Paul Sloane walks through four products that worked technically but flopped commercially: the Sinclair C5, Apple Newton, Segway, and Google Glass. He explains why they failed: poor market research, wrong pricing, safety concerns, privacy backlash, and arriving before people wanted them.
Chapters
When people talk about disruptive innovations, generally they talk about the ones that were successful— the Ubers, the Airbnbs, the Netflix, and so on. But it's important to recognize that most disruptive innovations fail. It's a very, very risky thing to try and bring a disruptive idea to market, and I'd like to just give you some examples of disruptive innovations which were technologically very successful but market failures. And the first one I would start with is the Sinclair C5, which came out in 1985, produced by a brilliant British inventor, Sir Clive Sinclair, who'd become a millionaire based on his inventions in computing. And in 1985, he brought out this small personal mobile transporter, human transporter, battery operated, and it looked like a little scooter that you would sit in. And it was launched and it proved to be a great flop. He hadn't done any market research on it. He didn't really believe in market research. And people said you were too low, that you were breathing in the fumes, it was dangerous, you were exposed to the weather, and so on. And it was not as successful, but technologically it worked. The battery wasn't very powerful, didn't get you up many hills before it ran out of juice, but the idea itself was a great idea. And if you think about it today, when electric vehicles are accepted, When battery technology has advanced so much, and when there are cycle lanes which potentially this might have been allowed to use, it might if it was launched today, it might be a success. So it was ahead of its time. It was a great disruptive idea—an idea of disrupting personal transportation—but it failed. The next one I would mention is the Apple Newton, and we tend to think of Apple as being brilliant disruptive thinkers, disruptive innovators with their succession of computers and iPhones. But in 1993, Apple. Brought out the Newton, which was a personal digital assistant, a PDA. It was mobile computing. It had handwriting recognition. It had full computing power, all in a handheld device for the first time. It was highly innovative and it would disrupt the whole market if it took off, but it didn't. It was very highly priced at $900. It was quite bulky and the handwriting recognition didn't really work properly. So in that sense, it disappointed the Apple enthusiasts who bought one, and it never really took off. But the ideas in there in terms of mobile computing, having something in your hand, a lot of those ideas surfaced again in the smartphone environment. The next disruptive innovation, which I would like to mention as an example of failure, was the Segway. designed by Dean Kamen and launched in 2001. And this was a brilliant piece of engineering, a self-balancing 2-wheeled personal transporter which worked really well and people liked it, but it was very highly priced. It fell foul of regulation. It wasn't allowed on many roads or sidewalks in many places, and it was— there was no market research really. The product was kept as a secret until it was launched. Nobody saw it, and therefore some people commented that it looked rather dull on it. It wasn't cool. It just looked kind of nerdy. So the public reaction wasn't great when it was launched, and even though it was a brilliant technological invention, it wasn't an innovation that found a need and a solution. And the final one I would mention is Google Glass, launched in 2012. We think of Google as great disruptive innovators, but even they can get it wrong. And the Google Glass was spectacles with a little camera in it and a heads-up display. So it could interact with the internet. You could see something and it would give you information about it. You could record things. It was their venture into what they called ubiquitous computing. Wherever you went, you would have computer technology, access to the internet, and so on. And it was certainly a brilliant, brilliant invention. And it worked, but there were a lot of concerns. The price point, $1,500, put a lot of people off, but the The thing that really killed it was the privacy issue, that many people felt uncomfortable that other people could walk around and record them without their permission. And people felt dissatisfied and uncomfortable with that idea. So in the end, Google folded it. So even Google, the great innovators, and Apple, the great innovators, can get disruptive innovation wrong. It's not an easy thing to get right. It's very difficult. It's full of challenges to launch something that's completely new into a market. The market might not just not be ready for it, like the Sinclair C5. Maybe it was just ahead of its time. Maybe it was priced wrong. Maybe the target market wrong. So even if you get the technology all right, if you get the marketing wrong, the positioning wrong, the pricing wrong, your brilliant idea can still flop. So let's not kid ourselves that disruptive ideas lead to disruptive innovations, which always lead to success.
