Since its launch on 11 September 1963, the Porsche 911 has changed a great deal, with features such as anti-lock brakes, water cooling, galvanising and multilink suspension (which helped to reduce the earlier car's disconcerting tendency to put 'City boys' in ditches if they bottled out in a corner) having marked its progress from hairy racer to that most unusual of creatures, the dependable sports car.
Italian or British competitors might be more attractive, but these looks often come with a compromise on reliability, the 911's reputation for rock-solid engineering making it the only car in its category that really can be used every day.
You can probably tell this is a pet topic, but here's my point. While the car has changed almost completely since its inception, it is still recognisably the same. It has evolved over time so that, from year to year, those changes rarely represent a substantial percentage of the engineering make-up of the product. It is this approach that has created the enviable reputation for reliability that competitors struggle to match, with their strategy of reinventing the wheel with every new model.
Website-owners could learn a lot from Porsche.
One consumer-facing UK company recently relaunched its website, which represented about a fifth of its multi-billion-pound sales. The site's numbers were not living up to the company's growth expectations, and after a period of political wrangling the business decided that nothing short of a complete rewrite was needed to bring them up to scratch.
Expensive agencies and even more expensive consultants were tasked with a root-and-branch reinvention of the site that, in one fell swoop, would address the myriad issues that had plagued it for years.
The company was right in one sense; its website was wholly inadequate. Yet, in trying to address everything at once, it bit off more than it could chew. The day the new site launched, online sales fell 25%, and the priority of the team behind it immediately switched from development to finding other benchmarks against which performance could be judged more favourably.
Watching from the outside, it all had a terrible inevitability about it.
It's hard to imagine this company redesigning its high-street retail network without first trialling the concept in a few stores. It's hard also to imagine it managing its stores without someone at, or reporting to, board level who had hands-on, senior experience of retail management. Yet both these mistakes were made with the site.
Perhaps the biggest error, however, was the fundamental assumption upon which the project was based. It is sometimes said that there are two characteristics common to all sites: that they are never optimal, and never finished. The idea that the answer lay in a complete relaunch ignored these precepts.
Contrast this with the approach of a successful ecommerce specialist. The Amazon site, like the 911, is recognisably the same as it was in 1998, but has undergone comprehensive change in thousands of small steps.
Each has been tested and refined in front of a small sample of consumers before being fully rolled out, and the site has dozens of variations of its home page in test at any time. Like Google and many other pureplay digital companies, it obsesses about the data generated by its consumers and regards this as one of its most valuable assets.
Not for these companies the prestige project, the 'with one leap he was free' style of development; rather, the celebration throughout the organisation of thousands of tiny victories that, over time, craft something that just works.
- Andrew Walmsley is a digital pluralist
30 SECONDS ON ... THE PORSCHE 911
- The 911 was introduced on 11 September 1963 by Stuttgart-based vehicle manufacturer Porsche AG, founded in 1931 by automotive pioneer Ferdinand Porsche.
- The distinctive two-door coupe was a rear-engined car with independent rear suspension. All models had an air-cooled engine until 1998, when the latest iteration introduced a water-cooled engine.
- In its 48 years in production, the 911 has undergone continuous development, with dozens of iterations reaching showrooms.
The cars have also been extensively modified for use in motor racing. Variants of the 911 include the Carrera, GT3 and Turbo.
- The 911 came fifth in the 1999 Car of the Century poll to find the most influential car of the 20th century. The vote was won by the Ford Model T.
- The latest 911 Turbo has a top speed of 194mph, produces 500 horsepower, can go from 0-62mph in 3.7 seconds and has CO2 emissions of 272g/km. The model costs £110,232 (including VAT).