invented these two things for the first time, they just improved it.

And this has happened and continues to happen with many things in our history, in fact a study reveals that 50% of the pioneering companies in a market fail, unlike other companies that enter the market and later, more likely to have success. It is simply because most of the initial mistakes have already been committed by another company, this shortens the way for other companies to start in the product or service market, so it is an advantage not to be a pioneer many times. Frustrations and "trial and error" costs are much smaller than those venturing into the market from the outset as pioneers.

It is also because people in this world take time to get used to some technological revolution. About 60 years ago communicating via invisible networks throughout the world was classified as crazy, nowadays it is part of our daily life and we call it internet, so much so that imagining a life without internet is something really difficult. The same thing happened with cars, people were already accustomed to carriages carried by one or two horses, but all this was changing with the growth and development of cities.

The thing is that being different does not lead to success, what leads to success is to be optimally different, to have a perfect balance between similarity and difference (how Steve Jobs did with every invention he made). Take a look at this fact: things that are at the forefront obviously are not the same as their predecessors, but they are not so different, another example of the perfect balance between similarity and difference.

Even in the world of music you can apply this concept, I am a fan of the metal and its derivatives, but the truth is that the songs that today are successful by modern bands what they do is to mix sounds very similar to those that are doing other Metal bands throughout the history of music, but the difference is the lyrics, then it is not completely the same, but neither is it very different from its predecessor. Same scales, same times, same distortion in their guitars, the difference lies in the lyrics of the songs, is that even in the way of singing closely resembles what has been the metal since the 60s. If you do not like the example of metal, in rap music this is much more evident, the rhythm is almost always the same, but once again, what draws attention are the lyrics of the songs.

Steve Jobs in 1998, when he introduced the iMac applied few technological improvements to the performance of the machine, however, Steve radically changed the presentation and visual effects of the previous models of other companies, in the film (Jobs) starring Ashton Kutcher you can see how it all happened. What most caught the attention of the iMac in 1998 was its presentation, the way people saw the "new computer", that gave Apple a big advantage over its competitors, synonymous with innovation.

That is why it is not always to stand out you have to be totally different, since what is totally different is very strange, but what is very similar is boring and obsolete, so the best way to exploit some business idea or what It will be taking an existing idea and perfecting it, how Steve Jobs had done for much of his life.