Overview

"Who's going to use your product?"

"Everyone!"

"And what will they do with it?"

"Everything!"

As technology and bandwidth allowed for real-time voice communication over the Internet, a bunch of companies entered the market to promote and develop it. Many decided to aim big; otherwise, the reasoning went, why aim at all? When asked about who would use their product, an executive at one of these companies replied, "Everyone who uses a telephone!"

Although at the time that was a great ambition to have, and a good story to tell investors, the group of people who would have been likely to use an Internet telephone in 1998 was a lot smaller than "everyone who uses a telephone." By defining the audience so broadly, they were, in effect, not defining it at all. Of course, they could have claimed to be happy if they captured a small fraction of the large market, but that reasoning would have been equally flawed. Aiming for a small share of a large market would have created an impossible task for the company. To capture even a small piece of a big market, they would have needed to understand the dynamics of the whole market. There are a lot of telephone users in the world. To understand the market they had so flippantly defined, the Internet telephone companies would need to know the needs, abilities, and desires of a large chunk of the world's population in a 1.0 product.

The company in question eventually realized...