Bad Ideas Never Die

The automobile was invented by Karl Benz in 1885 and the airplane by the Wright brothers in 1903.

Just three years later the first flying car story appeared. And in the 98 years since then, flying cars have received copious coverage in the nation's media.

In 1945, Ted Hall introduced his flying car, a development that was received by a wildly enthusiastic public. Roads would become obsolete, traffic jams a thing of the past. Every major aircraft manufacturer hoped to cash in on Hall's invention. The lucky buyer was Convair. In July of 1946, Convair introduced Hall's flight of fancy as the Convair Model 118 ConvAirCar. Company management confidently predicted minimum sales of 160,000 units a year. In spite of the hype, only two ConvAirCars were ever built.

In 1949, Moulton Taylor introduced the Aerocar, a sporty runabout with detachable wings and tail. The Aerocar received a tremendous amount of publicity at the time. The Ford Motor Company considered mass-producing it, figuring they could sell 25,000 a year.

Bad ideas never really die. In its November 9, 1998 issue, Fortune devoted a two-page spread to the Aerocar. "People dream of this," said the Aerocar's current owner. "They want to get off the highway and get lost in the clouds."

As recently as August 2, 2002, The New York Times carried a major story (nearly a full page) on the Taylor Aerocar. "A car with wings," said the Times "is many a flyboy's dream machine."

Then there's Paul Moller who has spent four decades developing the M400 Skycar. Today, $200 million, 43 patents and three wives later, his dream has still not taken off, although it has received extensive coverage in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Forbes, Investor's Business Daily and two big stories in USA Today, including one just last month.

Convergence captures the imagination, but divergence captures the market. Today we have many types of airplanes (jet planes, prop planes, helicopters) and many types of automobiles (sedans, convertibles, station wagons, minivans, sport-utility vehicles.)

No flying cars though.

Why divergence and not convergence? Because convergence requires compromise and divergence satisfies the evolving needs of different market segments.

An automobile needs to be heavy enough to stay on the highway; an airplane needs to be light enough to take off from a runway. No flying car will ever be as drivable as an automobile or as flyable as an airplane.

The autoboat, another convergence concept that has been floating around for decades, suffers from the same disease. "Drives like a boat, floats like a car," is the consumer's verdict. Convergence has become an obsession in the high-tech and consumer electronic industries, especially at Microsoft. "Has William H. Gates become the Captain Ahab of the information age?" asked The New York Times. "Mr. Gates' white whale remains an elusive digital set-top cable box that his company, the Microsoft Corporation, is hoping will re-create the personal computer industry by blending the PC, the Internet and the television set into a leviathan living-room entertainment and information machine."

In 1999, Microsoft pumped $5 billion into AT&T and secured a contract to install its TV software in as many as 10 million AT&T set-top boxes. Not a single box made it to the top of a television set serviced by an AT&T cable system and since AT&T is now out of the cable business, the contract is just another convergence dead end.

Irreconcilable differences will always doom such convergence concepts. Television is a "passive" medium; the Internet is an "active" medium. A couch potato will never put up with the complexities