4 ms·

I love the stories of General Magic and NeXT. Even though the businesses basically failed, the technology and experience from them would go on to completely cha

I love the stories of General Magic and NeXT. Even though the businesses basically failed, the technology and experience from them would go on to completely change the world :) For a look at another company in this space around that time, Jerry Kaplan wrote a memoir about his experiences at GO: https://www.amazon.ca/Startup-Silicon-Adventure-Jerry-Kaplan/dp/0140257314 https://www.amazon.ca/Startup-Silicon-Adventure-Jerry-Kaplan...

api 8y ago
Is there a case where ground breaking innovation resulted in a successful business? Usually innovation is too costly and the first incarnations lack mass appeal.
- xenadu02 8y ago
  Most ideas are neither new nor novel. Even if you're the first the odds are high that you are far too early and the technology won't be ready for a decade or more. Even the first toilets were far from successful. Indoor plumbing required a whole industry and multiple compounding innovations to become successful. Many people were working on flying machines. The Wright brothers simply got lucky in timing: internal combustion engines finally got reliable and useful enough for the idea to work. If they hadn't done it someone else would have within the following 5-10 years (and many others were in fact trying at the time). Many people had MP3 players but none of them managed to design a product ordinary people would want to use, nor the muscle to make the record industry play ball with an online store. You can scream until you're blue in the face that Apple didn't invent MP3 players but that just makes you irrelevant and a bad potential founder/employee. I would argue that most truly ground-breaking innovations do not result in a wildly successful business. Finding a way to pair ideas with execution and product-market fit are more important.
  - pjmlp 8y ago
    The bicycle is yet another example.

api 8y ago

Is there a case where ground breaking innovation resulted in a successful business? Usually innovation is too costly and the first incarnations lack mass appeal.

xenadu02 8y ago
Most ideas are neither new nor novel. Even if you're the first the odds are high that you are far too early and the technology won't be ready for a decade or more. Even the first toilets were far from successful. Indoor plumbing required a whole industry and multiple compounding innovations to become successful. Many people were working on flying machines. The Wright brothers simply got lucky in timing: internal combustion engines finally got reliable and useful enough for the idea to work. If they hadn't done it someone else would have within the following 5-10 years (and many others were in fact trying at the time). Many people had MP3 players but none of them managed to design a product ordinary people would want to use, nor the muscle to make the record industry play ball with an online store. You can scream until you're blue in the face that Apple didn't invent MP3 players but that just makes you irrelevant and a bad potential founder/employee. I would argue that most truly ground-breaking innovations do not result in a wildly successful business. Finding a way to pair ideas with execution and product-market fit are more important.
- pjmlp 8y ago
  The bicycle is yet another example.