Problem Management — failure
Unacceptable Solutions

Woolsey's Law: People would rather live with a problem they cannot solve than accept a solution they cannot understand.
— Robert E. D. Woolsey

No matter how good your idea or solution is, if you can't sell it, it will die. Woolsey's Law describes one such way, but there are others.


BetaMax VCRs provided far better quality than VHS did, but Sony didn't market or license it nearly as well as JVC marketed VHS. Except for high-end video and television studio use, BetaMax effectively disappeared from the market after only a few years.

The Atari Linx (with a back-lit colour screen, ambidextrous controls, and local networking) was a far superior product to Nintendo's Game Boy (with an unlit monochrome screen, awkward controls, and no networking), but a huge disparity in advertising budgets meant its rapid failure.

And Atari's ST personal computer had far better physical architecture and far more reliable and better designed software than the competing IBM/Microsoft product, but once again, Atari barely advertised it, while marketing had long been IBM's strongest point.


If your solution is better than any others, you must make sure everyone knows about it, and knows how and why it is better. And to do that, you have to understand the how and why yourself, and have the confidence required to sell it convincingly.

But even if your solution is the only one available, don't take it for granted that it will be accepted. You still need to understand it, have confidence in it, and be able to convince others that it is a good solution. If they can't understand how it will solve their problems, they won't accept it.