If you interviewed 100 failed entrepreneurs, I suspect that many would list as their number one reason for failure "being slightly ahead of our time.” It was a brilliant idea, they might say, but the market just wasn’t ready.
I don’t have a problem with that reason. I believe it happens. (Maybe not as much as “we invented some technology and then tried to find someone to buy it,” but few admit that.) Smart people can absolutely, positively outpace and outthink the market.
You may know that MySpace is up for sale. News Corp, a savvy and profitable media company, paid $580M for the service in 2005 and would be happy to get $100M for it now.
I don’t believe MySpace was ahead of its time. It was the leading social network in 2005 when News Corp purchased it, and continued to be right up until that fateful day when it allowed people to begin making their own web pages.
The result, we all know, was the ascendance of Facebook.
Enter now AOL, that clunky, twentieth-century behemoth that’s making a valiant effort to emerge from irrelevancy. How soon we forget, though. AOL had 200,000 subscribers in 1992 when it started putting floppy disks in the mail. In retail stores. In magazines. Under your pillow. In your breakfast cereal. Dropping them from airplanes.
By the time it was done showering us with floppy disks, AOL had 25 million subscribers (most on dial-up modems!) and a market cap of $150 billion. And it did it quite simply by rescuing us from the Web. We all thought we wanted to be “out there” on the open range with our Mosaic browsers, hob-nobbing with Netizens. It turns out—and it always turns out this way--the frontier was just a little too wild for most of us.
Painful to access. Complicated. Too much choice and too much junk and way, way too many bad people doing terrible things to our computers.
In effect, AOL created a kinder, gentler parallel universe to the Web with news, weather, email, chat, stocks—you name it. And it kept worms and bugs and viruses from our machines. It helped us find our friends. And, it whispered in our ears, You've got mail!
It's nostalgic to recall just how "networked" we felt by email--the idea that we could contact an old college roommate or family member across the country at a moment's notice.
It's nostalgic to recall just how "networked" we felt by email--the idea that we could contact an old college roommate or family member across the country at a moment's notice.
Which makes ancient, decayed AOL sound so much like sleek, new Facebook that it must hurt some of those old AOL folk. It was ahead of its time, or better said, had many of the right ideas about social networking but not nearly the technology to fully implement a safe, parallel, walled-in Facebook society.
And, while we're taking a walk down technology lane, remember the Newton? That was Apple’s first tablet, launched in 1993 and killed in 1998. It was just slightly ahead of its time, too. But unlike most entrepreneurs, Apple got a second bite, as it were, and returned one day with the iPad.
It’s hard to think of a product more in-sync with its time than the iPad.
That’s about as close to a miracle as we get in technology, for one company to be ahead of the market and completely bomb, and then come back later and get it exactly right with the same product idea. In fact, it’s so rare I cannot think of another time it happened, certainly not this dramatically.
Which brings us full circle. What if AOL, which pioneered the concept of the safe, walled garden only to see it bomb, purchased MySpace? And then, in a Newton-to-iPad-metamorphosis, gave Facebook some serious indigestion.
I know, I know. It would be a train wreck. But would it not be cool to see two miracles in one lifetime?
There is a complicating factor to my wish, and that is that AOL does not appear to have any interest in bidding on MySpace.
Nor would I, were I AOL. But a wish is some mail your heart gets. Or something like that.
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