>One of my favorite poster children for this is Plastic Logic.
Basically the entire organic transistor community has a solution in search of a problem. Not really an issue limited to Plastic Logic.
Basically the entire organic transistor community has a solution in search of a problem. Not really an issue limited to Plastic Logic.
The interesting bit was that they were not wrong, if they could do all those things they could have dominated the market. But they had too much money relative to the market window. As a result they spent way too much time working through product issues that were completely unrelated to their game changing display and once full color tablet readers were a competitive threat they had too much margin pressure to recoup any of their development costs.
[1] And yes, I met with their VP of Marketing/Product Development and explained this to them when they had time to take the advice, but they did not.
A general issue I see, however, is that the real world need for flexible displays is far more limited than earlier projections suggested. If you switch to a rigid display, there is no reason to use an organic transistor back plane - that's where things start to unravel. PL were not even the first company in that space. There also were Polymervision and a couple of others.
The key though is cost. A slam dunk product would cost what the Boogie board does ($30) have 200dpi+ resolution and let you write on it with a simple stylus.