R.I.P. HP Touchpad. I barely knew ya. It’s all about hits, hits, hits. Getting them out, scoring big, then pumping all of that money back into the machine. The designers, the programmers, the artists – it keeps them all employed, but barely. All the while, it’s the industry that makes the money. I’m skeptical anyone is going to be touching Apple in the tablet market for awhile to come. It’s Apple’s game, and it’s their market to lose, and unlike cell phones, there are no issues with carriers, plans, contracts, and any of that gobbledy-gook gunk that gets in the way of it all. But, seriously, a month? Bad movies now have shelf lives longer than bad products.
And the Touchpad was hardly the only thing pulled. From Google’s Wave to a wave of iPad wannabes, the world is rife with abandonment, as it more and more resembles the entertainment industry – an industry plagued by short-term memory and shorter-term thinking. The splash has become more important than the ripple, and if you don’t hit the water hard enough, it’s on to the next thing. Even more aptly, the splash is becoming the ripple. See ya. Wouldn’t want to be ya.
But making a splash is not creating a ripple. One is about novelty. The other is about innovation. And while they can go hand-in-hand, in an unquenchable market thirsting for the new, it becomes more and more tempting only to focus on the novelty. But novelty is myopia. It is innovation laid bare then stripped of its heart and spared its body, a merchandising opportunity on life support.
Fostered, novelty can become innovation. Almost every idea can have legs. But not all ideas last long enough to find them. Maybe some should, maybe some shouldn’t, but not enough do. What we see as perfect in the end, often came from vitally flawed ideas that were given a chance. Innovation is an iterative process. It requires cycles of thought, change, thought, change. It must constantly be challenged and answered, until it is so deeply felt that even the simplest of results is stuffed with the sweat, blood, and tears of effort. You could see it as a diamond formed from the unyielding pressure of creative thought, a stone polished from the constant current of the ocean, or wine aged through the complex processes of nature. But whatever the metaphor, innovation has two distinct qualities. First, it takes time. Second, it is impenetrable.
We can all look at a beautiful picture, some will appreciate it more, some less. We can all copy a beautiful picture. Some will do so better, and some worse. But no one can acquire the essence of that image. We are only seeing the tip of an iceberg. The result of a fully formed person with heart and soul, flaws and brilliance. We cannot take that, and reformulate it, because we cannot understand how it was created in the first place. We can only go through our own process of forming our own hearts and souls, filled with our own flaws and brilliance. In other words, it is the very fact that it takes time that makes it impenetrable. The life of an image is the life of its creator.
The reality is that I didn’t even try the Touchpad. I’m sure it was a capable product. I’ve heard some good things about it. Were it invented several years earlier, maybe it would be a game-changer. A smash hit. But not here, not now. It’s obituary made more of splash than its entry. Take the time to let things develop. Forget the pressure chamber. When we find what we’re about, we create something enduring.
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