From The Fall Of Failure, Success Can Take Flight

Diana Nyad swims less than two miles off Key West, Fla., on Monday.

Andy Newman/AFP/Getty Images

Diana Nyad's successful swim from Cuba to Key West on Monday was made all the sweeter because she had tried — and failed — four times before.

She learned you should "never, ever give up," but she also learned some practical lessons to help beat the elements in those earlier attempts. Out of failure, she innovated. And out of innovation, she succeeded.

"In my interviews with explorers, over and over again, so many of them said, really, the only failure that counts is dying," says National Geographic staff writer, Hannah Bloch, wrote about failure for the September issue of the magazine.

Up And Away

Bloch tells All Things Considered host Jacki Lyden about the 19th-century Swedish patent clerk who became a polar aeronaut and national hero, Salomon August Andrée.

"This was an era when the arctic and the North Pole were really unchartered territory. And many people had tried to reach the North Pole overland and had died trying," Bloch says.

To circumvent the challenges of others, Andrée took a completely different path: He decided to fly there in a hydrogen balloon. The idea was so bold that he even convinced the King of Sweden and Alfred Nobel to back his project. He and a small crew took flight on July 11, 1897.

Members of S. A. Andrée's 1897 journey survey their downed vessel. This photo was recovered from a camera when their remains were found 33 years later.

Courtesy of Grenna Museum, Andréexpeditionen Polarcenter/Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography/National Geographic Members of S. A. Andrée's 1897 journey survey their downed vessel. This photo was recovered from a camera when their remains were found 33 years later.

Courtesy of Grenna Museum, Andréexpeditionen Polarcenter/Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography/National Geographic

They never made it to the North Pole; their remains were discovered some three decades later. The tuxedo he'd brought along to wear on his triumphant return remained packed away, unused.

But their failure served as motivation for many other polar aeronauts. Italian explorer Umberto Nobile eventually made the first successful trip in 1926. He, too, traveled by air, but flew a dirigible instead of a hydrogen balloon.

Coming Back From The Edge

It took others' persistence to learn from Andrée's mistakes, just as he had learned from those before him. Some risk-takers, though, are fortunate enough to learn from their own failures.

American anthropologist primatologist Agustin Fuentes, for example, changed the course of his career after getting lost in the jungles of Borneo.

Fuentes had been trekking deep into the jungle to catch a glimpse of the elusive maroon leaf monkey when he realized he was in trouble. Being lost was dangerous in a region full of leopards and venomous snakes.

"I was actually helped out of the jungle by an orangutan who came down, got me, and walked me back into camp," he said in a Google+ Hangout sponsored by National Geographic.

Primatologist Agustin Fuentes turned his sights on the macaque after getting lost in search of a much more elusive monkey.

Lintao Zhang/Getty Images Primatologist Agustin Fuentes turned his sights on the macaque after getting lost in search of a much more elusive monkey.

Lintao Zhang/Getty Images

"But the punch line here is that early in my career, I wanted to study those things on the edge, the last remaining members of a species or something like that," Fuentes says. "I failed, so my experience there gave me the hint that ... maybe what you should be looking at is not these last few things living out there, but those primates that do OK with people."

Since then, Fuentes has made a successful career researching a much less timid primate: the macaque.

"Think about what the world would look like if there was no such thing as failure," National Geographic's Bloch says. "What would be the point of doing anything? I think failure gives it what gives success its meaning."

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Put Office on the iPad for tablet success, analyst advises

Armed with a $900 million argument, an analyst has raised the Office-on-iPad banner, saying that the flop of the Surface RT gives Microsoft a chance to make billions in lemonade from its lemon.

" 'Protecting' Windows RT by keeping Office off of Apple's iPad and Android tablets isn't working," said J.P. Gownder, a principal analyst at Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester Research, in a recent blog. "It's instead creating risk for Office as users find other ways of getting things done."

Gownder tied Microsoft's recent $900 million write-down of the Surface RT by Microsoft to a renewed call for the company to sell its ubiquitous productivity suite on rivals' tablets.

"The biggest asset Windows RT has is actually based on an app that Microsoft hasn't released—Office for Apple's iPad," Gownder wrote, referring to the operating system that powers the Surface RT. Windows RT bundles Office Home & Student 2013 RT, which includes touch-based versions of Excel, OneNote, PowerPoint and Word that run in a special "desktop" mode.

Outlook will join that roster this fall when Microsoft ships Windows 8.1 for RT.

Gownder's unsolicited advice to Microsoft wasn't out of the blue; a horde of analysts and pundits have called on the Redmond, Washington, software company to pull the trigger on Office for tablets powered by Apple's iOS or Google's Android.

But last week's $900 million write-down, which Microsoft said was to cover steep discounts and excess inventory, was the proof that the software giant's Windows RT/Surface RT pitch had fallen on deaf ears.

In turn, that made Microsoft's presumed strategy of withholding Office from other tablet platforms indefensible.

Microsoft's beleaguered Surface RT

But Gownder, like other analysts before him, also pointed out that Microsoft may have already missed an opportunity. "Microsoft's problem [is that] workers and consumers are already exceptionally productive with their tablets. [And] there's a hidden danger of holding out on Office for iPad and Android tablets—competitors tend to fill the gap and users establish different habits," Gownder said.

He cited examples, including Apple's iWork—which Apple will take to the Web later this year—Google's Quickoffice, Evernote and other mobile apps that users have taken up in the absence of Office.

Gownder contended that Microsoft could recoup its Surface RT losses, and make more besides, if it offered Office on iPad. "If 10 percent of the 140 million iPad owners bought Office for $99.99, Microsoft would earn $1.4 billion in top line revenue, or $500 million more than the Windows RT write-down last quarter," he said.

Gownder may have based his math on the $100 annual subscription price for Office 365 Home Premium, the consumer-grade Office rent-not-buy plan. Assuming Microsoft does deliver Office for the iPad and Android tablets, it will most likely follow the same strategy it used last month for Office Mobile on the iPhone, requiring a valid Office 365 account to run the app.

Others have recently called on Microsoft to focus less on Windows and more on other parts of its portfolio, including Office, in light of last week's 6 percent decline in Windows Division revenue, the $900 million Surface RT charge and the continued slide in PC shipments.

"Documents remain essential and ubiquitous to all of the world outside of Silicon Valley," noted Ben Thompson, until earlier this month a partner marketing manager in Microsoft's Windows app team. Thompson now writes on his Stratechery website. "An independent Office division should be delivering experiences on every meaningful platform. Office 365 is a great start that would be even better with a version for iPad."

In Microsoft's recent corporate reorganization, however, Office will not be an independent division—it is, more or less, in the current structure—but will instead be within the new Applications and Services Engineering Group, which will include Office, Microsoft's Bing search engine and Skype.

The company may well decide to continue resisting the potential of new Office revenue to keep Windows afloat. In the quarter that ended June 30, the Microsoft Business Division (MBD), whose biggest money maker is Office, recorded revenue of $6.43 billion, 1.7% more than the same period the year before, largely on sales to enterprises and in the face of a dismal quarter in PC shipments.

Microsoft may think the at-hand revenue is the smarter choice than more money accompanied by the risk of damaging Windows 8's tablet chances. But that would be a mistake.

"By ceding ground to competing [productivity] apps, Microsoft is encouraging users to investigate other platforms," Gownder said.

Gregg Keizer covers Microsoft, security issues, Apple, Web browsers and general technology breaking news.
More by Gregg Keizer, Computerworld

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