Dr. Neil's Notes
Software > Development > Being Early
Why Good Ideas Fail When the World Isn't Ready
Introduction
In 1997, I co-founded WebPrecinct, a central online mall designed to let multiple retailers consolidate their online sales in one place. The idea was sound. The technology worked. The model made sense, on paper and in practice.
The problem was trust. People were still deeply wary of spending money on the internet in 1997. Not because the idea was wrong, but because the infrastructure of trust that makes commerce possible had not yet been built online. No familiar brands. No consumer protection frameworks that people understood. No ingrained habit of typing a credit card number into a browser.
WebPrecinct was a good idea in a world that had not yet decided it was safe to have it.
Ideas Need an Ecosystem
A technology or product does not succeed on the strength of the idea alone. It succeeds when the surrounding ecosystem is ready to support it. That ecosystem includes infrastructure, habits, regulation, complementary technologies, and the simple willingness of people to change how they do things.
In 1997, the ecosystem for online retail was nascent at best. The infrastructure existed in a technical sense. The trust infrastructure did not. SSL certificates were not yet the reassuring padlock that a decade of browser makers and security campaigns would eventually train people to look for. The instinct to hand over payment details online had not yet been normalised.
A good idea planted in unprepared soil does not thrive.
What the World Was Not Ready For
The list of things that needed to change before online retail could grow is instructive:
- Payment systems needed to earn trust through repeated, safe transactions at scale.
- Logistics networks needed to develop the reliability and tracking that made delivery feel dependable.
- Regulators needed to establish consumer protection that translated from physical retail to digital.
- Browsers needed to mature, and become the safe, consistent environments they would eventually become.
- Customers needed years of small, successful online purchases before committing to larger ones.
None of these were problems with the idea of online retail. They were preconditions that needed time to develop.
The Lesson
When a good idea fails, the instinct is to look for the flaw in the idea. Sometimes that is the right place to look. Often it is not.
The more useful question is: what does the world need to have in place before this can work? And the harder follow-on question: how long will that take, and do I have the patience and the resources to wait it out?
Some ideas are worth staying with. Some are best handed off to the next generation who will have the advantage of arriving at a moment when the ecosystem has caught up. Knowing the difference is one of the more difficult judgements in technology.
Part of the Being Early series.