Details of Execution

Sometimes if you do something very difficult, and you do it really well, the end result is that your achievement becomes completely invisible. I mentioned a year and a half ago that I like Twitter . That was a little bit less common a position to take back then, but in the months since, tons of people have taken to the little messaging service, so clearly this was no great insight on my part — it’s just a useful, fun service. But of course, that popularity has not been without its problems. Twitter’s gotten a reputation for being unreliable, as a result of its rapid growth. In fact, in many ways, the Fail Whale and its related frustrations has come to define Twitter’s brand more than almost anything else. I’m no expert at these things, but there are a lot of reasons startups fail, and the reasons almost never include the fact that thousands of users clamoring for a service. Indeed, it seems to me that most companies (whether they’re...