"I guess you guys aren't ready for that yet... But your kids are gonna love it."
Marty McFly's famous words from the stage of the Enchantment Under The Sea dance at Hill Valley High School left an audience of doo-wop fans speechless. Had McFly picked a more recent decade to crash a party with heavy metal riffs, he might not have been so poorly thought of.
Whether you're a time-travelling Van Halen fan or the CEO of a technology business, timing is everything when it comes to introducing something entirely new. Netflix wouldn't have been able to make a movie streaming business succeed without ubiquitous domestic broadband; Napster did, but the repercussions of its timing may have damaged public appreciation of sound quality forever.
Similarly, Wikipedia succeeds where one experiment on the part of the BBC in the 1980s fell flat on its face; a futuristic ambition let down by the reality of current technological restrictions.
The following is a collection of nine stories of technologies, services, products, people and ideas that arrived too early -- they either failed as a business for simply being ahead of their time, changed an industry for the worse because of the period of their birth, or simply suffered under hands too eager to ship a product.
By: Nate Lanxon, Edited by: Olivia Solon
Continue reading...via Wired.co.uk
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-02/18/too-soon
