As software developers and technologists, we often get wrapped up in the day-to-day heads down "feature" development of our products.  Sometimes, this is great as the features we add are often the result of customer feedback and truly improve our offerings.  But sometimes, staying focused and heads down on feature development causes us to miss the bigger picture of the problems we are trying to solve.  It's essential to take a "heads up" break from time to time.

I thought it would be great to look at a few examples of companies who focused on features vs. those who came late to the market and focused on solving root problems and then took a leadership position as a result.  My examples include the Nintendo Wii, Google Search, Apple's iPod and iPhone.

Here's the presentation as it was given in an AZ Groups .NET meeting on June 27th, 2007.  The Google Video is just under 10 minutes long:

 In the presentation, I refer to a previous presentation on "Shipping Software OnTime".  Here is the Google Video of that presentation: