Comments on: Ardent 3: Supercomputer Porn

By: steve

steve — Sat, 09 Oct 2010 16:16:34 +0000

I read your prev art (get outta my bldg) last night, and awoke this mornign wondering how you got started finding people to talk to. this article provided the answers. now I’ll go forward and look for other articles that described how you contacted the Cray customers so you could get in front of them to do custdev

By: Dan Hodgins

Dan Hodgins — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 07:08:59 +0000

Some people consider competitive profiling to be a core competency and competitive advantage. I agree with that assertion and have become much more systematic about understanding market leaders in my industry order to grasp the market and actual opportunity.

If you follow Steve’s advice and let the market leader do all the work and make all the mistakes, all you have to do is systematically hit their weaknesses with your strengths in order to grow your market share.

Isn’t theory fun?

The reality is that market leaders are well-capitalized and formidable opponents. Therefore, you must leverage your strengths by exploiting their weaknesses due to size, brand, culture, or established historical norms which make them much less agile than a flexible yet less-capitalized opponent.

Gracias for another great read Steve!

Dan

By: Idont

Idont — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 16:12:55 +0000

How can you differentiate if you copy-paste the well established leader.

What you have to do: build on the experience acquired by the leader AND remove the historical constraint which make no sense AND break the rules in favor of your customer that the leader cannot do.

By: Ardent War Story 4: You Know You’re Getting Close to Your Customers When They Offer You a Job « Steve Blank

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 13:02:20 +0000

[...] Ardent 3: Supercomputer Porn [...]

By: Siddharth Chawla

Siddharth Chawla — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 04:34:39 +0000

Wow, this is really validating of how I go about finding things.

I always thought a company with lots of resources may go doing this very differently but reading about your experience helps to validate my ideas about business development.

That knowledge itself gives me immense strength about my approach.

Thanks.
Siddharth

By: links for 2009-10-13 « Blarney Fellow

links for 2009-10-13 « Blarney Fellow — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 01:10:29 +0000

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By: Top Posts « WordPress.com

Top Posts « WordPress.com — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 00:44:47 +0000

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By: jorge

jorge — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 03:52:26 +0000

Another good approach is to look at how people in a different industry are selling to your desired customers… what their channel looks like, how they market, etc.

By: Hmm

Hmm — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 22:50:21 +0000

This is incredible and EXACTLY what I’ve been doing. I am launching a competing site to a business that provides open records. People pay a subcsription to access the data. For the longest time I wondered how the site acquired the public data. Then I did a google and WOAH I found everything from towns RECEIVING the request for data to towns deliberating on it etc.

All I had to do is ask the town for the exact same data. My competitor has been doing the work for 10 years for me!

By: Twitter Trackbacks for Ardent 3: Supercomputer Porn « Steve Blank [steveblank.com] on Topsy.com

Mon, 12 Oct 2009 20:08:51 +0000

[...] Ardent 3: Supercomputer Porn « Steve Blank steveblank.com/2009/10/12/ardent-3-supercomputer-porn – view page – cached + Customer Development Manifesto: The Path of Warriors and Winners (part 5) + Can You Trust Any VC’s Under 40? + Customer Development Manifesto: Market Type (part 4) * Archives + October 2009 +… (Read more)+ Customer Development Manifesto: The Path of Warriors and Winners (part 5) + Can You Trust Any VC’s Under 40? + Customer Development Manifesto: Market Type (part 4) * Archives + October 2009 + September 2009 + August 2009 + July 2009 + June 2009 + May 2009 + April 2009 + March 2009 + February 2009 * Other Stuff + Steve Blank + Entrepreneurship o Books/Blogs for Startups + Secret History (Read less) — From the page [...]

By: Chris Ryland

Chris Ryland — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 19:21:23 +0000

It’ll be interesting to see how you proceeded from there.

At Multiflow (a VLIW spin-off from Yale that was a semi-competitor of Ardent/Stardent (Convex and Alliant were our direct competitors), our whole shtick was “we run even your junk code fast, while killing the vector code dead”. (Which was true, but wasn’t true enough to survive, long-term.)

So were we looking at traditional vector-based markets like Cray, but also less vector-oriented high-performance computing.

We were eventually killed by Sun. Even though the workstations were wildly less performant at the high end (we sold timesharing machines for $500K to a few $million), the fact that you could have a Sun workstation on your desk was the deciding factor for most people. I.e., they’d rather have a decent-performing personal machine than have to share a high-performance machine.

Well, “duh.” Never bet against the desktop. But this was 1985; we didn’t know any better.

Now I guess it’s “never bet against the Internet,” with all that implies.