The Long Nose of Innovation
“Bill Buxton has been talking over the past few years
about something he calls the Long Nose of Innovation. A play on Chris
Anderson’s notion of the Long Tail, the Long Nose describes the decades of incubation
time required to produce a “revolutionary” new technology apparently out of
nowhere.
The classic
example is the invention and refinement of a device central to the GUI
revolution: the mouse. The first mouse prototype was built by Douglas Engelbart
and Bill English, then at the Stanford Research Institute, in 1963. They even
gave the device its murine name. Bill English developed the concept further
when he took it to Xerox PARC in 1973. With Jack Hawley, he added the famous
mouse ball to the design of the mouse. During this same time period, Telefunken
in Germany was independently developing its own rollerball mouse device called
the Telefunken Rollkugel. By 1982, the first commercial mouse began to find its
way to the market. Logitech began selling one for $299. It was somewhere in
this period that Steve Jobs visited Xerox PARC and saw the mouse working with a
WIMP interface (windows, icons, menus, pointers).
Some time after that, Jobs invited Bill Gates to see
the mouse-based GUI interface he was working on. Apple released the Lisa in
1983 with a mouse, and then equipped the Macintosh with the mouse in 1984.
Microsoft announced its Windows OS shortly after the release of the Lisa and
began selling Windows 1.0 in 1985. It was not until 1995, with the release of Microsoft’s
Windows 95 operating system, that the mouse became ubiquitous. The Long Nose
describes the 30-year span required for devices like the mouse to go from
invention to ubiquity.”
From the Webb and Ashley book: "Beginning kinect
programming with the microsoft kinect sdk"