For one thing, think of all the debate and prioritization of effort that went into features that customers would never discover. If we had shipped sooner, we could have avoided that waste. Also consider all the waste caused by our incorrect strategic assumptions. I had built interoperability for more than a dozen different IM clients and networks. Was this really necessary to test our assumptions? Could we have gotten the same feedback from our customers with half as many networks? With only three? With only one? Since the customers of all IM networks found our product equally unattractive,
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