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by tomphoolery
4310 days ago
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This seems to happen frequently with some of the largest tech companies. I'm reminded of how Apple was developing a tablet computer, what would eventually become the iPad, far before anyone was thinking about multi-touch interfaces (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPad#History). They spent almost 10 years in R&D before they were able to put something out there, and even longer before they could actually ship the iPad. It's a good thing they wasted all that money, because it ended up paying off. I think Google, Amazon and even Microsoft are hedging similar bets against the limits of technology. After all, what's impossible today may be trivial tomorrow. |
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CERN built capacitive multi-touch displays in the 70s. Mitsubishi, Bell, Microsoft, IBM and a bunch of other companies were involved in the R&D from there.
What Apple are good at is integrating and commercializing at the exact point where the economies of scale are viable, adding a layer of accessibility for users (eg. inventing the gestures, but not the touch technology itself).
The anecdote about how Apple tried to launch the iPad before the iPhone is proof that they didn't catch-on to how the core touch tech scaled (every inch of touch surface would increase production cost non-linearly) until much later.