When someone else says something better than I ever could, it behooves me to get out of the way:
If you want to make money at some point, remember this, because this is one of the reasons startups win. Big companies want to decrease the standard deviation of design outcomes because they want to avoid disasters. But when you damp oscillations, you lose the high points as well as the low. This is not a problem for big companies, because they don't win by making great products. Big companies win by sucking less than other big companies.
- Paul Graham in his "
Hackers and Painters" essay. Thanks to
Garrett for sending me down the rabbit hole.
