Just the Idea Ain’t Enough


Take these examples of companies that dreamed up ideas, technologies and even prototypes but then didn’t make products of them:
-         Did you know that Nokia came up with a phone with a color touchscreen set above a single button? 7 years before the iPhone? But they never started making those phones. And now the same Nokia is being driven closer and closer to bankruptcy by the very same smartphone that they didn’t productize. Is that ironical or what?
-         Nokia also came up with a tablet computer with a touchscreen in the late 90’s. Again, they didn’t make the product finally. Apple came up with the same class of products (iPad’s) years later and still dominates that market.
-         Microsoft had a prototype e-reader ready way back in 1998. Bill Gates shot it down. A decade later, Amazon made the Kindle.
-         One of the engineers on the MSN Messenger team at Microsoft pointed out that the concept of posting statuses (as opposed to just chatting) was very popular with college kids. Microsoft decided to ignore that suggestion. The rest is history: Facebook got built on the exact same idea to become a $100 billion company!

The exact reasons why the company chose not to make the product is not important: maybe it was company politics, maybe it was just a bad decision. Rather, what these examples show is that just having a great idea is not enough. The path from conceiving an idea to making an actual product out of it is just as important. As Steve Jobs put it:
“…it's the disease of thinking that a having a great idea is really 90 percent of the work. And if you just tell people, 'here's this great idea,' then of course they can go off and make it happen. The problem with that is that there's a tremendous amount of craftsmanship between a having a great idea and having a great product.”
I liked the choice of words: most companies call the path from idea to product as “execution”, but Jobs calls its “craftsmanship”! I guess that’s why Apple’s products are so loved: they are works of art indeed. But I digress from the topic of this blog…

Thomas Edison felt the ratio was even more skewed towards effort compared to ideating. After all, didn’t he say, “Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration”?

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