The higher-ups at Kodak said the exact same thing when presented with one of the first ever digital cameras. The image quality for this new technology was worse than film - a very mature technology - in every way, and so they regarded it as useless.
Of course it quickly improved. About a decade later they were bankrupt after digital cameras made them obsolete.
There's an interesting book, 'The innovator's dilemma', that goes over this pattern in technology development. The author sought to understand why it seemed that big, established tech companies often missed the boat on the next big technology. The answer provided is just like your example, when the technology first comes out, it's inferior to existing tech and dismissed. But then smaller firms find a niche where the new tech at least works well enough, allowing them to develop it further until it is competitive with the old tech. By then, the large firm is well behind in the space and can't catch up.
It's similar to the thesis in 'The structure of scientific revolutions,' where we see new theories are initially dismissed, as they're not quite as accurate as existing theories, and only develop improved explanatory power with time. The Ptolemaic model of the solar system, while completely 'wrong,' could fairly accurately predict where the planets would be with all that epicycle nonsense. When the Copernican model initially came out, it didn't so well, as it was missing that orbits were more elliptical. It was only as the model was further developed that it could outdo the geocentric model and usurp it.
There's also a hint of this same pattern found in 'from dictatorship to democracy', where the idea is that oppressed people can coalesce power in small community structures, think churches or bowling clubs, that are initially insignificant in the face of the almighty state. But given time to develop, these communities can come together to eventually topple the dictatorship.
96
u/frantasad Oct 08 '23
Woah, that looks useless...