Someone once said "the slow and steady pace wins the race", and I think that's excellent advice.  I'm sure you've heard that before so I won't waste time explaining what it means.  But I'm a big fan of that meaning because I think it usually proves to be true.  In fact, I've been saying that here since day one:  small improvements and small changes can make big things happen.

One of the biggest, most well-known companies in the world has based their entire operation on this philosophy.  They've launched entirely new products on numerous occasions and made big announcements.  But in almost every case, the product has been slowly and steadily upgraded over time to create a superb offering that's hard to beat.  Maybe the initial feature set isn't anything impressive or out of the ordinary, but as the product continues to grow, it slowly becomes more of a trend-setting example and less of "just another" product.

The company I'm talking about is, of course, Google.

Red Herring wrote a piece about a new feature Google has been slowly rolling out for its Gmail service that allows users to collect email from multiple addresses and store them in one, unified inbox.  That feature, in and of itself, is no big deal.  Yahoo has been offering a similar feature for years.  But when you combine the new feature to the already existing and ever-growing collection of features present in Gmail, it makes for a stellar application.  According to the Red Herring article, one commenter said Gmail "became perfect" with the introduction of the mail fetching feature.

If you watch the huge assortment of Google blogs (which we do for you, by the way) you'll see almost daily announcements from some product team in the Googlesphere.  There have been some pretty big announcements made, but for the most part these product updates are about small things:  the ability to rate Google Base entries, KML in Google Maps, hosted business pages, or a few new buttons in the Google Book search results page.  Those announcements might have been the best news in the world to a select group of people, but in the grand scheme of things… not so big.

The philosophy that has kept Google going, innovating, and leading in many facets of the online world is its "slow and steady pace wins the race" mentality.  Using Gmail as another example, you can watch that philosophy in action on the Gmail sign-in page.  For months, the storage available to Gmail users has been slowly and steadily increasing in real-time on the sign-in page.  When the incremental increases started, Gmail was sitting at 2 GB of storage.  Now it's pushing 2.8 GB.  If they wanted to, Google could probably just say "hey… everyone gets 5 GB".  But that could cause problems and, consequently, disrupt or hamper the Gmail service.  So instead of speeding to the finish line and dealing with the consequences afterward, Google is steadily trotting toward the end and having no problems so far.

So when I talk about making changes, running tests, or some other change to your website or company, this is the type of change I'm talking about.  I don't think it'd be a good idea to completely overhaul your operation in one swoop.  Not only could it confuse customers, but it is almost certain to open up flaws and errors that weren't spotted before launch.  Slow and steady helps you respond quickly to small errors as they occur.

Contrary to popular belief, the most nimble runner is the slow and steady one… not the bullet racer aimed at the finish line.