The fallacy of superior technology

After reading the article "Will Slack's New Update Kill [Microsoft] Teams and [Facebook] Workplace," I found myself marveling at how so many people in the technology space believe great technology and features equals business success.

Nope. Sorry.

In the battle of Teams vs Slack, Slack has already lost. 

[I'll save the discussion on the Facebook Workplace product for another day but the short of it is that I don't see any business except tiny ones using Facebook for anything except ads.]

But what about all my cool technology?

Teams has won the day is not because of any features or cool whiz-bang technology or even the stuff that sounds more customer-focused like "user experience" and "better performance."

All of that stuff is window-dressing.

It may move the small percent of people who love to explore and be the first to play around with stuff for bragging rights. In Geoffrey Moore's classic work on technology markets, "Crossing the Chasm," these folks are rightfully seen as important in seeding a new market but insufficient to create long-term success and market penetration.

In the end, for the majority of people, these technology features are nice to look at but not materially significant in predicting winners and losers in business. The business landscape is loaded with superior technology piling up in landfills.

The bottom-line is: Microsoft simply has a better go-to-market strategy than Slack. 

In the technology wars over the years, it's *always* the better go-to-market strategy that wins the day—not the superior technology.

Microsoft out-maneuvered the competition out of the gates.

Anyone familiar with Microsoft's initial rise can go back in time to witness that the core of their success was built on their go-to-market strategy.

They established agreements with nearly every computer maker to pay $$$ for DOS (for the younger folks reading this, that's the pre-Windows operating system that controls a computer) on EVERY MACHINE SOLD—whether the computer vendor installed it or not.

That leads to "well, we might as well use the Microsoft product since we're paying for it."

So if you were a small startup who built a better operating system that performed better or gave more flexibility than Microsoft DOS, it really didn't matter. You had no market for your product.

The computer manufacturers were closed to you as Microsoft had beaten you to them.

Apart from creating your own hardware for your operating system as Apple did, the only hope for superior operating systems was to advertise and up-sell to people after they purchased a computer.

Businesses tried that. They failed.

Salesforce.com schooled traditional software publishers.

And about twenty years ago, Salesforce.com came out of nowhere to establish dominance in the CRM market—not because the product was revolutionary but because their strategy made it easy for sales people to circumvent the usual "no's" from the accounting and computer departments.

It was priced to make for a short sales process. Salesforce.com got to yes'es and no's while competitors were still negotiating for a demo call.

Anyone in sales understands the importance of sales velocity—how fast you can move leads through your pipeline and out the other side. Whether you close them or lose them, the speed at which you moves is a good indicator of how fast you can improve, iterate, and ultimately increase sales.

Salesforce.com outmaneuvered and created an entire new sector of "cloud software" almost single-handedly with their go-to-market strategy. They established dominance before their competition even understood what had happened.

And to this day, many erroneously believe that Salesforce.com did this exclusively with a superior product.

Amazon.com made shopping easier

In the heady days of the first "dot com" revolution, people were in love with doing everything online.

This wasn't built on desire to use cool, new technology.

It was convenience making it easier for people to shop. You could go to a website and order stuff from the comfort of your home or office. And you had an unlimited inventory to choose from that couldn't be found in your local bricks and mortar stores.

Amazon has built dominance by continuing to focus on the convenience factor and leading the market in new go-to-market strategies to make customers' lives, or at least their shopping, easier.

To be clear, I'm not suggesting that Amazon's website is superior to other websites. Frankly, if you look at the Amazon website, it hasn't significantly changed in five (maybe more?) years.

It's not the technology driving this.

Amazon got a jump on traditional retailers by making it easy to conduct business from their homes before traditional retailers even understood what the internet would mean for them. It was this unique go-to-market strategy that gave Amazon a huge first-move advantage that they have maintained.

Don't the technology and cool features matter at all?

Of course, no one wants a crappy product or experience.

For the most part though, it's irrelevant because people will choose the path of least resistance nine times out of ten. Unless the product is seriously deficient, people will go with the easier choice.

I've seen people stick with poor technology because they already own it (sunk cost fallacy) or because someone they hired used it previously at their former job so...why not try it here?

For every early adopter of a cool productivity tool like Slack, you will have hundreds of people who simply won't care until that technology becomes the easy choice to make.

And that's why Microsoft Teams usage has exploded and is continuing to explode. Microsoft has made it easy to get, install, try, and use Microsoft Teams.

Is it the better product? Speaking for the majority of the planet: who cares?

In the end, I love Microsoft Teams and I'm glad that Microsoft has made it the "easy choice" for people out there like me. Otherwise, a project to evaluate and acquire a collaborative communication tool would have stayed on the back-burner for years to come.

So hooray for smart teams who make it easy for us to discover (and use) their products!

And to all the technology industry professionals reading this, remember that it's not the features or technology that is going to make your product or services explode.

It's your go-to-market strategy.