I had a very frustrating conversation with someone a few weeks ago. He asked me how Posterous could compete in the blogging space given Google's Blogger has more users, money, and people.

I responded: we have the best team of engineers and designers imaginable. We will win because we are small and awesome. Microsoft throws 10x as many people at music players, phones, and computers. And they aren't winning there. If team size always won, there wouldn't be startups.

He then asked me about features. Other platforms have our features. Were we the first to do video posting by email?

No, we weren't the first with our feature set, but we think we did it best. Look at the iPhone: little of what the iPhone does is actually new. But Apple did it right, so it actually works well. If you compared the first iPhone to a Blackberry for features, the iPhone lost.

I asked this person directly: do you have an iPhone? Nope. Do you use a Mac or a PC? PC. There you go. You don't get it. Until you use an iPhone, a Mac, drive a BMW or Audi, you don't even realize how great the experience can be or how much it can drive the success of a product.

When I was at Apple, I learned that they don't throw more people at hard problems. They hire the best.

And they don't measure products by what they do, but by how well they do them. You won't find a matrix where Apple compares their product to a competitor by feature. They measure products by the experience.