>Lytro failed to do this. Just because the underlying science is complicated doesn't make the tech "ahead of its time" due to the fact that maybe the tech, as implemented, just isn't what people want, now or in the future!
As we speaking abstractly? What theoretically could be if we didn't know anything about the tech?
Because otherwise this specific tech is very much an "ahead of its time" technology, whether consumers adopted it or not.
Besides, consumer adoption is a BS test for a technology being ahead of its time.
Failure in the market can simply be because the implementation was not good, or the marketing wasn't, or the support was lacking, or the price too high, or 200 other reasons, that don't depend on the technology not being ahead of its time.
The high price was primary due to them trying to offset the high RD cost vs the actual hardware cost. Google might be able to sell it cheaper if they can get ROI with other applications.
As we speaking abstractly? What theoretically could be if we didn't know anything about the tech?
Because otherwise this specific tech is very much an "ahead of its time" technology, whether consumers adopted it or not.
Besides, consumer adoption is a BS test for a technology being ahead of its time.
Failure in the market can simply be because the implementation was not good, or the marketing wasn't, or the support was lacking, or the price too high, or 200 other reasons, that don't depend on the technology not being ahead of its time.