Open coffee chatter this morning

After a terrible Seattle commute this morning, I arrived at the Seattle Open Coffee at Louisa's on Eastlake Ave East and was warmly welcomed by 7 other entrepreneurs who braved the slick rodes. We had a fascinating conversation about the adoption rate of technology in general and then more specifically about the introduction of the mouse. At this point the mouse seems like a ubiquitous commodity but at some point in the 1960s it didn't' exist. I'm told it took about 20 years to move from invention and patent filing to being used by Apple in the McIntosh. And Apple only used a 1 button mouse and the patent was for a 2 button mouse. Supposedly (I'm told at coffee this AM) that the engineer couldn't understand why you'd ever want a 1 button mouse when you have multiple fingers -- go figure!  Anyway, it was a fun conversation and my take away is that inventors and entrepreneurs have a big job of getting people to use their product and it takes TIME. This is more true in some instances than others -- and as I've mentioned local online is one of those markets that takes TIME.  So everyone who's out there slugging it out -- be patient and keep putting one foot in front of the other. And remember that sometimes one button is better than two.

Comments

[Maggy Young]

Liked the 'sometimes one button is
better than two' ending. Maybe local online has been approached in a way that makes it too complicated. Do most people really want to trawl lots of reviews or 100s of price comparisons ? Maybe we need something simpler.