Decade

I still remember the day we made the decision to deprioritize the feature I had spent 2 years building.

I joined the Adobe Illustrator team primarily to help build features for web design—and one of my venture bets was SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics). Adobe was an early supporter of SVG, especially considering the rise of Macromedia Flash at the time (the shocking Adobe/Macromedia merger was still years away).

With the launch of Illustrator 10, we effectively turned Illustrator into a full SVG editor with the ability to both read and write SVG files, and we had a strong vision for taking it further. But adoption in the market for SVG was painfully slow, and designers were flocking to Flash. As we explored what features to build in the next version of Illustrator (which would come to be known as Illustrator CS), I had to make the painful call to shift focus away from SVG and turn to build features supporting Flash.

We believed open-source SVG was better for the web, but the world wasn’t ready for SVG just yet.

One of the reasons we believed so strongly in the future of SVG was Japan. Due to its strong typography support, Illustrator was incredibly popular there, and we had our finger on the pulse in that market.

At the time, Japan was a global leader in the mobile phone market, and due to its small file size and scalability, SVG (Flash Lite too) was being considered for early smartphone operating systems and interfaces. Because Illustrator was so popular in that part of the world, adding SVG support made a ton of sense.

At the time, I thought my Motorola RAZR flip phone was cool, but the phones coming out of Japan had—get this—cameras (we’re talking years before iPhone).

Except the cameras weren’t there for taking selfies.

At the supermarket checkout, you hear the familiar beep as a laser reads traditional UPC barcodes, which can store up to 20 alphanumeric characters. But Japanese alphabets like Kanji and Kana are far more complex, and the QR code was developed to support storing richer information. Adding a camera to your phone effectively turned it into a QR code scanner, making it possible to leverage the richness of what those codes supported, such as the ability to process payments. It was a fantastic and novel idea–and I was convinced QR codes were going to take the US by storm.

But like many great ideas, the world wasn’t ready for QR codes just yet.

Jim Henson shared a similar sentiment when he initially pitched his idea for the Muppet Show—the TV industry simply wasn’t ready to accept that audiences would watch a 30-minute show with puppets.

Big ideas often require momentum. In the case of the QR code, it would be several years before iOS and Android added built-in QR code support for their native camera apps (meaning people didn’t have to download and install dedicated apps just to scan them). Then the COVID pandemic forced restaurants to use QR codes that linked to menus and online ordering. Then Coinbase aired a SuperBowl ad featuring a QR code dancing around the screen, which was so popular it crashed their site.

And then, according to Michael Bungay Stanier, it happened – QR codes finally started working!

Here’s the thing: QR codes have always worked. After 10 years, with a whole lot of help in terms of culture and momentum, the world was just finally ready to use them.

Apparently, the magic number is 10 years.

Ten years after the release of Illustrator 10, SVG was finally supported natively in all web browsers. It took a ton of effort across the industry and a huge movement towards web standards and the cultural ideas embraced by Web 2.0. And Jim Henson said it took a full 10 years for his Muppets to gain enough visibility and momentum before the Muppet Show was ready for a network to bet on.

Bill Gates famously said we overestimate what we can accomplish in a year, and underestimate what we can accomplish in a decade.

The upshot? Our big ideas are worth pursuing. But we should recalibrate our expectations in terms of how much effort it takes for big ideas to come to light.

Take a deep breath, keep at it, and count to ten.

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Books referenced in this edition:

• The Long Game: How to Be a Long-Term Thinker in a Short-Term World by Dorie Clark
• Jim Henson: The Biography by Brian Jay Jones
• How To Begin: Start Doing Something That Matters by Michael Bungay Stanier

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Read. Learn. Share. is Curated Curiosity™. I regularly share quotes with brief commentary on LinkedIn from things I read, watch, and learn. This series takes us on a journey that goes deeper on top-of-mind topics and themes.