Loved

Chapter 24The Balancing Act: Right Message, Right Time

Back when the Internet was new, Microsoft Office had a handful of features that were Internet-ready. It was a standard pre-launch practice at that time to go around the country doing focus groups to test feature names. One of the exercises asked people to take cards that described what a feature did and stack them in the order they valued them.

Not one of the dozens of participants had Internet-ready features anywhere close to the top of their card stack.

This surprised us. Inside the tech bubble, the Internet was all everyone was talking about. Yet the focus group participants told us the market wasn't yet there. We faced a classic marketing dilemma: market ahead of what customers valued to push the market or market what they told us they prioritized now?

It felt risky at the time, but we decided Internet-ready features should lead our marketing, despite what customers told us. It didn't take long for it to be clear we'd made the right call.

And yet, the exact opposite happened at Loudcloud.

We were the first to offer Internet infrastructure as a service and talk about services in the cloud. We went to analysts and customers and did focus groups to understand sentiment. The closest thing they talked about was a managed service—which we felt wasn't big enough for our vision. We decided we had to try to change minds.

We talked about the cloud being like a power utility that you turned on and used dynamically on-demand. We ...