Reminds me of a guy I once knew. He was unemployed and as far as I could work out - a sponge on everyone he knew, including his parents and girlfriend. He kept telling me that he hated 'real' jobs and wanted to be a writer.

I asked him what he had written. He couldn't answer me. This struck me as very odd (I was young). Of all the things in the world to do, writing has to have the lowest cost of entry. Just pick up a piece of paper and start writing. Of course, getting published is another matter altogether, but you would think writing something - anything- and submitting it for publishing would be the first step to being a writer.

Back to the article - I think they gloss over the utility of a concept a little too much. Certainly for car manufacturers, the example cited, launching concept cars is a very good way of gauging reaction to a certain style or type of vehicle. It's also a very long bow to string to say that GM is bankrupt because it spent time designing concepts while the Japanese spent time improving their cars. The Japanese love wacky concepts as much as the next place, and have created many concept cars with no thought as to production. It's an important way of introducing (and de-sensitising) the public to a new design language before it reaches a production model. And there are many cars which have been built as concepts and unveiled to the public, only for the public to demand it be built by placing down real money. There's plenty of examples where frustrated designers have used a secret concept car to ambush their management by conducting a very public focus group.

And onto software - launching simple prototypes and concepts is a very good way of testing the market for an idea.

So yes, real artists ship, but they also dabble as well. Smart dabbling is the right way to go. Perhaps if Apple had launched a concept Newton it mightn't have been such a monumental flop.

Disagree. This is not binary unless you are a small shop. Operational activities produce tangible products via shipping. R&D Departments produce concepts.

Concepts as a "product" are just a useful marketing opportunity on the back of your research. Everything else that went into the research, and all the learnings that come out of it, flow into your future products, even if its years down the track.

The two examples they provided don't hold water either. Nokia and Microsoft produce concepts: yes. They both have significant research departments, it's to be expected. It completely discounts their market share (historical or current) and the sheer volume of released products.

Any business that grows to a point will start doing concept work and research. It's the same as any creative or product process - sometimes you have to bang through a whole lot of useless concepts before you have worked through enough ideas to understand which parts of which end point work as a whole.

Concepts are basically like any other form of failure - they're the pile of learnings that help you get closer in the next iteration.

This is a very weak essay. Here's the conclusion, or "Kontra's law":

> A commercial company’s ability to innovate is inversely proportional to its proclivity to publicly release conceptual products.

This is nonsense since conceptual products are innovative by definition.

What the author maybe is trying to say is that working on concept products isn't a good idea in the business sense. But the examples he gives are all companies that have been wildly successful: GM, Microsoft and Nokia. While those companies' performance declined, there might be dozens of different reasons for that.

The author severely overestimates how much of a risk the iPhone was for Apple, and how unexpectedly it changed the way we interact with mobile devices. He is forgetting the iPod Touch, which was Apple's "concept" model (that actually shipped).

If the response to the iPod Touch wasn't as positive as it was, the iPhone may have never been released, or would've been delayed until a few more iterations of the iPod Touch product line.

"Although Nokia and Microsoft gave us an endless supply of concept products over the years, they haven’t produced, for example, anything like the TiVo, the iPod, the iPhone, OS X, the iTunes App Store, or created brand new user experience paradigms, transformed calcified markets, captured the imagination of people, and so on. They didn’t have the organizational and intellectual discipline to go from concept to product."

Pure fanboyism. Nothing like OSX? Windows isn't like OSX? It's a gui system for running programs on your personal computer. Nothing like the TiVo, iPod, iPhone? Well... they see themselves more as a software company. Apple doesn't have a product that can even remotely compete with MS Office - like it or hate it, it is MS's 'killer app'. Transform calcified markets? MS IS the calcified market! They had so much of the market there was nowhere for them to go but down. Captured the imagination of people? People being led by the nose to say "ooh, shiny glass and brushed metal" are showing the same level of imagination as the people playing in the MS-corned PC games market.

"Real artists ship, dabblers create concept products" Nonsense from the outset. Unless, of course, you think that a painter of masterpieces should never have once produced a preliminary sketch.

Agree AAPL is one of the most innovative company yet they don't release any "concept" products but tht's probably because they are fiercely secretive about their new products and major updates. Nothing to do with real artists shipping.

> "One of the latest Microsoft concept products is Surface" That's no longer the case. The surface is going to be a real product that you will be able to buy this year. Cost ~2K. I think this was announced at the CES this year.

http://www.engadget.com/2011/01/05/microsoft-shows-off-next-...