I saw an article somewhere today that mentioned this fact. It was a bit startling because I was one of those that pre-ordered the Google G1 when it was first announced. I still have it sitting in a drawer in its box because that phone made me very happy.
It couldn’t stand with the iPhone and didn’t even try to. It was its own device with the chin, physical keyboard, trackball, and five physical buttons. It was like a personal computer brought to life. And was it an UGLY phone! All black plastic.
But it made a statement that still stands today in the Android environment: anything goes. We may not have the right recipe today, but we’re going to try. We’re going to put our ideas out into the world and see what sticks. And then they iterated. New versions started coming out. The first 18 months Android was out there were some AWFUL phones. But they kept getting better.
Consumers had a chance to provide feedback through their purchasing behaviors. The phone got better because of it. And every six months a new version of Android came out that kept getting better and better. And then 2 years after the first G1 came the G2. 3 years ago this week. I remember when that showed up as well.
You could see the legacy of the G1 but everything that made the G1 ugly and complicated was gone. Fixed. It was like the engineers had taken two years of history and built the phone that should have been. HTC showed how to learn from your mistakes.
I went from the G1 to the G2 to the One S. And now I run CyanogenMod on my One S. And in my five years with this environment I’ve seen it do amazing things. Because the vendors push their ideas out quickly and aren’t afraid to fail. It’s been a big mess at times, but it has worked.
tl&dr- never be afraid to put your messiest ideas into the world if you think they have potential. Don’t say how resource constrained you are and you would if you have more help. That’s a cop out. Just get it done and see what happens. The worst that can happen is you get yelled out for not being perfect. So what? If it’s the right idea and you give it your best, amazing things can happen.