<story><title>If Everyone Else is Such an Idiot, How Come You&apos;re Not Rich?</title><url>http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/12/if-everyone-else-is-such-an-idiot-how-come-youre-not-rich/249430/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>sskates</author><text>If you&apos;ve ever run a company or any sort of organization, you&apos;ll realize that walking around blind is the default. It takes effort to get information on what&apos;s going on. Because you can&apos;t wait forever for perfect information, you end up taking calculated risks like Netflix did with Qwikster where it&apos;s not clear in advance if it will pan out.&lt;p&gt;As the OP realized, this results in Monday morning armchair quaterbacking from people who ask &quot;why didn&apos;t they make the right decision in advance, are they stupid or something?&quot; When in fact, no, they are not stupid, they just don&apos;t have perfect information about what will happen.&lt;p&gt;Incidentally, this is the largest advantage of startups- the cost of a risky bet is much lower because you don&apos;t have to risk hemorrhaging hundreds of thousands of customers each time you make a bet. As a result, you can take many more risks and come to a better solution more quickly.&lt;p&gt;edit: downvotes? what?</text></comment>
<story><title>If Everyone Else is Such an Idiot, How Come You&apos;re Not Rich?</title><url>http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/12/if-everyone-else-is-such-an-idiot-how-come-youre-not-rich/249430/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>joebadmo</author><text>One of the important points I&apos;ve heard Clay Christensen make is that incumbent companies often get destroyed (disrupted) by small players not because they&apos;re incompetent, or even because they&apos;re making bad decisions. Each decision along the way seems perfectly rational. Christensen frames it ultimately as a problem of measurement, that people are measuring the wrong thing, therefore optimizing for or solving the wrong problem.&lt;p&gt;I think this article correctly points out that Hastings isn&apos;t stupid, but he&apos;s in a tight spot, just because of the circumstances.</text></comment>