| There are two classes of Next Big Things: 1. things which would clearly be useful, but couldn't be made yet or which cost too much to be practical. Example: flying cars, tablet computers. 2. things that could be done easily with current technology but hadn't been tried yet. Examples: Uber, Twitter. A useful subclass of #2 is things which are known to be useful and have just become or are just about to become makeable. A good example is the Motorola Star-Tac, the first flip phone. It's a Star Trek communicator, made real. Apple is good in that space. The Macintosh was of that type. Good UNIX workstations already existed, as did the Alto and Dorado, they just cost too much. The original 1984 Mac was a severely cost-reduced workstation - tiny screen, no hard drive, floppy disk storage only. It took a few more years to get a hard drive into the product, at which point it became useful. The iPod was also in that space. It wasn't the first MP3 player. The iPhone wasn't the first smartphone, although it was the first to get rid of the keyboard. So that's where Apple innovates - at the leading edge of what's commercially possible. They don't do long-term efforts to make a technology work, as RCA did with color TV and IBM did with computers. |