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First, or Best, to Market?

By Allen Holub

September 15, 2004 — (Page 1 of 2)
How important is the notion of "first to market?" I had intended, in this column, to review VisiComp's RetroVue debugger, but unfortunately, the installed (as compared to demo'd) version was disappointing. RetroVue is a wonderful idea: a debugger that keeps a history of your execution so that you can definitively answer the question: "How did that happen?" But the shipped product simply is not good enough to be thoroughly tested and reviewed; my guess is that they were so interested in being first to market, they released too early, rendering a potentially great product disappointing. Rather than discuss RetroVue, then, let's talk about the first-to-market issue.

Putting things into perspective: Of the billion-dollar products that are endemic on today's PCs (spreadsheets, databases, word processors and operating systems), can you name any product leaders in these categories who were first to market? The first-to-market PC-based products in these categories were VisiCalc, DBASE and WordStar, and CP/M. None of these products (or the companies that created them) exist today. Being first to market often does nothing but prepare the marketplace to accept the second-to-market products. Nonetheless, the gospel of first to market pushes people to release too early.

But don't you have to establish a "beach head?" Can't you fix the problems in version 2? People subjected to a bad version 1 won't try version 2. The competition won't be sitting on its hands waiting for you to get your act together, after all. Your potential customers, remembering their experience, will try the competition first, and people will stay with the first solid product they find.

So, "first to market" doesn't matter. "Successful in the marketplace" does. And it can't hurt to get to market as quickly as possible. So how do you quickly develop a successful product? I'll answer that question with another: What does a successful version 1.0 release look like?

First and foremost, no obvious bugs. Bugs are endless, but your product will simply fail if your schedule is more important than the bug count. The best way to deal with this problem is continuous testing. I'm a strong believer of Test-Driven Development (TDD), which advocates writing tests before you write the code you're testing. TDD alone cut my development time by at least half. Without automated regression testing in place, it's simply not possible to refactor your code (improve it without changing functionality). There are lots of tools to help in testing. Erich Gamma's JUnit (www.junit.org) and its clones are everywhere. Find information about TDD atwww.agiledata.org/essays/tdd.htmlandwww.testdriven.com.

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