Why real inventions meet resistance
Land spent his career asking people to accept things they had not imagined. His own record both supports the line and breaks it.
An invention that is quickly accepted will turn out to be a rather trivial alteration of something that has already existed.
Victor McElheny’s biography of the Polaroid founder places this remark at a shareholders’ meeting in 1975, when Land was defending years of spending on new instant cameras. The argument is straightforward. People judge new things by comparing them with what they already know. A product that fits an existing category is easy to judge and easy to buy. A product that creates a new category has nothing to be compared with, and so it waits.
Land had a recent example in mind. The SX-70, a folding camera that pushed out color prints which developed in the light, reached stores in 1972 after years of costly development. Its first couple of years were troubled by production problems and high costs, and critics asked whether the money had been wasted. By 1975 it was beginning to sell widely.
Land’s own career gives one clear exception. When the first Polaroid camera went on sale in a Boston department store in November 1948, the stock sold out on the first day. Photographs that developed in a minute were not a trivial alteration of anything, and buyers took to them at once. Quick acceptance does not always mean the idea was small.
It also gives a harder case. In 1977 Polaroid launched Polavision, an instant home movie system, after heavy investment. It was an original piece of engineering and it failed, because video tape was arriving at the same moment and did everything customers wanted with less fuss. Resistance to Polavision was not a sign of its depth. It was a correct judgment by the market.
That is the danger in the line. Read one way, it is a useful warning against expecting fast praise for original work. Read another way, it becomes a comfort for anyone whose product is being ignored, and a reason never to ask whether the ignoring is deserved. Slow acceptance is consistent with a great invention and with a poor one, so it cannot tell them apart.