I encourage skeptics to read this study: Pioneer advantage: Marketing logic or marketing legend?
http://faculty.fuqua.duke.edu/~moorman/Marketing-Strategy-Seminar-2011/Session%209/Golder%20and%20Tellis%20JMR%201993.pdf

“Twitter is often trotted out as a classic example of “get it out fast,” but it’s a bad one.” – Yeah, I would hate to be as unsuccessful as Twitter.

“Customers don’t actually know what they want.” – well I kind of agree with this one, but this doesn’t really have anything to do with releasing fast and iterating.

Obviously you have to find the right balance, but I think the big advantage of releasing fast is you avoid wasting time building tons of features that nobody uses. And you get useful feedback while you’re building out the product, even if you don’t take what customers say they want word-for-word all the time.

There is no one true answer here, you simply have to be smart about it. I actually agree with Cohen’s point: customers don’t know what they want (I think focus groups are useless if you just ask them what they want and not watch them use your product). This doesn’t mean you don’t iterate based on your customer’s “feedback”. Feedback doesn’t have to be explicit. Especially on the internet, it’s very easy to receive implicit feedback. You look at the bounce rate on specific pages, you monitor your customer service requests, what features you customers use more often than others etc. etc. There are also tools like “visitorspy” that let you actually watch a video of how your users interact with your site.

There is also a matter of core functionality – of course you can’t release a job site without being able to post jobs, search for jobs and post resumes. But a release doesn’t have to be a public one. You can plan your product to death but when you see the HTML – many things you didn’t plan on will start popping out. For me, I’d like to see some code out and let people interact with it, watching over their shoulder – friends, family, peers…
Also, the first users of your software, your “early adopters” are usually the tech savvy users that expect bugs. They like to provide feedback and if the core functionality is there and they like what you do – they will come back.

BTW – Apple DOES release fast and iterates. They are great at being focused on the most important features that will stun you. Look at the iphone – they have released 1st gen without 3g when the technology existed and used by most households in many countries. It was revolutionary enough in order to bring to market ASAP. Finding a solution to add 3g in a cost efficient way – do it next time. On the software side – they update firmware constantly. The focus on the core functionality, release the product and add “copy/paste” or MMS via firmware updates.

One more thing worth mentioning – Naughty Dog, a video game publisher, have released Uncharted 2 for the PS3. This game is the “iphone” of video games. Set the bar so high you can’t even see it . In a recent interview to G4, Evan Wells (co-president) said that their secret was to not write a full/polished script and go from there, like most video game devs do. They had a general narrative, they wrote a scene, coded, watched users play it, received feedback (implicit), changed stuff around and went from there to the next one.