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Comment by gizmo | Hacker News Reader

One the one hand this is a cool story about real technology pioneers. On the other hand, this is a story about people building technology that was so ahead of its time that it had no chance of turning into a good product. Too expensive, too unreliable, too complicated.

I think there are some obvious parallels here to General Magic and the Apple Newton. Very cool technology. Impressive demos. But ultimately the products didn't deliver on the vision. It wasn't until the iPod and capacitive touch screens and tiny hard drives came to the market that the iPhone became possible. Being 20 years early doesn't help.

Similar catastrophically flawed research projects get started today. In the past couple of days the Humane AI pin has been in the news. It's a wearable AI gadget that seems cool but it doesn't work. The tech has to catch up to the vision. It's at least a decade ahead of its time.

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The other issue is that it requires the driver to read a screen while driving. in 1988 at the MIT Media Lab I built a system called Back Seat Driver that provides spoken driving directions, allowing the driver to keep their visual attention on the road. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8C0V6lDKQ0Y&t=21s. It ran on a Lisp Machine, not in the vehicle. A later version ran on a Sun computer in the trunk.

The in-car nav system was also augmented dead-reckoning, like Etak. GPS was still denied to civilians at the time.

This is one of the reasons why I think patents are important, because it allows them to profit from their inventions, and for the inventions to be reused later by others, even if the product was "too soon". They invented innovative technology, tried to build a real product, they should be able to make some money from others picking up the baton -- and presumably they did, when they sold the company through the chain of acquisitions that ended up with them at TomTom and with TomTom in control of their patent portfolio.

I couldn't disagree more. If you try to build a commercial product and fail that doesn't entitle you to the profits made by others who made a successful product.

If the successful commercial product is based on the research of someone else, why does building a commercial product that succeeds entitle you to the innovations of others? I tend to favor liberalizing intellectual property, but your lens seems to suggest that value exists only in commercial success which ... is odd.

I think the problem comes when the correct solution is so obvious that it can be seen years in advance and it becomes a race to see who can patent the obvious solution first before the tech catches up and people start actually building it.

This is why people were mad at the "email, but on a cell phone!" patents and all of the "doing thing companies were already doing, but with internet!" patents from entities that don't make a product so they don't have to deal with real world limitations. Once the actual manufacturers start working on the problem they discover all of the obvious solutions locked behind patent walls.

Patents also block people from coming up with the same design independently. In addition you've got patent trolls who will gladly shake you down but who have no desire to use their patents productively themselves. Patent law turns the simple mechanics of designing a good product into a mess that involves lawyers and other gatekeepers. This benefits incumbents and makes the market inaccessible for upstarts.

I don't believe businesses deserve protection from competition. Not even when they've done meaningful original research. Society wins when people with the ability to bring a better product to market are legally allowed to do so.

I couldn't disagree with you more.

Patents exist to reward research or invention that results in practicable ideas. Entrepreneurialism is not (and should not be) part of that.

I think this divide basically shows which part of making a product is harder? The R&D? Or the operational side of production and support?

Ideas are cheap. Execution is everything.

In theory a reasonably skilled individual should be able to recreate your invention from the patent. In reality patents rarely provide sufficient details to do so. The fix is to bring reality back in line with theory.

So nobody should be an inventor unless they are employees of a corporation that can afford to commercialize everything they make?

What does the patent even do- protect the rights of the most successful company? At what point does it get taken away from the company that couldn't make enough (what's the dollar threshold?) and to which company is it given (or do they all just use it at once, and then the most successful is awarded the patent, and the rest have to pay arbitrary licensing fees to the winner?)?

Only if someone builds it within 5 years.

A more optimistic takeaway is that if you set out to solve a hard problem then you might be surprised about your tech's applications elsewhere. Between 1983 and 1989 they built a company that they went on to sell for ~25 million, or ~64 million in 2024 dollars. I don't know how much went into it but it doesn't sound like an obvious failure.

http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/latimes/access/60130710.html?did...

Isn't this a necessary part on the innovation path?

When smart people work on hard problems this usually comes with positive externalities. Even when the tech ends up worthless the the engineers will have learned a ton. I don't think that having people work on technology that is ahead of its time is bad for society. I think it's effectively high budget university research that presents itself as a commercial endeavor.

How much does silicon valley invest into these doomed sci-fi projects annually? Many hundreds of millions at least. I suspect PhDs at a university could produce a lot more innovation at a fraction of the cost.

Given that the tech and people went on to be involved in future nav systems, yes.

I imagine all that work digitising the maps was used again and again for a few decades, and the people brought their hard won knowledge to newer systems

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