Yeah, you are close. I was more thinking about what Steve Jobs said when he announced the new MacBook Air:
"We asked ourselves, what would happen if a MacBook and an iPad hooked up? Well, this is the result, we think it’s the future of notebooks."
It made me wonder what would happen if the MacBook Air and the MacBook Pro would hook up. Surely Apple is taking the best of both machines when they are designing the new MacBooks. So what would the ultimate MacBook pro look like? Well, more like a MacBook Air.
When you fall you've failed at walking. But we all know that this is part of learning to walk. We can focus on the fail or on the process or learning. You obviously only see the fail.
As mentioned in the post "Of course we would have preferred it if the solution would have been perfect, but at least we had the chance to give it a try"...
No. That would just mean you would lose your shares and make it impossible to ver do an exit that would satisfy the investor. He expects a x20 return on investment so unless you can turn your company into a 2 trillion dollar company, you are screwed.
I left those details out because I didn't think they would add to the story. The big company was KPN to which I sold my WiFi Hotspot operator in 2003. The manager who told me the story was Jan Kroon and it was about a manager he reported to. See, all that info doesn't make the story that more interesting really.
I think this manager didn't care about you being late or not. All he cared about was results. If you would have come in at 9:15 AND showed poor results and then came up with an excuse he would have punished you for it. But if you came in, with a confident smile on your face because life was good and you loved your work, he would have just smiled back at you.
I have the same experience but then with pageviews and Twitter VS Facebook: Twitter users check an average of 1.2 pages on my website. Facebook users do 4.2. That means 1000 visitors from Facebook generate the same number of pageviews as 4000 from twitter.
I started TwitterCounter.com as a fun weekend coding project after my partner said he wouldn't have time to start on it until he had finished some other stuff. I couldn't let it go so started coding right away. We launched 6 days later. Not it is hugely profitable and has 2 full-time employees.
More importantly: I think almost every major internet success was started as a side-project. Yahoo, Google, Apple, the list goes on and on...
Wow, we launched this like 2 years ago (okay, September 16, 2008 to be exact) at TwitterKeys.com. Was wildly popular for a week or two and then died off.
"a nice gesture to the users"? I think those users would habe enjoyed the extra attention. More followers, credit, props and traffic? Just put my name in there from now on...