This UK folding plug needs a patent, and regulatory approval. Hopefully the designer has started on these, otherwise the video disclosure is “too early”.

I recall putting up with dial-up speeds if I had to, like for on-line banking and such, but it was certainly not something I engaged in for fun. I believe many like myself had become accustomed to high-speed internet while working on their jobs, and therefore would not have had much patience for dial-up on an internet appliance, especially if it were slowed to an even more leisurely crawl with ads.

In addition, very few besides Google and network television have appeared to be able to turn “free with ads” into a viable business model, and certainly no one on the hardware side.

I would say that the netbook is close to the evolutionary track of IA’s. But high-speed access is more the rule than the exception today, and no one is trying to give them away in exchange for looking at ads.

Apple could not have introduced the iPhone a year earlier than they did

Mine is an argument against the notion that ground breaking products come about only because all the relevant ingredients have been developed to a point where a company just has to assemble them into a whole. If it has to actually develop new technologies, infrastructure, marketplaces, services, behavioral modifications, etc., well then it’s “too early”.

With the original iPod Apple sold not (just) an MP3 player but convenience: “1,000 songs in your pocket.” That, of course, would not have been possible without the ground breaking Toshiba disk drive, which wasn’t available a year prior. What if Apple did in fact know about the possibility of such a drive and, say, funded and accelerated its development a year earlier?

What if, for example, video conferencing is currently “too early” on mobile devices? Not enough bandwidth? Awkward eye contact/parallax issues? Too taxing for the CPU and battery? New compression algos needed? Yes, Apple could wait a couple of years, until it becomes not “too early” which is pretty much what every other player will do in this space. Or or Apple could, for instance, convince AT&T to improve the network, invent video capture through device screen, develop a new add-on chip to facilitate better video processing, battery conservation, compression, etc. IOW, instead of predicting the future, it would create the necessary ingredients to make it happen.

It’s hard to imagine a startup doing that – funding for startups is just not that patient.

I agree. That’s something the VC community has to grapple with, as I pointed out above. The “10X returns quickly” approach may not be tenable going forward. Look what the “30X leverage now” approach gave us in derivatives gambling. :-)

it’s unusual to see commercial software that outruns the current technology base.

That’s not quite right. 3D rendering, special FX, video post-processing, CAD, speech synthesis are just a few examples of commercial software perennially in desperate need of better hardware support. And BTW, hardware can easily appear before there’s sufficient software support as well. Easy example is multithreaded processing for multi-core CPUs.

Maybe one aspect of their work matches what later became a success – but was it really what they were selling?

Exactly. This is why I pointed out Fred invested in both the Internet appliance and Twitter. Sometimes one realizes that it’s not about the device but perhaps about the service or, conversely, the service isn’t sufficient and a properly attuned device is the optimum. It’s all in framing the business proposition correctly.

“Too early” isn’t really a statement about time. It’s a statement about investment – of money, of research, of development, of market education. Products that are “too early” are either ideas for which the technology doesn’t quite exist yet – e.g., the Apple Newton – or for which the technology exists but the market demand hasn’t appeared, but appears later – for which I have no specific example I can think of. (Note that many products remain “too early” forever: The market demand *never* appears.)

Apple could not have introduced the iPhone a year earlier than they did – it would have been too heavy, too slow, not bright enough; the digital network it needed would have been too limited. Apple could see the technological trends, and was willing and able to spend significant resources developing, discarding, re-developing, fine-tuning – and waiting for the necessary technological elements – as well as business elements, like a network provider willing to work with them on appropriate terms – to become available. It’s hard to imagine a startup doing that – funding for startups is just not that patient.

Software-only products require much less capital investment, and because of its nature, it’s unusual to see commercial software that outruns the current technology base. But software can easily appear before the market is ready for it, and failure to invest sufficiently in market education, re-tuning as tastes and technology inevitably change, and just plain hanging around have killed many such products.

Of course, many “too early” products aren’t, really. The developers look back and see only the positives, not the stuff they did that really didn’t work well and would have doomed the product no matter what. They also re-interpret what they did in light of later work. Maybe one aspect of their work matches what later became a success – but was it really what they were selling? Was Pointcast ahead of its time because the world wasn’t ready for RSS and Atom feeds? Or would Pointcast have failed no matter what in the face of open, easy-to-adopt standards that lead to thousands of free “information channels”?

The issue here is the time-frame and the returns-ratio VCs normally pursue. Not too many VCs will consider, say, a min 5-year window or invest in necessary infrastructure to ensure that a product actually succeeds. I’m not sure if they’d have the expertise to do that, let alone the patience.

Timing is key. Some companies get there through luck and ruthless tactics; some through persistence and perseverance; some through pure engineering and calculation; a few through genius and vision.

People often describe Apple as aiming for where the hockey pock will be, instead of chasing after it like everybody else. I think a better analogy would be that Apple and Google (and Amazon to some extent) are actively trying to change the actual playing field so the pock will go where they want it to go. By the very use of iPhone and Google Docs and EC2, people are helping them push for the future to come sooner than the rest of the market thought it may take. Whereas a VC typically only evaluates a company’s product, a visionary company looks to alter the environment to foster its innovation, and concurrently apply its innovation to create an even more suitable environment.