I'm not really sure what the lesson is here. He says "Customer Development, Business Model Design and Agile Development could have changed the outcome" but how? I mean, they could have shut down halfway through and saved a couple billion, but it doesn't seem like any amount of adaptability could have made a global satellite project cost-feasible in the face of cell phone ubiquity.
The only lesson I can think of here is don't finance a project that's going to cost a lot and take a decade to implement, because there's a good chance that technology will make it obsolete by the time you launch.
"The only lesson I can think of here is don't finance a project that's going to cost a lot and take a decade to implement, because there's a good chance that technology will make it obsolete by the time you launch."
I think the lesson is to be continually re-evaluating the project to see if your assumptions still make sense given the current state of the market. This would be especially true for multi-year projects. It's basically the fallacy of sunk costs.
And wouldn't that have been a huge improvement over the actual outcome? Shutting down early and saving 3 Billion dollars is 125X what they ended up selling for in bankruptcy.
I agree with you in principle. That would have been a better outcome. But as they say, hindsight is always 20:20. When you're in the thick of things, the last thing you want to do is quit. Sometimes you only want to quit when you have to, so that at the end of the day, you know you gave it your all.
It's an improvement, but not much of one. If the best you can figure out in hindsight is a way to only lose $2 or $3 billion dollars, you're not trying hard enough.
If you realize your market is niche, would you build different satellites than what they did? Change the economics of it somehow (cheaper phones, lower cost per minute, longer life on the sattelites etc) ? Make a satellite/ground station hybrid that can work through most walls? Shrink the phone size?
The big one would be: Only launch enough enough satellites to cover the area where your main customers are, rather than trying to cover the whole planet.
That's a little tricky - the earth being round and all.
You can't put a satelite in orbit around New York (in spite of it being the center of the universe - orbital mechanics doesn't work like that)
Your only real option is how close to the equator you orbit them - you can get away with about 3 sats if you only want to cover the region very near the equator, unfortunately only poor people live there.
As you improve coverage further north you have to add more satelites in higher inclination orbits. Iridium already limits this - the coverage in the far north is very poor, which is ironic since it's one of the few places where you really need sat phones!
One change they could have made is add data to the satellites. Data was greatly desired by the users, but the system was not designed for it. The best they could do was a slow analog modem.
"The only lesson I can think of here is don't finance a project that's going to cost a lot and take a decade to implement, because there's a good chance that technology will make it obsolete by the time you launch."
The only lesson I can think of here is don't finance a project that's going to cost a lot and take a decade to implement, because there's a good chance that technology will make it obsolete by the time you launch.