There are countless examples of mobile technology hitting the market before the world was ready, before all of the parts were in place to make them a success and before the inventors really knew how to market them. The announcement of the BlackBerry PlayBook brought this subject up in my mind because of the integration with BlackBerry devices. This feature was the main force behind the Palm Foleo which was inexplicably pulled before anyone could buy it.
The Foleo was announced in May 2007, a time when the Netbook was unknown (they would start to appear later that year), and at a time when only laptops and desktops dominated the computer industry. The 10.2” display, 5 hour battery life and low 2.4 lbs weight are not far from what is considered an ideal form factor today. Sadly, as I said earlier Palm ditched the idea and the very first Netbook / mobile companion never saw the light of day.
Then there was the Palm LifeDrive. A high-resolution 3.9” screen, 4GB of internal memory, Wi-Fi and a 1660 mAh battery in a device dating back all the way to 2005. It was the iPod Touch of its time and was capable of music, video gaming and everything else, but in a time when internet connections were slow and there was no widely known method of adding media to it. It did everything we wanted, but the eco system surrounding it had not been invented yet. I look back at the LifeDrive now and realise that it was ahead of its time, sadly about 3 years too far.
Palm did it again with the Treo 650. Back in 2004 it was the smartphone to own or to be more precise, the only one worth owning. I remember a trip to Orlando where I witnessed Treo after Treo hanging off belts (awful way to carry a phone by the way) and was stunned at just how popular it was. The Treo 650 is not necessarily an example of a product that was so far ahead of its time that it wasn’t successful, but is an example of a product that missed the golden generation of the industry it was in. We all know that Palm should have done a lot more with the Treo range and we can look back now at the countless errors, so easy to do in hindsight, but there is little doubt that the 650 was another example of a product without an eco system surrounding it and crucially, a culture where smartphones were recognised by the masses.
Notice the trend here? Palm. To be fair others have suffered this fate- Psion is a classic example from the birth of mobile computing and you could look back on some of the early Windows CE devices and see the Netbook form in them.
The fact is that no-one can tell why some products take off and others don’t, but history tells us that releasing products that are better than others in an industry that is mature is the best bet. Creating an entire new industry is incredibly difficult for anyone. Apple did the with the first iPhone- there were tons of smartphones on the market, but Apple did something new and made the smartphone a household name. Apple threw in an eco system, eventually, that included apps, games, music, video rentals and anything else you want to put onto an iPhone. Apps and games were available long before the iPhone, but Apple did it better.
The iPad is not a new product at all, but it is better than the tablets we had been subjected to prior to its release. Apple has not created a new industry here, but again did things better. Palm innovated time and time again, but didn’t do things better because there was nothing to compare those products to, and there was nothing surrounding them that made them worth a second look for most people. It seems to me that innovation, in terms of a whole product, has historically come from companies who failed to deliver the ideas at the right time. The real money has come from companies that feed off these ideas when the time is right for the whole world to use them.
“The real money has come from companies that feed off these ideas when the time is right for the whole world to use them.”
- I think that sums up Apple completely. They weren’t the first to the market with a large capacity HD based MP3 player, but they were the first to put together a polished and usable product in the iPod. The same is true with the iPhone.
Jobs has said that often the most critical decisions are on the products that Apple does NOT bring to market.
The Lifedrive was not ahead of its time. I owned one – its design was not all that innovative (compared to the advanced CLIEs), and it was terribly slow. It was the only palm device I returned because it was unusable. ALL wifi-enabled mobile devices of this era were horribly compromised by the terrible web browsers.
Again, the reason RIM took off was not because the Treo did not have the right design, it was because Palm did not understand the value of push email.
I think the Foleo was cool, but I am pretty sure they were pricing it in the $600-$700 (US) range. That would have killed even a perfectly executed product.
Apple invented the entire webkit browser from a license they purchased in early 2000s (2003 or so, I believe). And then they made it open source. So now, thanks to Apple, RIM, Android/google, webOS, and even Nokia now have a decent mobile browser.
I think and value Palm ALOT. But to go from innovation to a viable product takes a LOT of effort. Engineering something simple is NOT easy. This is why I think Nokia is going to fail to keep its leader in the cell phone market.
With all these examples above, I think INNOVATION is not merely about creating new, creative and useful product, it must also incorporate the intelligence of packaging the product (from some one else innovation) and knowing the best time to reveal the product.