Limitations as means to succeed?

Getting your competition to -spin- trying to fix your "limitations" while you move on to the next great interesting thing, is probably the smartest thing ever! For twitter, while everyone was trying to make sure that you get more than 140 characters Twitter was busy adding capacity to cover the millions joining rapidly, provide extensive API support to help developer build on the success of the exciting platform and looking into ways to utilize Twitter as more than just another-social-network, but rather a communication platform and an incubator of new-simple-but-cool ideas. Having celebrities on it couldn't hurt either.

Looking back at the history of some of the places, I can easily recall the success of places like in-and-out in California or Al Quds Falafel in Jordan, or even Reem Shawarma in Jabal Amman. They did one thing, and did it really well. Everyone was trying to compete by providing more stuff, and perhaps in all frankness everyone has done way better additional things. But most have failed to "get it", or even share part of the success of these folks.

It only takes one simple idea, let's admit, it doesn't get simpler than Twitter! But it's that simplicity and availability to the world that gave it what it needs. A quick push forward in the right direction, wide, no HUGE adoption by every one which perpetually propelled these great simplistic, yet limited, ideas to levels of success that are completely beyond comprehension!

Maybe the whole Twitter code isn't as large is say, a printer driver that you have on your PC. But it doesn't matter, because comparing line per line would put the worth of every letter of code in twitter at a staggering price.

I guess what I'm trying to say is, pouring effort, and sophistication into something doesn't always mean it will succeed, and the opposite is also true. However, in these two examples, it was the limitations that actually helped hurl couple of very simple ideas, into the stardom of success. The limitations gave a decoy for competition to work in a direction completely orthogonal to the successful trajectory and that made all the difference.