The art of failure

"It is not a disgrace to fail. Failing is one of the greatest arts in the world.”
Charles F. Kettering  (American engineer, inventor of the electric starter, 1876-1958)

Building on the theme of my previous blog – how does a payments player make success out of failure? Innovation is rarely a single step process – In the cards world with multiple choices of technology it is unlikely that every choice you make will be a winner.

In 1995 Microsoft came up with BOB. This was codenamed ‘Utopia’ and was designed as a non-technical interface to computers.

It was not a success – the computers available could not run it – it did not achieve its goals – indeed PC World magazine has named it the world’s worst software program of all time.

There were some legacy outputs of this product – possibly the world changing one was that Bill Gates met his wife Melissa through this project.  The font Comic Sans was invented for BOB – this is so hated by typographers – but loved by users. (There is even a web site devoted to hating Comic Sans.)

Do you remember the paper clip that popped up in Microsoft office? That was a direct descendant of BOB technology. Urban myth also says that the data used by Microsoft to verify Windows XP was in fact an encrypted version of BOB.

So from a disaster rose some unlikely pointers to the future.

So how does this relate to the payments world? There will be failures – remember SET – the Secure Electronic Transaction. This was going to be the de-facto standard for payments – but was thwarted by the obstacles of getting client software to client PCs and a complex installation of payments in the merchants.

However banks and companies that participated in the SET experience learnt a lot – mostly on how not to do things – and these lessons went into technologies such as Verified by VISA. Although some of the barriers to NFC are not dissimilar to SET – so maybe we haven’t learnt by history?

In reality all banks will have a few ‘BOB’s – and they must learn from them – however let’s hope they are not all just dating sites for CEOs!