(The other comment is my main response, but there’s a possibly-tangential issue here.)
In a long-tail world, if we manage to eliminate 95% of problems, then we generate maybe 10% of the value. So now we use our 10%-of-value product to refine our solution. But it seems rather optimistic to hope that a product which achieves only 10% of the value gets us all the way to a 99% solution. It seems far more likely that it gets to, say, a 96% solution. That, in turn, generates maybe 15% of the value, which in turn gets us to a 96.5% solution, and...
Point being: in the long-tail world, it’s at least plausible (and I would say more likely than not) that this iterative strategy doesn’t ever converge to a high-value solution. We get fancier and fancier refinements with decreasing marginal returns, which never come close to handling the long tail.
Now, under this argument, it’s still a fine idea to try the iterative strategy. But you wouldn’t want to bet too heavily on its success, especially without a reliable way to check whether it’s working.
(The other comment is my main response, but there’s a possibly-tangential issue here.)
In a long-tail world, if we manage to eliminate 95% of problems, then we generate maybe 10% of the value. So now we use our 10%-of-value product to refine our solution. But it seems rather optimistic to hope that a product which achieves only 10% of the value gets us all the way to a 99% solution. It seems far more likely that it gets to, say, a 96% solution. That, in turn, generates maybe 15% of the value, which in turn gets us to a 96.5% solution, and...
Point being: in the long-tail world, it’s at least plausible (and I would say more likely than not) that this iterative strategy doesn’t ever converge to a high-value solution. We get fancier and fancier refinements with decreasing marginal returns, which never come close to handling the long tail.
Now, under this argument, it’s still a fine idea to try the iterative strategy. But you wouldn’t want to bet too heavily on its success, especially without a reliable way to check whether it’s working.
Yeah, this could be a way that things are. My intuition is that it wouldn’t be this way, but I don’t have any good arguments for it.