A product needs to be sufficiently innovative to distinguish itself from the pack, but not so forward thinking as to alienate the user.
Interpretation
Products should be innovative enough to stand out, yet accessible enough not to alienate users.
This quote by Reid Hoffman emphasizes the delicate balance that product developers must maintain between innovation and usability. While it is crucial for a product to offer unique features that set it apart from competitors, there is a fine line where excessive innovation can deter users who may find the advancements too complex or unfamiliar. Thus, the quote underscores the importance of aligning innovation with user needs to ensure successful adoption.
In practice
In a presentation on product strategy, one might quote this to highlight the importance of user-centered design.
Leaders, whether in the public or the private sphere, must understand the responsibilities that come with their role. They are the most visible standard-bearers of their organizations. Holding them accountable to this responsibility protects the promise of our organizations and our communities.
The same instincts that make us good students can make us lousy entrepreneurs.
The entrepreneurial journey starts with jumping off a cliff and assembling an airplane on the way down.
Any effort to make the death penalty speedier and less costly - more 'efficient' - will inevitably make it less just.
I've long believed that if you're not embarrassed by your first product release, you've released too late.
Good ideas need good strategy to realize their potential.
Without a doubt, I wholeheartedly support programs at Microsoft and in the industry that bring more women into technology and close the pay gap.
The Internet in the 21st Century is as important to our future as highways were in the 20th Century. Like a highway, the Internet must remain free and open for all - not determined by the highest bidders.
Steampunk appeals to the idea of uniqueness, to the one-off item, while every mainstream consumer technology of recent years is about putting human beings into ever more granular, packageable and mass-produced identities so that they can be sold or sold to, perfectly mapped and understood.
If we enter into the kind of world that Google likes, the world that Google wants, it's a world where information is copied so much on the Internet that nobody knows where it came from anymore, so there can't be any rights of authorship.
Now it's easy for someone to set up a storefront and reach the entire world in very modest ways. So these technologies that we thought would dis-intermediate traditional sellers gave more people the tools to be sellers. It also changed the balance of power between sellers and buyers.
Our technologies become more complex while we become more simple. They learn about us while we come to know less and less about them. No one person can understand everything going on in an iPhone, much less pervasive systems.
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