David Epstein

They end up selling 3,000 units of their personal communicator.

When it comes out, it has so many features that the battery life's terrible.

The user experience is choppy.

It's expensive.

It's confusing.

But there was one...

that I think kind of encapsulated their problems.

And it was this guy, this engineer named Steve Perlman, whose job was to create a calendar function for their operating system.

And so he creates it to run from 1904 to 2096 and checks it in and is like, all right, I'm done.

And then one of the managers comes to him and says, look, somebody might build apps that go way back in history or way into the future.

You have to make it longer than that.

So he opens it up again.

He goes back to year one.

Fine, thinks he's done.

Then another team comes to him and says, look, why are you starting with that arbitrary religious context?

You should go back to the beginning of astronomical time.

So he builds the calendar app

From the beginning of the universe, way into the future.

And as he said, if he had stuck from 1904 to 2096, it would have been four lines of code and he could have moved on.

And instead it dragged on for months.