Hacker News Reader

Comment by dpandya | Hacker News Reader

> It's sad, really. It's one of the really innovative companies, but it's not easy to sell tech ahead of its time.

This glorifies failure quite a bit. One major objective of tech companies is to produce products that customers value and like. Lytro failed to do this. Just because the underlying science is complicated doesn't make the tech "ahead of its time" due to the fact that maybe the tech, as implemented, just isn't what people want, now or in the future!

Having complicated science underlying a product certainly doesn't excuse a company from producing products that people want.

View on HN

> Having complicated science underlying a product certainly doesn't excuse a company from producing products that people want.

That's not the biggest obstacle, actually. The biggest obstacle that the sales strategy has no case studies to work with.

What market does the new tech appeal to? Should it be B2C or B2B? (In their case, they tried both IIRC.)

You may hold the collective entity responsible, if you wish, but in this case, they required both sharp and inventive techies (which they had), and a business leader with a vision (which they didn't have). It's not easy to put together, especially if the investors make the call for the CEO's replacement.

An analogy from a different area, Siri could be another dead curio if Steve Jobs didn't decide to make it a centerpiece of their new iPhone.

>Lytro failed to do this. Just because the underlying science is complicated doesn't make the tech "ahead of its time" due to the fact that maybe the tech, as implemented, just isn't what people want, now or in the future!

As we speaking abstractly? What theoretically could be if we didn't know anything about the tech?

Because otherwise this specific tech is very much an "ahead of its time" technology, whether consumers adopted it or not.

Besides, consumer adoption is a BS test for a technology being ahead of its time.

Failure in the market can simply be because the implementation was not good, or the marketing wasn't, or the support was lacking, or the price too high, or 200 other reasons, that don't depend on the technology not being ahead of its time.

The high price was primary due to them trying to offset the high RD cost vs the actual hardware cost. Google might be able to sell it cheaper if they can get ROI with other applications.

Update: hardware cost about $400 interesting analysis of their strategy here http://hc25.web.rice.edu/files/projects/LytroMarketingPlan.p...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com