John McKown wrote: > Second, something about your note makes me think maybe you have not done > a lot of searching to find out who had these ideas before you [2] and > why nothing much became of them. It can be a sobering but useful > learning experience :-) It is indeed a learning experience to study history, and here are three concrete examples that are perhaps more encouraging than I think you intended: 1) Apple Newton. Ahead of it's time, predated the PDA explosion but a commercial failure due to size, cost, and hand writing recognition that didn't agree with most people (I got along with it just fine). Did this stop Palm? No. Palm made it smaller, cheaper and did something that still impresses me to this day; they made people adapt to the machine by learning Graffiti instead of fixing the hand writing recognition (dodging the hard problem). 2) MP3 players. If you have a normal memory you'll remember that before the Apple iPod there were *many* MP3 players on the market. The Rio I believe was the first major commercial one. They got bought by S3 (later Sonic Blue). S3 did nothing to help the Rio succeed, and it sort of stagnated. About the time they changed their name to Sonic Blue they bought this company/product called the EMPEG, the first MP3 car stereo. Managed to kill that product too, which was annoying since I have one and it would be *years* until another MP3 car stereo came to market. Fast forward a few more years, the rest of the world realizes MP3 is cool, Napster comes along and makes national news. So Apple makes a consumer friendly MP3 player and immediately takes over a market that was littered with the corpses of other attempts. 3) The search engine market was considered dead by most of the industry before Google got on everyone's radar. Two morals from these stories: 1) Figure out why the other attempts have failed and go for it. 2) Timing is everything. _______________________________________________ Wear-Hard mailing listhttp://www.haven.org/mailman/listinfo/wear-hard
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