Is Your Product As Popular As a Currant-Cleaning Machine?
Why do some inventions take off while some don’t
What do a ventilating top hat, an artificial leech, an anti-explosive alarm whistle, a tennis racket with a ball-picker, and a currant-cleaning machine have in common?
They are all ‘inventions that didn’t change the world’ — according to the self-titled book by Julie Halls.
They didn’t hit the big time — but the smartphone did.
Christopher Mims wrote recently in The Wall Street Journal: “Social media is turning into old-fashioned network television. A handful of accounts create most of the content that we see.”
Mims also sees an “industry trend of separating social into private channels, and turning what were once social apps into entertainment feeds.”
It may seem it has nothing to do with a currant-cleaning machine. But it does.
The only thing distinguishing successful inventions or technologies from the ones that sit on the shelf for good is that the former satisfied the needs of many (or enough) customers.
People liked computers, smartphones, napkins, and toothpicks because they knew what to do with them.
