Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters

by Richard P. Rumelt

Design always involves a certain amount of trial and error, and hardware trials and errors are much more costly. If a hardware design doesn’t work correctly, it can mean months of expensive redesign. If software doesn’t work, a software engineer fixes the problem by typing new instructions into a file, recompiling, and trying again in a few minutes or a few days. And software can be quickly fixed and upgraded even after the product has shipped. Thus, software’s advantage comes from the rapidity of the software development cycle—the process of moving from concept to prototype and the process of finding and correcting errors. If engineers never made mistakes, the costs of achieving a complex design in hardware and software might be comparable. But given that they do make mistakes, software became the much-preferred medium (unless the cutting-edge speed of pure hardware was required).

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