response to thetabletpost.com - you've got it all wrong

The 'Tablet Post' is an effort by some Notion Ink supporters, and I happened to come across it via the Notion Ink blog. Now I don't have anything against a news letter edition that also writes encouraging words about NI or Adam, to each to its own. But I need to respond when an entire article is based on a faulty premise or resorts to chewbacca defense.

My response is to the article "Abilities versus Expectations" which is  in the Volume 2 Issue 7 of the site, and I'll get to why this whole line is both absurd and oblivious to facts.

But first, here's an interesting sentence from the article - bold emphasis is mine - "Is it reasonable to expect Notion Ink to be as agile (this is one of the great new buzz words in tech speak) as these other companies (Apple, Microsoft, Motorola and Asus)?"

Clearly the author either does not understand what agile means or does not understand how agile is referenced to in the business sense. It is a buzz word but you got it all wrong, Dale.

The  differentiating factor between a start-up and a large company is that the start-ups are agile! It's not the other way around! We should have expected Notion Ink to be agile - i.e. fast, responsive, able to move faster than its giant competitors and not be trampled by them.

If you think of a small area of a field and an elephant and a rabbit on it, the elephant is Apple or Asus and the rabbit is (or should be) Notion Ink. What the rabbit needs to do is

(a) figure out what kind of grass or leaves it wants to eat

(b) move quickly and nibble avoiding being trampled by a slow moving elephant and

(c) hop skip & jump and change its eating strategy as the elephant changes course.

Therefore, the rabbit needs to be agile. The elephant has scale (bigger, more resources, more power) but the rabbit has agility.

And this article gets it completely backwards, which goes to prove the point that Notion Ink is not an agile company, which is exactly what a start-up should not be! So yes, it is entirely reasonable to expect NI to be more agile than the big companies.

So, let's now agree that the author was really talking about scale and not agility. How fair is that comparison? Actually it's very fair. If we accept that premise that young companies simply cannot do well because there are larger competitors, then young companies cannot grow at all, and therefore in every industry the only companies that should be left standing are large, very old companies who got to the market first. But that's not how it is, is it?

I can pick any number of companies that started small and grew - Apple, Google, Microsoft - all challenged incumbents at some point in their past. There are tons of small companies that are doing very well in spaces that are occupied by large corporations. Roku should be dead because Apple is in their space, Boxee should give up because Roku got there first. TiVO should have never happened because cable boxes / DVD players were around. DropBox should be dead because carbonite was around. Fastspring should be dead because PayPal is around.

The way start-ups succeed is because they move faster than the big companies and capture specific segments of the market that either the big boys don't care about or are slow to get to (other than inventing new markets). The start-ups are responsive to customer needs, build great customer experiences and grow quickly when they're successful. Even when they screw-up horribly, they come back and keep their audience engaged till the problem is resolved (dropbox and airbnb are recent examples).

Compare that to a third rate company like Notion Ink. No transparency, no focus, plenty of unhappy customers who can't get answers to questions for months, horrible customer support, no acknowledgment of problems or how they will address them. It has nothing to do with scale and it has everything to do with focus and ability.

Stop defending a shameless company and finding excuses for their performance. They built the expectations and failed to deliver, and it's not the buyers fault as many want to make it out to be. Don't taint the start-up concept with NI's pathetic performance, there are plenty of start-ups who do just fine.

Those numbers in the article mean nothing - large companies are larger because they're, well, selling a whole lot more. On a sales to employees ratio NI is probably worse than even the bigger companies.

Alternatively just accept that Notion Ink has no ability. That's it.