Three good ideas of insuccess - week 1

Hello dear internet sailor, and welcome to my little blog. My name is Lumix, in the coming weeks I'm going to share with you a journey through the E-SPEAIT sea, trying to produce some interesting contents and to navigate safely till the end of the spring semester.

As the title of this first blog suggests, today I'm going to write about three ideas, three good ideas, that have something in common: they all failed...

The first story of brilliant failure is the story of Betamax. The "Alfamax" of the case would be the VHS standard for video recording on tape cassettes, the one that pushed the Betamax standard by Sony out of the market.

Betamax entered the market in 1975 imposing itself as the best in quality in the market of video recording tape cassettes, by far the best video quality, but Sony was greedy and didn’t want to license the production out of its own brand, or maybe wasn’t greedy enough making the second mistake that made this "tape war" so famous. Sony, a serious company, said no to collaborations and business deals within the porn industry which in turn embraced the VHS technology, imposing a VHS reader in most of the houses…

Betamax was better, but who is going to buy a second (and more expensive) reader when already has a VHS one for the… you know what… stuff?

The defeat of Betamax by VHS is today studied in business schools as an example of how technological superiority and higher quality of the product is not enough to guarantee competitive advantage and to win market shares.

The second example of a visionary failure is when Microsoft tried to introduce tablet to the consumer market way before the iPad, with the first prototype in the year 2000 naming it “Tablet PC”. They predicted tablets to be the new things in the next 5 years, it didn’t happen and they gave up with the project, the market wasn’t responding. 

In 2010, ten years later, Steve Jobs launched the iPad, showing once again that markets can not only be followed but sometimes, they can be created…

The third and last example of a well-designed product that didn’t make it trough is Google+, the social network that in June 2011 aimed at replacing Facebook. It was a well-designed software with some interesting feature like the videocall service “Hangouts”, better than FB in managing phots and with a clearer and more effective management of privacy. Still, there are divided feeling around the +1 button.

Google plus had them all, but more than everything had all the other big G application (Gmail, YouTube, etc.…) at his support, with sometimes a bit overreaching push to ecosystem integration. None of this was enough to overcome the already impressive network economies FB had developed at that point, G+ was simply too similar to FB to give incentive for the user to migrate from a well established social network to an empty box. The service was disconnected in April 2019…

And that’s all for my first week blog, see you soon!