Flutterby™! : Owning the ecosystem, seeing the future.

The MeFi entry pointing to this Kodak post about creating a portable digital still camera in 1975 and this NY Times article about it had a few comments that got me thinking. There's the usual "why couldn't they see far enough?" and "Xerox PARC could, but they couldn't get corporate to execute" and that kind of stuff, but empath's observation about seeing the future is worth a pondering:

I'll give another example -- if someone had asked you, in 1980, which would have been the more world-changing invention -- the ability to make video-phone calls, or the ability to send a text message to anybody, at any time, anywhere, most people probably would have said video-phone calls, because I think it seemed like a more difficult problem.

Video calls are one of those things that I've tried and abandoned a whole bunch of times. Asynchronous text exchanges? I've been doing that for more than two and a half decades, but when that started nobody in the mainstream saw the value.

And then I'm not sure what it was about this comment about Kodak owning the sensor market, and then losing it to Canon and Nikon, and Rochester suffering got me thinking, but...

I get a lot of "hey, we're working on this cool project, you should join us!". I saw a handheld portable personal video player ready to come to market years before Apple brought out theirs. I've sat sipping scotch and talking about all sorts of products that eventually came to market a decade or so before they finally hit the big box retailers. Time after time, the problem wasn't the ability of the engineering team to execute, it was owning enough of the ecosystem to make the overall product useful. That portable video player? Heck, the guys working on the hardware understood that a portal that led the user to content was a necessity, but they couldn't get the next level up to spend a few tens of thousands to stumble through getting that portion working.

In that comment above, the thing that struck me was that Kodak owned the consumables, but Nikon and Canon owned the lenses. So Kodak's digital cameras used Canon lenses; once Canon figured out sensors Kodak's line was toast.

I'm not sure how to summarize that realization, but as you look to consumables and ancillary products and how to position your efforts, I think it's worth looking at how Kodak, in its pursuit of providing the consumables, lost the long-term game.

See also: this great MeFi comment about the decline and fall of Sears. And also realize that many of these things happen at scales longer than human careers. There's another lesson there.