In their defense history focuses on the false negative rate without considering the false positive rate at the same time. Large corporate R&D labs churn out amazing and bizarre things all the time. A lot of these ideas are garbage and it’s a subtle challenge to see which jankedy prototypes are actually world changing.

Ripeness of ideas and problems is important; frequently it's hard to tell if they are ripe or not. Attack a problem a decade early and you might be GO, a decade later and you might be Apple.