

Tech Products Ahead of Their Time - gpl1
http://mashable.com/2011/06/19/tech-products-ahead-of-time/

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potatolicious
I wouldn't call it "ahead of their time". Being ahead of its time means that
some critically necessary pieces that the product really needed didn't exist
yet, but companies stubbornly went ahead and tried anyways (e.g., streaming
video during dialup days).

A lot of these failures weren't hinged on the lack of some technology, it's
just plain _bad execution_.

See: N-Gage. There was nothing preventing them from building a perfectly
viable handheld game console that was also a phone. It was just _horrifically
engineered_. Same story goes for the ROKR - it was not all technologically
infeasible to create a phone tightly integrated with iTunes and music
playing... but they just sucked at it.

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solipsist
Missing from the list: Google Wave. While people gave it an especially hard
time, there were some fascinating ideas and technologies in it that could have
taken off if only Google had waited 5 or so years to release it. Google Wave's
biggest problem was its target audience. It required its users to have a
significant level of technology literacy. At the time that was a minority.
However, based on the current trend, it would be a perfect fit in the coming
years.

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Kique
I feel Wave's problem wasn't the advanced tech, even my mom figured out how to
use it pretty easily. The problem I had was that they made it invite only -
for a service that needs other people using it for it to work effectively.
There were months after I was invited that I still had no one to use it with.
Then last summer at my internship we seriously used it all the time to
communicate and share between everyone in the office... and then we found out
it was being shut down.

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solipsist
But didn't Gmail start out as invite only? Look at how it turned out.

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bvrlt
But GMail doesn't require other people using GMail to be useful.

