Bright ideas, big wait on tech payback

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the founders showed it off to Yahoo co-founder David Filo. According to Google, Filo said he wanted to talk with them when the technology was fully developed and scalable. Sources said Yahoo even had a chance to buy Google.

Since then, Google, of course, has become Yahoo's biggest competitor. But in retrospect, it seems somewhat reasonable that Yahoo wouldn't have been jumping to buy the company. Search was a flooded field at the time. Stanford had little luck finding early investors.

Yahoo, however, isn't alone. It offered itself--in vain--to Netscape back in the mid-1990s.

10. The microdrive and hard-drive-based MP3 players
IBM started shipping an invention called the microdrive--a mini hard drive with a 1-inch diameter platter, in 1999 and waited for business customers to snap it up. And waited...and waited.

Sales never materialized, and IBM, which invented the hard drive back in the '50s, continued to lose money on drives. (HP also came up with a small drive in the '90s but snuffed it.)

Apple Computer's iPod

Fast forward to 2002: IBM dished its drive business to Hitachi. In 2003 and 2004, the mini iPod and other music players made mini drives a hot commodity.

"IBM didn't see the consumer," said Bill Healy, senior vice president of product strategy and marketing at Hitachi Global Storage Technologies and a former IBMer. "Hitachi is the GE of Japan. They make rice cookers, refrigerators, nuclear-power plants."

Mistake? Hitachi has had more luck selling drives, but the business is still notoriously competitive and profits are often elusive. And, unlike IBM, Hitachi faces a slew of competitors in this market.

On a somewhat related note, Compaq Computer, Dell and others marketed MP3 players with hard drives before Apple did. However, they were home systems with standard PC hard drives. In January 2001, it seemed like a promising market. In October 2001, Apple came out with the first iPod based on a novel 1.8-inch drive that had interested few manufacturers. Portability won out.

11. Xerox PARC
Move along, folks, nothing to see here. Xerox has been flayed mercilessly for allowing concepts such as the desktop PC, Ethernet networking and the laser printer--all invented at its famed Palo Alto Research Center, or PARC--to get exploited by others.

The photocopier giant is now trying to stay afloat in a world going paperless. Still, PARC did help launch the careers of a number of people: James Clark, Alan Kay, Robert Metcalf and Lawrence Tesler, among others.

CNET News.com's Mike Ricciuti contributed to this report.

1947 Transistor not SIlicon

The transistor that John Bardeen,
Walter Brattain, and William Shockley invented in 1947 was a germanium transistor, not a silicon one. Gordon Teal, of Texas Instruments, produced the first silicon transistor in 1954.

Nice article, though.

Jim

[Gleeplewinky]

What if we applied modern day IP strategy...

An interesting article (even if a little
inaccurate with the details), but it doesn't ask
the obvious question: how would the world be
different if the modern-day notions of
"intellectual property" and IP strategy existed?

I think that the obvious answer is that
innovation in highlighted fields would have
stalled and that costs involved in adopting the
technology would become a barrier to bringing
things to market. The advent of modern "IP" is
only now starting to substantially limit
technology development and increasing costs
substantially.

[tomforemski]

IP and Washiungton Legislation

I totally agree, IP battles will limit innovation, and so will legislation pushed by gtroups battling the open web, open standards, and open innovation.

Legislation will also limit innovation--it already does witness the Digital Millennium Act, all in favor of content holdrs and granting almos teternal control, imho.

[dennisbaker2003]

Bright Ideas

your selective choise of Ideas to use as reference material leaves a lot to be desired.

1)The Binary Code would have been better.
2)University of South Florida incarceration of a scientist for 15 years for "stealing his own notes", would have been better.


More idea's are lost to corruption than anything else.

Dennis Baker

Corruption