No-one wants to say 'I told you so' (well some people do, but they are typically mean spirited), but sometimes you have to say something similar. Something like, 'Uurm - I did mention this might be an issue a while back' or 'didn't this issue come up before?'
Sometimes it is necessary to say. Sometimes it is important to look back and acknowledge missed or ignored warnings. That's how we learn.
Five years ago I bought my first OneWheel XR. It's an electric one wheeled (clue's in the name) skateboard sold by a company called Future Motion in California (it was actually invented by a plucky brit,there's another story here about inventing something awesome, but someone else running with the idea, improving it and making a mint but that's for another day).
Anyway, the OneWheel XR changed my life, in a good way. While I had a couple of falls, in the main, it has been a joy to ride, to walk the dogs, to race through the woods, swoop down the roads - it's like floating, it's akin to surfing inland - it is the best thing ever! But it's dangerous, as I pointed out in the video I posted five years ago.
I got quite a lot of criticism from the OneWheel community for this video, and admittedly, the title is a bit click-batey, but the underlying point was valid. In fact - I was spot-on, as now, Future Motion are recalling 300,000 devices and pushing out a CRITICAL software update to all of its other products. Fortunately, Future Motion have a solid OTA mechanism in place to enable the update. What is the update? A Haptic Buzz which WARNS users if they are asking too much from their board. Something I was talking about 5 years ago.
Imagine the impact of that to a startup... Let that sink in.
And I guess that's my point - it's critical, when coming up with something innovative and cool, to think through all the 'worst case' scenarios and the impact of those 'scenarios' on your end users.
In the main, the risk of death is not something most of us innovators need to concern ourselves with, but we must make an effort to predict issues and build-in mechanisms to mitigate anything which could, at best, make people moan about our products at the pub and, at worse, - kill someone.
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