When Bad Ideas Are... Good.
By
Staten Island, NY Posted: 6/3/2015 1:00:00 AM
I love BAD Ideas!
Don't get me wrong. I love good ideas too, but very few of them would exist if it wasn't for the countless bad ideas that inspired them.
To me, a bad idea is like finding a diamond in the rough. There's something valuable inside. You've just got to chip away the crud on the outside before you can let it shine.
Most of us remember Apple's greatest ideas, but most of those ideas are a direct result of Apple's commitment to research and development. Almost every successful product was the direct result of a bad idea that they improved. Thankfully for Apple, some of those bad products were first introduced by other companies, but quite a few were from home-grown failures.
Some of those bad ideas never make it outside the labs, but once in a while, they release things that are quickly criticized for being a bad idea. Critics initially hated the iPhone, because it was expensive and lacked a buttons or a keyboard. The iPad also had mixed reviews. Many critics felt Apple lost their Golden Touch and it wouldn't catch on, because it wasn't something the public wanted.
Oddly enough many critics felt the iPhone and iPad would fail because they were a lot like another "bad" Apple idea, the Apple Newton, which was introduced in the late 80s, and eventually discontinued when Steve Jobs took over in the late 90s.
Apple spent over $100 million developing the Newton and it's later generation MessagePad and when you look at Apple's history, many people consider it their biggest flop. I beg to differ.
By today's standards the Apple Newton was pretty useless.
It was the first Personal Digital Assistant (PDA), but it was too big to fit in your pocket.
It didn't have a keyboard, but it had handwriting recognition... which wasn't very reliable.
It ran on AAA batteries... but they didn't last long.
It wasn't wireless... but the Web didn't even exist back then.
It had a touch screen... but it required a stylus.
In spite of all this, they sold quite a few of them, but not enough to call it a success. However, the reason most people bought them wasn't because it was useful, or because it worked well, it was because the people who bought it saw the diamond inside of it. Although people, including Steve Jobs saw it as a bad idea, there was a great idea behind it. The Apple Newton was actually a great idea. It was just too soon for technology to catch up with the idea itself.
3Com, which later became Palm improved on Apple's ideas and the market for PDAs eventually became a worldwide success. That market eventually led to hybrid PDA / Mobile phones from companies using Palm or Windows CE. I owned several of these early SmartPhones many years before the iPhone was introduced. By today's standards, those early smartphones were a complete failure. They were expensive, difficult to use and didn't sell well.
Apple saw the potential in the core ideas behind those failed products, and that led to the company's most successful products ever, the iPhone and iPad, which would not exist if the Newton didn't exist first.
Joe Crescenzi, Founder
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