Dharmesh Shah has written a great post about the power of polarization over on OnStartups.com
I find the "be remarkable" message tremendously inspiring and exciting. It makes me think.
And yet …
… is it actually true that curve-jumping companies selling remarkable products to a small but polarised audience are more successful than boring companies selling average products to average people?
I’m not convinced. For every Apple there’s a Microsoft; for every for Twitter a SAS institute; for every 37signals, an SAP. There are a lot of very boring, very succesful companies quietly knuckling down to the boring business of figuring out what customers want, building it and then selling it to them.
The ‘remarkable’ companies are, by definition, companies that stick in our minds. But we shouldn’t blindly follow them, basing our decisions on individual, vivid and easy-to-recall examples when the data lies in the dull.