When Bill Gates was a young programmer he worked for Steve Jobs and Apple. This was when Apple had begun work on the Macintosh and the first commercially available GUI.
Apple didn't however invent the Windows, Icons, Mouse and Pointer WIMP system. Xerox did at their PARC facility in Palo Alto where a young Steve Jobs was mooching around seeing what the big boys were doing.
The truth was that the bosses at Xerox didn't think much of WIMPS and thought it was a stupid gimmick. Certainly no good for real computers so they basically let Jobs walk out with the ideas for free. Later, after Microsoft had developed Windows 1.0 Jobs let fly at Gates, accusing him of robbing ideas from Apple whereupon the shrewd Gates replied along the lines of: "We both went into our neighbor's house to rob him. You got the television and I got the stereo"
Kodak were one of the first companies to develop digital imaging. The bosses of the company however were confident in the fact that film emulsions would always be higher resolutions and richer color than digital sensors could produce. Oh how wrong they were and how much that lack of foresight cost them.
There must be a moral to this story somewhere. Perhaps it is that no boss should ever let go of his options when it comes to an interesting but seemingly unpromising technology.
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