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Comment by igodard | Hacker News Reader

Evolutionary development you can start at once, because you are building on what you had before; think an x86 generation. Evolution works if you already dominate a market and only need to run a little faster than your competitor. Evolution can be scheduled; tick-tock.

A newcomer can't sell yet another me-too, even with evolutionary improvement. Instead the newcomer has to rethink and create from first principles if it is to have any chance in the market. Rethinks can't be scheduled; they take as long as they take. Ours has taken longer than I'd hoped, but adding resources like more people to the project would have just slowed us down, or forced us to market with a broken product.

The Mill rethink stage is over, and we now can have reasonable schedules and put in more resources; that's why we are going out for a significant funding round this year, our first over $10M.

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That doesn't sound right even though I support your niche strategy. Many of the successful companies had me too priducts with incremental, ecosystem, or marketing improvements. Intel did with x86 starting as an incremental improvement. AMD turned into huge company doing it to x86. Transmeta and Centaur did well adding power efficiency among other things. Quite a few vendors implemented POWER variants with many acquired or still doing good business.

There's plenty of it on software side, too, with the proprietary DOS's and UNIX's. Foreign cloners stayed doing it with mainframes and embedded CPU's. So, incremental stuff (esp patented) can certainly grab market share and generate revenue. It's been going on for some time even in CPU market even with dominant players.

Yes - by those with established businesses. I can't think of a startup that succeeded with an initial incremental, at lease since Amdahl. It's also hard to do an increment: the Intel teams are not dumb, and many could and have built far better processors than Intel has - but not while keeping compatibility and Intel's ROI and marketing and pricing structure. TransMeta tried - RIP.

There's also personal strategy involved. If we had done a better X86 we would have needed huge dollops of money to crack the front door of the market - c.f. TransMeta - and lost ownership of the company. By going for the disruptive approach we still own all of it - and funding rounds now are at a valuation that will keep us making our own mistakes, not someone else's. That matters to me, enough to go without paycheck for a decade. YMMV.

Starting out in x86, AMD had a license from Intel.

That justifies my use of it even more. Even with the license requirement, they still succeeded quite a bit. Even led on the 64-bit part since Intel screwed that up.

Aren't almost all the businesses mentioned here extinct, or at least have tiny chunks of the market?

More disruptive startups are. These were either running profitably or absolutely huge at one point. Blame AMD's and VIA's management for the rest on their end. ;)

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