Page 81 - The Resilient Organization

68 Part Two: Step 1. Managing the Consequences of Past Performance

PC, and it offered protection against data theft. Today, its green credentials
in saving electricity would be even more appreciated.
Although the Sun Ray’s failure to generate significant wealth is a common
new technology story, we think the reasons behind this failure point to an
often-neglected but important culprit. The Sun Ray failed, in part, as a prod-
uct launch because its predecessor, the much-hyped JavaStation (Sun’s hoped-
for Microsoft killer), had been an engineering disaster. It was JavaStation’s
prior failure (discussed in the following section) that crippled the Sun Ray
internally at Sun Microsystems, independent of the Sun Ray’s own potential
in the marketplace, and it was Sun’s inability to recover from the trauma of
JavaStation’s failure that prevented it from marketing the Sun Ray effectively,
thus leaving open questions about its ultimate viability in the marketplace.
Before we can explore how the Sun Ray’s emergent story led us into the
concept of innovation trauma, it is important to first understand this case.
The next section provides a brief synopsis of the effects of JavaStation’s
legacy on the Sun Ray over an eight-year period. Beyond the difficulty of
gaining acceptance for new technologies in the marketplace, which has been
addressed by many authors in innovation literature (for example,
Christensen, 1997; Moore, 1991), we wish to draw attention to the reasons
why learning from failed innovation doesn’t come easily, and, in particular,
how prior innovation failures may get in the way of effectively organizing
behind a new, related innovation (see Huy, 1999). Thus our explanation is
not external—that is, a matter of user adoption—but internal—that is, an
issue of emotional comfort and trust with the new innovation (see Massey,
2002, about the need to integrate emotional components in social analysis).

THE EMERGENCE OF POSTTRAUMATIC DISORDERS

Development of the Sun Ray was begun in 1997 within Sun Labs, Sun’s
R&D laboratories, by six engineers primarily interested in multimedia tech-
nologies. These were experienced, talented engineers with complementary
skills who had worked together on several projects before beginning work
on what would become the Sun Ray.
Although the initial idea behind the Sun Ray can be traced to several
origins, at least one spark was the existence of the JavaStation, a similar