4 ms·

The way I look at it is that tech frequently has people inventing the same approach over and over. So this actually happens, just it’s not always the version th

The way I look at it is that tech frequently has people inventing the same approach over and over. So this actually happens, just it’s not always the version that takes off. Sometimes I shrug when someone says “I invented Facebook in 1990.” But sometimes that happens, although people don’t normally talk about it in public. I’ve worked with co-workers who “invented” aspect oriented programming, Jenkins, ajax, nosql sui generis. A few years later in each case I remember thinking “oh yeah this is what John Doe” was building. So I just chalked this up to people in this company “inventing” mobile computers, dial-up communities, and portals at the same time as compaq, prodigy, and yahoo.

vidarh 6y ago
I think that makes sense. This is a story about people who are reasonably successful but they keep never making it truly big. If anything, having a big breakout success is so rare that "almost succeeding" many times is a lot more common. It sucks - e.g. I was part of building a tablet years before the iPad (we were not first, either, and not the last pre-Apple attempt) - but after a couple like that you get used to it and learn from what the successful attempt did different instead of being annoyed at it. And then you try again with something else.
- sgerenser 6y ago
  Arguably, Apple also built a tablet years before the iPad: the Newton MessagePad in 1993.
  - vidarh 6y ago
    There were a lot of similar pen-based PDAs and tablet PCs released around the same time as the Newton. Though I think all of them were as commercially unsuccessful as the Newton. E.g. the Amstrad PenPad. The Newton was not really something people compared to, though - it got compared more to PalmPilot and similar PDAs. It makes sense to put it in the mix of precursors, by all means, but at the time people didn't really draw that parallel. The "second generation" tablets were very much treated as a separate category from Newton, PalmPilot, PenPad etc. on one hand, and Tablet PCs on the other hand, in that they tended to be built around internet connectivity and browsers as more important even that portability (you were expected to use them around home or the office), and with media consumption as an essential element. The marketing assumption was that people would have a PDA for work, and tablets would be media devices that were largely separate things. The second generation devices, including ours, and Ericssons, and a number of others, flawed in that they were still too low res (though much better than the "first generation" like the PenPad or Newton), too expensive, and too slow to be attractive for anything but techie early adopters, and with abysmal battery lifetime which meant they couldn't compete with the PDAs, and you were basically chained to home. This was also before wifi was widespread, and various alternatives were still competing for the wireless space - e.g. ours had a data extension to DECT. Apple's greatest stroke of genius with respect to the iPhone and iPad wasn't primarily technical, but to recognise that it was too early and the hardware wasn't up to it, and wait instead of releasing a sub-par product. "Everyone else" launched tablets as the next step after PDAs around '99-'05 or so, didn't get any traction, and gave up or failed and then a lot of us subsequently laughed at Apple, because "everyone knew" something like the iPhone even wouldn't work. That's not to say I assume we'd have competed if we'd waited, but we'd at least had a much better shot. There was a very distinct failure to understand the gap between the quality that was exciting to a tech audience vs. what would be exciting to a wider market... That was a very useful lesson.
  - jecel 6y ago
    Note that the 1987-1990 Newton was a lot closer to the iPad before it was completely redesigned: http://www.byrdsight.com/apple-newton/ http://www.byrdsight.com/apple-newton/

vidarh 6y ago

I think that makes sense. This is a story about people who are reasonably successful but they keep never making it truly big. If anything, having a big breakout success is so rare that "almost succeeding" many times is a lot more common. It sucks - e.g. I was part of building a tablet years before the iPad (we were not first, either, and not the last pre-Apple attempt) - but after a couple like that you get used to it and learn from what the successful attempt did different instead of being annoyed at it. And then you try again with something else.

sgerenser 6y ago
Arguably, Apple also built a tablet years before the iPad: the Newton MessagePad in 1993.
- vidarh 6y ago
  There were a lot of similar pen-based PDAs and tablet PCs released around the same time as the Newton. Though I think all of them were as commercially unsuccessful as the Newton. E.g. the Amstrad PenPad. The Newton was not really something people compared to, though - it got compared more to PalmPilot and similar PDAs. It makes sense to put it in the mix of precursors, by all means, but at the time people didn't really draw that parallel. The "second generation" tablets were very much treated as a separate category from Newton, PalmPilot, PenPad etc. on one hand, and Tablet PCs on the other hand, in that they tended to be built around internet connectivity and browsers as more important even that portability (you were expected to use them around home or the office), and with media consumption as an essential element. The marketing assumption was that people would have a PDA for work, and tablets would be media devices that were largely separate things. The second generation devices, including ours, and Ericssons, and a number of others, flawed in that they were still too low res (though much better than the "first generation" like the PenPad or Newton), too expensive, and too slow to be attractive for anything but techie early adopters, and with abysmal battery lifetime which meant they couldn't compete with the PDAs, and you were basically chained to home. This was also before wifi was widespread, and various alternatives were still competing for the wireless space - e.g. ours had a data extension to DECT. Apple's greatest stroke of genius with respect to the iPhone and iPad wasn't primarily technical, but to recognise that it was too early and the hardware wasn't up to it, and wait instead of releasing a sub-par product. "Everyone else" launched tablets as the next step after PDAs around '99-'05 or so, didn't get any traction, and gave up or failed and then a lot of us subsequently laughed at Apple, because "everyone knew" something like the iPhone even wouldn't work. That's not to say I assume we'd have competed if we'd waited, but we'd at least had a much better shot. There was a very distinct failure to understand the gap between the quality that was exciting to a tech audience vs. what would be exciting to a wider market... That was a very useful lesson.
- jecel 6y ago
  Note that the 1987-1990 Newton was a lot closer to the iPad before it was completely redesigned: http://www.byrdsight.com/apple-newton/ http://www.byrdsight.com/apple-newton/