Case Studies of Failure

I’ve probably designed like a dozen computing products and I would say two are really successful, and maybe six were might reasonably successful, and a bunch of duds. I'll tell you my first failure; my first failing product was interesting. I was at GRiD, we had done the tablet computer, right? Which was a stylus phase and we're selling it to commercial like people - insurance adjusters, and things like that. And then Microsoft decided that this is a new area, they've created Windows for Pen Computing. Whenever that Microsoft saw a new area they just would say Windows for that area and that would be it. They still do that to this day, I hope you notice that. So they were creating all these kind fud, fear, uncertainty and doubt and these all kinds of noise and so I have this idea. So, look, I have a great idea. I'll create a convertible notebook type - it was a laptop, it was like a convertible laptop, which is what we see today. It was the very first one it was actually a very nice design. It was called the "Good Convertible" actually and came out like 1990 or maybe something like that, maybe '91. And it had this display, like a laptop with the display kind of was facing up and it had this double hinge, it's a really cool action. And it had a keyboard and you could adjust the size of the keyboard. And so it was a regular laptop plus a tablet computer. So we could sell it to our tablet customers and they didn't have to worry about Microsoft and all that kind of stuff. Well, it was a well-executed product. It was beautifully designed and I thought it was a great idea, and it was a failure. And the reason we learned it was a failure - it had to do with the fact that in the laptop market, people didn't want any compromises. And so, basically, when you pick a laptop some people say, "I want it thin, I want it this. I want this and this and this," And we were offering just one product, and it didn't fit for everybody, and it was a little bit thicker and t...