Missing the Next Big Thing
There are plenty of examples of companies seeing the Next Big Thing right in front of them and yet passing on them. Like Xerox PARC when it developed both the mouse and the graphical user interface (GUI) and yet sold them to Apple for peanuts! How could Xerox have been so dumb, we wonder? Malcolm Gladwell wrote a very interesting article on the creativity myth where he told the “true” story of the mouse (the mouse wasn’t Xerox’s idea; rather, it was devised by a computer scientist, Douglas Engelbart, at Stanford Research Institute). Here’s the interesting part that doesn’t get told often: “If you lined up Engelbart’s mouse, Xerox’s mouse, and Apple’s mouse, you would not see the serial reproduction of an object. You would see the evolution of a concept.” The GUI too evolved from what was at Xerox to what Apple finally sold to users. The key word here? Evolution. Xerox didn’t have the next big thing ready…they had a concept. Apple took the next step in both cases and product...