[hibikir]

I like the fact that it's the wrong years for the idea to succeed: Kind of like with the Newton, they are going into visionary ideas when the tech or the market isn't there. There's a lot of companies out there that fail because they go in too early to have good execution.

[npunt]

1000%. One of the big reasons I love Halt & Catch Fire is because their reach exceeds their grasp and they were too early for the ideas they dreamed of. I wrote a piece, partly inspired by the show, on category-defining products and how many factors have to line up for a product to become category-defining:

https://nickpunt.com/blog/category-defining-products/

[Nevermark]

So many people have been there. Working to put something together, but with gaps that are hard to close. I have been there.

Even billionaires like Zuck bite off more than they can chew and flail around.

For that matter, Jobs at NeXT succeeded in an unlikely way in the end. But for much of NeXT's existence it chronically couldn't get enough traction. They ended up droping the hardware. Then down purposed their OS into a developer platform to run on other OS's. So disappointing. But they did such good work, when Apple had a need, they were ready.

[leoc]

And NeXT was the spiritual successor to Apple's internal "Big Mac" project which never even made it to market before it was killed. (The project leader Rich Page and others started phoning the already-fired Jobs, begghing him to step in, when Big Mac was deep-sixed.) The Mac had come after the Xerox Star, which failed commercially, and the Apple Lisa, which failed commerically: then it too nearly failed commercially, until the desktop-publishing market finally came together around it. And even then industry wiseacres like John C. Dvorak had years more fun mocking it (not completely without justification) as an extravagant toy and a market also-ran.