Too Much, Too Early...

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OK, following from last night's teaser, I said I'd riff on the success or failure of good ideas, and that one of the great ideas that didn't make the grade was the Apple Newton: the MessagePad, from the early-mid 1990s. I have to say I loved the device, despite its obvious shortcomings, and even foresaw using it as an integrated part of a suite of show-control programming gear for theatre presentations, turnkey visitor installations, museum displays, and so on. Unfortunately the device's tenure on this earth was short-lived and for one good reason: handwriting recognition, or rather its piss-poor performance in that department. It was a great idea pulled up short by the immature hardware available. Apple tried to run with this one before it could walk.

Three years later, we were producing a piece of software that sought the opposite goal: to straighten out the shortcomings of contemporary hardware and make it do what no-one else had thought to do properly. We took a simple idea - photographic contact sheets for the nascent digital era - which as I've written here before, simply didn't function properly to any significantly usable degree and certainly not at the professional photographic level. We were simply subverting existing technology by "reading the f***ing manual" and studying the SDKs and APIs of both Adobe's host software [guess which] and Apple's Quicktime, throwing in for good measure some program libraries from the Linux sphere for good measure.

Result? a piece of software that simply trounced anything available on the planet, by any benchmark. We succeeded technically where giants had failed because we understood the needs of our target consumers intimately, and had measured the available tech - the shortcomings of the hardware available and the mostly unused potential of the software out there - and used it appropriately, rather than dreaming up the impossible. Where Apple failed because they dreamed the then impossible and the market duly crushed a flawed product, we failed because we were too soon to the market and couldn't achieve the market penetration we needed to achieve the tipping point between success and bankruptcy. In another life it might have been a different outcome for both ideas.

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