Agreed. It's just like an uninformed manager who reads about technology trends in a business magazine and wants it, without having any of the other components in place to make it successful within his organization.

Right. You might be considering this to be picking nits with our idioms (I did when I first read it), but he's basically saying that ideas that are missing even just one proper element are really not well fleshed out. Relatedly, we've all talked to people who are confident that they had the idea for something that is now popular while insisting they would be rich had they materialized it. To me, this is the same out that "ahead of its time" gives to folks.

You should be able to read the relevant section of the book on Google Book Search, though I don't know how much since it has the DRM included. I really can't do it justice in a few comments, but it's worth the read.

The bit about the netbook was from me, not the book, FWIW.

The viability of the netbook in the mid-90s is academic, and it's hard to make a comparison to the sub-notebooks, because they are such different things: their target audience is wholly different as well as the product. The /. article summary asserts the netbook craze started in 1996, which would seem to be just false. While the subnotebook was "received" perhaps in the same sense that the New Coke formula was, more traditional options seemed to reign for the next decade without so much as a second thought from consumers.

Forgetting the price, which we all know is impossible to make work adequately outside of building the netbook in the very near past, the product of a current-gen netbook would be hardly successful in the mid-90s. The specs might be technically superior, but what consumer programs would come close to taxing it? (IIRC we were just crossing into P100 procs at that time, and 32 MB of RAM was a lot) It may have wi-fi, but nobody else does. How many even had USB 1.1 back then? Where are the serial and parallel ports and modem?

Even if you could surf the internet, there isn't much to do after maybe viewing some spartan web pages. It's a far cry from the rich multimedia experience that we've come to expect, with Javascript web apps and Flash videos, we can move our computing selves into the internet and use the lightweight netbook to access all of it. And when I say "we," I mean the general consumers that are increasingly buying netbooks recently.

And that's all from a relatively recent time period. Take it back further and it gets more ridiculous.

All of these issues could be solved, but with much more work on the developing company's part than current netbook makers have to do. The culture is vastly different and its acceptance levels are just ripe for netbooks and smartphones without much, if any, priming needed. Consider how much usability training you've received in the course of the last 12 years perhaps without even taking a single course on computers.

But the real message of the book to me is that the value of innovation goes down as public acceptance goes up. This is for the very same reason as why it's so easy for a company to create those products. The tide affects all of the ships, including those the companies competitors. The relative value of your innovation is dependent upon your ability to increase the perception of value of your idea to your audience. Take now as an example: for better or worse, much of the tech economy is based on "free" in all senses of the word. Innovation today has to keep that in mind and work that into their perceived value marketing.

Aside from that not being true, it was underpowered so that it didn't have the appeal of later devices, it was marketed poorly in a world that wasn't ready (it would have needed to be marketed better).

Right. In the book "Myths of Innovation," the author (Scott Berkun) discusses how there is no such thing as a product being ahead of its time (which is what it seems this /. article summary is basically touting). You can't have a great idea in isolation and expect the market to come to you. Part of the invention process is how will your audience accept the product? Aside from patent trolling, the marketplace doesn't allow for financial success in a walled garden.

Berkun also cites many examples and non-examples of famous inventors like Edison not actually being the first to invent something (such as the light bulb), but really being the best one to bring it to the audience. He also demonstrates how you wouldn't be able to bring a modern invention such as the netbook and take it back in time to be as successful as it has been for us. The infrastructure wouldn't be there and the public mindset would have no reference point or paradigm to go from.

Not sure which company you did that with, but the only things negotiable at the company I work for are price and riders. Usually an independent agent can find a provider that can fit your situation, but he doesn't modify the base policy. The policy is rarely ever modified, and when it is, it's done across the board.

Not to say there aren't custom insurers out there, because I know there are, but I would imagine that if you were able to customize your policy with a large company, there was probably a rider that changed the language to accomplish what you wanted.

BTW, because you can't negotiate a contract of adhesion that means the courts interpret any remotely ambiguous language in favor of the policy holder, not the company.

Interesting. The insurance industry basically started in the UK (referring to Lloyds of London, although, not with contacts of adhesion). But, how do insurance companies do business in the UK if there is no such thing?

I'm excited about the potential to get a Super Famicom controller for the Wii, but at the rate that it takes to get points, it may be easier to just pay for it to be imported.

How dare you!? The hours I spend every week crafting clever rewrites of my email address is precisely that which keeps the spammers on their toes. How else do you think Gmail capable of filtering any spam mails out? I'm keeping their volume down. It's not just some stupid security superstition, either: it really works! And way better than whatever algorithm they're training over in Mountain View.

From,
seinjunkie@gmail.com