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Case Study: Innovation Trauma and Resilience 67

considered a revolution in desktop computing: The Sun Ray redefined what
3
“desktop computing” meant. If you worked on a Sun Ray, you could hop
from terminal to terminal—around the world—picking up where you last
left off in a matter of seconds because your desktop was virtually and
instantly created through the network connection. New software upgrades
would appear automatically each time you logged in. If someone stole your
Sun Ray, he or she would get a hunk of metal and plastic with exactly zero
proprietary information in it.
The Sun Ray exhibited some other benefits too. When Sun Micro-
systems switched from Sun workstations to Sun Rays in 2000, the company
saved more than $2 million in electricity costs alone because the Sun Ray
demanded so little power to run. Its sleek design was impressive too, and
the product appealed to many. A number of executives have told us the Sun
Ray had perhaps the best demo of a product they had ever seen. Otherwise
critical journalists liked it too: for example, read the glowing review of the
demo by Rich Karlgaard in Forbes, January 2003. 4
Still, despite the high hopes, the Sun Ray never sold anywhere near the
100,000 units Sun had expected in the first year, much less the 1 million Sun
forecasted for year 2. Throughout its first six years of existence, the Sun
Ray struggled to land even one significant reference customer to tout its
magnificence. In fact, if you don’t work in the high-tech industry, you have
probably never even heard of the Sun Ray. In many ways, you can add it to
the pile of other novel computing ideas (like Apple Computer’s Newton) as
yet another radical innovation that failed to generate significant wealth for
its creators.
When it comes to radical innovation, we follow the definition put for-
ward by Dewar and Dutton (1986: 1422–1423): “Radical innovations . . .
represent revolutionary changes in technology” as well as ideas, practices,
or material artifacts that are “perceived to be new by the relevant unit of
adoption” and “represent clear departures from existing practice.” The Sun
Ray represented a marked departure from Microsoft-dominated personal-
computing technology at a time when it perhaps was not too late to intro-
duce competing technology infrastructures to rival PCs. Furthermore, its
target customers were not individuals but organizations such as call centers
or health-care providers that required cheap, reliable computing power. The
Sun Ray was much less costly to manage as a computing solution than a