I've got news for you, you aren't building a printing press no matter how much you think that you are.

That's why nobody heeds the diagram; everyone is so sure they have the world's first printing press.

Most categorical statements are only useful as heuristics, not as hard and fast rules.

EDIT: I agree with your statement as a heuristic, but not as a rule. Printing presses do, in fact, exist. Someone had to invent the technology.

This one is about as hard and fast as you can get though. That's my point. The moment you leave room for printing presses, you leave room for everyone to just assume they are building one.

I agree that occasionally, a revolution comes along. However they are called revolutions for a reason, and the odds are highly stacked that while you may indeed be building a successful product, it is not going to be revolutionary.

The key to all that is that even if it is, and you follow the diagram, it will cause you little to no pain. Too many people think that their particular project somehow escapes this simple truth. That's the problem.

This is a problem of perspective. Printing presses are better and faster than a pen, but they are not cheaper in any way that isn't essentially a rephrasing of the other two qualities. It just so happens that they are sufficiently good and fast that it makes up for their relative costliness.

Also, this is really referring to the behavior of a project, not a product. A project might be able to create something that is indeed better, faster and cheaper than the competition — but it will not be able to do so faster and more cheaply than it could have made a product without all those qualities.