What failed wasn’t the vision but the timing and the absence of a refinement process. Technologies which succeed commercially are not “moonshots.” They come from a grinding, laborious process of iteration and discovery long after the technology is invented.
The technology is one part of the problem to be solved, the other is how to get people to use it. And that problem is rooted in understanding the jobs people have to get done and how the technology can be used defensibly. That’s where the rub is. An unused technology is a tragic failure.
From http://www.asymco.com/2013/12/17/moonshot/#comment-1177644697Companies that set up so-called "skunk works" operations tend to forget that the original Skunk Works had customers and worked closely with those customers. When it operated as a mere technology incubator it tended to produce duds. Its major successes were produced for the CIA and the Air Force.
Apple is really the moonshot idea turned on its head. It has the "skunk works" at the top and treats traditional operations as part of the product being created. [...] Product development should be "C-level", including prototyping, and the process of turning out millions of those products, marketing them and selling them, etc, should be assumed. It should also be headless and hence killable once the market for the product dries up, regardless of how long that takes.