40 Years, A Billion Units: Extrodentiary Achievements

This week’s been another difficult one both on Wall Street (and its international equivalents) and in corporate boardrooms and development labs around the world. As such, I thought I’d do my part to end it on an up note. I hope you don’t mind

Tuesday marked the 40^th anniversary of the first public demonstration of a computer mouse by researcher Doug Engelbart. And last Wednesday, leading mouse supplier Logitech announced a closely related achievement; the manufacture of the company’s 1 billionth device. Reflective of the exponential spread of computing around the globe, while it took 11 years for Logitech to make its first 100,000,000 units and another 11 years to make 400,000,000 more, the second half-billion threshold came about in a mere five years’ time.

To celebrate its achievement, Logitech did something that was both unexpected by and delightful to me; it published a gallery (PDF) of various mouse design ideas that made it to prototype form but that the company subsequently decided not to take to production. With thanks to Joel at Boing Boing Gadgets, I’ll reprint below some of his favorites from the Logitech documentation and send you to his post for the rest of the summary:

Logitech could have made some snide remark about what a bunch of impractical lame-brains its engineers were, and that thank goodness marketing stepped in to rein in the technology ‘creeping elegance’ and focus the team on products that could actually make money. But Logitech didn’t do that. Instead, here’s what Rory Dooley, Senior Vice President of Control Devices, did say:

As we look to the future and what it holds for the mouse, I’ve tasked our product-development team with continuing to assess new technologies and how they might enhance the human-computer interface. No idea is too far-fetched, from touch technology to mind control. If you take a look at some of our ideas that never made it to manufacturing, you’ll see that our engineers can be pretty creative.

Celebrating your stumbles; how refreshing is that? In an era when R&D budgets are being slashed to the bone, if not completely eliminated, and when every new product proposal is expected to be at least a double, if not a home run, Logitech rejoices in the risk-taking that inevitably leads to the occasional foul ball or strikeout…but which also encourages occasional grand slams that probably would have never happened with a more oppressive team.

If I were a more cynical sort, I might deduce that this was nothing more than a smooth PR campaign by the company, and that the environment within its walls is far more repressive than it’s letting on (readers?). But I suspect (hope?) that reality matches the hype…hey, after all, it’s almost Christmas. And so, until I’m presented with damning evidence to the contrary, I prefer to believe that yes, Virginia, there is a Logitech.

Kudos to you, Doug Engelbart, for your compelling vision of what a low-cost and efficient computer interface could be. Kudos to you, Rory Dooley, as well as to your predecessors and (hopefully) successors, for giving your engineering teams enough rope not to hang themselves but to do what they do best: transforming Doug Engelbart’s enduring vision into many generations’ worth of compelling products.

And a happy weekend to you, dear readers. Squeak.