Wouldn't nuking a product after 18 months be the opposite of the wrong kind of stubborn if it's the right thing to do? That's exactly my problem with views like these, it's always the other party that is "obstinate" and doesn't listen, but what if after 18 months the product as a whole didn't meet enough expectations? Then it would be very obstinate to insist on releasing it anyway, and a more pragmatic way to reach the goal (which in this case is ultimately to have a successful company) would be to shelve the product and eat the loss. I'm not saying that's the case here, but I am sure those QA people feel like if you asked them.
It wasn't the wrong kind of stubborn. It was exactly the right thing to do, for this organization.
I'm not sure that it was, in the aggregate, the most beneficial decision for the company, but it was the decision they made, and I had to go along with it.
I do think that we could have addressed the Quality issues, in a couple of months, and the app was something that I think would have been "revolutionary." That "revolutionary" part probably contributed to its demise. Many QA types are very conservative, and risk-averse. I suspect that they wanted to find problems, because they didn't want to deal with a very different (albeit awesome) kind of application. There were also a couple of other reasons, which I won't go into, here, but they weren't particularly well-handled. They did make it easier for the conservatives to sway upper management.
I can't know what's correct there, but I don't need to. Ultimately it comes down to was it a success or not, for a company this basically means does it exist and is it profitable. In the alternate universe where things are done differently it could be better or worse. My main point is that whether it's the right or wrong stubborn depends on your point of view. Now Paul Graham has been very successful in business, but even there you might have different businesses. People took different approaches and were still successful. And business is just a narrow part of life. So what's bothering me here is that there are broad generalizations that in most cases come down to your point of view. This could ironically be interpreted as the wrong kind of stubborn.
My experience, is that folks can't deal with "it depends." We have to have "hard and fast" rules, to be applied in all contexts.
Determining "it depends" almost always requires scars and contusions. Less-experienced folks often have a much more difficult time, making these decisions, than folks that have been around the track a few times.
The folks that decided to cancel that project were very highly-placed executives. It wasn't an easy decision. However, one of my mistakes, was underestimating just how obstinate and change-averse, the QA people could be, and how much real power they wielded. If I had accepted this, I maybe could have saved the project. It was a hard lesson, but one I learned well.
That corporation made some serious mistakes, mainly from being so risk-averse, that they allowed their competitors to eat their lunch, and suffered a pretty big implosion. I suspect that they will do OK, in the long run, but they took a real beating. Ironically, the reason they survived that drubbing, was because of their fiscal conservatism.
"Good judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgment."
