<i>No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.</i><p><a href="https://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases-ipod" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases-i...</a>
Google itself, according to the opinions of its own creators (and vinod khosla who was urging them to sell it), if their own actions are anything to judge them by:<p>> In 1999, Larry Page and Sergey Brin were looking to sell Google to search engine Excite for about $750,000. But Excite's CEO George Bell passed on the offer<p>And you can add the CEO of excite to that list too I suppose. So pretty much a short list of the who's who of the internet in 1999 didn't think Google was worth even a million dollars.<p>I would enjoy finding a collection of backstage tales like this that collectively serve to undermine the broad and unsubstantiated belief - our current generation's disguised version of the great man theory - that Superior Visionaries always know just how dominant their ideas will be (and who deserve to be proportionately rewarded for their vision and boldness and risk-taking blah blah blah) to the humble desk jockeys and implementers who end up working for them.
Twitter seemed absolutely idiotic at launch. A "Twit" was an idiot who chattered incessantly on a BBS... why would you want a network full of them?<p>When they were first produced, transistors were only marginally more useful than tubes. They were finicky to produce, mechanically fragile, and tended to age rapidly.<p>Gasoline was thought too explosive for any use, and dumped into the nearest stream to get rid of it.
Mozilla and Firefox. When I was shipping the first versions of those two browsers, I can't tell you how many people said "why do we need a new browser when IE 6 is plenty good" and much of that sentiment came from friends in the industry, not even typical consumers who were even less interested. Then we popularized tabbed browsing, integrated search, pop-up blocking, browser extensions, intelligent addressing, and a whole lot more through compelling extensions. That led to 25% market share for the Web platform in about 5 years. Not bad for a few kids doing after hours work as AOL wound down the Netscape operation after settling their civil suit with MS in 2002.
Dropbox is the classic example, where a commenter on this very website wrote:<p>> For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.<p>and then went on to say<p>> It does not seem very "viral" or income-generating. I know this is premature at this point, but without charging users for the service, is it reasonable to expect to make money off of this?<p>Today, Dropbox is a public company. Its net income for the twelve months ending March 31, 2023 was $540M, a 47% increase year-over-year. I think that should count as successful.
"Developer of the Laser Calls It 'A Solution Seeking A Problem'" (New York Times, May 1964) <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20221212154109/https://www.nytimes.com/1964/05/06/archives/developer-of-the-laser-calls-it-a-solution-seeking-a-problem.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://web.archive.org/web/20221212154109/https://www.nytim...</a>
Not exactly what you are asking, but the thing that immediately jumped into my mind was: post-it notes. A 3M scientist, trying to improve adhesiveness, came across a property that caused stickiness with poor adhesiveness. Not exactly what he was tasked to invent.<p>Years passed. Until another 3M scientist, who was struggling with the bookmarks he put in the choir hymnals continuously falling out, thought about his colleague's odd sticky non-adhesive thingamajig. And voila! Post-its were born.
Microsoft Word. From <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Word" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Word</a><p>> It was not initially popular, since its user interface was different from the leading word processor at the time, WordStar.[20] However, Microsoft steadily improved the product, releasing versions 2.0 through 5.0 over the next six years. ... The first version of Word for Windows was released in 1989. With the release of Windows 3.0 the following year, sales began to pick up and Microsoft soon became the market leader for word processors for IBM PC-compatible computers.[13]