I Invented The iPad, 10 Years Before Apple Did
As early as 1999, I foresaw mankind surfing the web on a wireless, keyboardless touch-screen device. So, if I’m such a genius, where’s the fame and fortune?
Before I crossed over to the Dark Side and started working in Marketing, I was a programmer (and some other stuff, but we’ll get to that in another piece). At one time, I was writing a library of user interface components for touch screens on industrial ovens. In our lab, we had two of those (extremely rare and expensive) touch screens for testing.
This was around 1999/2000. The time home WiFi was a hip and new thing. If you were really geeky, and you had the cash, you had a 802.11b router and a laptop with a wireless card, so you could surf the web from your couch. Yes, I know, I’m OLD.
Am I a genius, or what?
Thing is, I’m a paper person. I love reading books and taking notes on a notepad, with a pencil. Part of that comes from the freedom you have to choose how you sit, when you don’t have to type. So lounging with a clunky laptop did not seem like the ideal way to the Great Blessings of the Web to me.
Then the idea hit. What if you could have one of these touch screens, make it a bit thinner, and give it a laptop battery and a wireless card? No keyboard. No wires. An easy-to-use touch interface. Surf the web. Read. Take notes. Write short messages.
The concept, if I may say so myself, was quite brilliant.
So, I shared the idea with some of my co-workers and friends. They all shrugged. ‘Why have another device, when you have a laptop?’ I tried to explain, but genius is rarely understood by common folk, is it?
Microsoft flop
Then, in November 2000, this happened. Apparently, someone at Microsoft did think my idea was brilliant enough to build. But when the thing became available, it was a heavy, clumsy, under-powered and ridiculously expensive piece of hardware. Nevertheless, I stared longingly at the ads for months, before finally deciding I wasn’t going to invest 6 weeks’ pay in it.
Apparently, everyone else felt the same way, because the Microsoft Tablet PC was a total flop. It took another 10 years before Apple had developed the concept to a point where it was feasible. At that time, of course, I already had a smartphone and the whole ‘slouch on the couch while surfing the web’ issue had, as far as I was concerned, been solved to the level of mundanity. Which, incidentally, didn’t stop everyone I knew from owning both a tablet and a phone.
So, why am I not a billionaire?
My genius idea had finally caught on, over a decade after it had hit me in a messy, dusty hardware lab with no windows. So, why am I not a billionaire? Why am I not the shining example every tech entrepreneur in the world wants to be?
Because I had the idea, but never executed on it.
Yes, the moral of the story is probably one that you have heard before. Anyone can have a great idea. But the world is a big place and if you can think of something, someone else has probably though of it before you did. Whether or not your idea will change the world, depends on your ability to stop dreaming about something and start building it, disregarding the opinions of the shoulder-shrugging Muggles around them. And then, if you ever get your prototype cobbled together, you need to find R&D cash and hope the technology to build your vision actually exists.
A dime a dozen
In 2000, the technology was simply not there. Flat screen TVs were still fetching 5 figures. The touch screen I was testing my clunky glove-hands user interface on was about 5 inches thick and had a bunch of cables attached as thick as my arm. Microsoft used the thinnest, highest-resolution touch screen they could find for their first tablet computer, and it was still expensive and unwieldy.
Apple had the smarts, the capital and the entrepreneurial spirit to sit on the idea, wait for the market and the technology to come together, and execute flawlessly. And they made a splash. I respect them for that. It is as the legendary Mary Kay Ash said: “Ideas are a dime a dozen. People who implement them are priceless.”
