Chuck House talks about where the HP logic-analyzer product line came from -- a classic solution-in-search-of-a-problem scenario, but one where it turned out that there actually was a problem to be solved.? (Warning: very long.)

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http://www.hpmemory.org/timeline/chuck_house/lsa_birth_03.htm

"We'd already spent $2 million, with a burn rate that had to escalate for our next phase. We were, at best, two years from delivery. The Tek engineers told me that they had spent $34 million dollars and seven years of effort, to get to this (IEEE) show with an incomplete line. Whew!

Worse, my team was having trouble debugging our own prototype scheduled for a division review in four weeks. That review would be with two guys notoriously chary about poor engineering detail execution - Packard and Hewlett, headed to Colorado Springs in late April. It was not hard to figure out what to do. I had to cancel Next Gen.

The first problem was that I was in love with it..."

-- john, KE5FX

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