What do Apple and Pure Digital (the maker of the Flip Video camera) have in common? They both have products on the market renowned for their usability, partly due to a focus on the essentials. But they share something else: failure. Big time failure. TechCrunch takes a look at the predecessors of the Flip and concludes that:

Pure Digital wasn’t always selling hit products - it took seven years for the company to get it right. In the meantime, they launched products that just weren’t quite the right thing at the right time.

And while Apple is by now considered the pinnacle of product innovation, design and usability, the company has had it's fair share of failed products, that by now journalists are of course very willing to highlight (Forbes, Wired, MacLife). But appropriately, the Wired article is entitled 'Learning From Failure', because the question arises whether the iPhone would have been the iPhone if it had not been preceded by the Apple Newton and the Motorola ROKR. Then again, Apple's still struggling with AppleTV, and that was preceded by Macintosh TV. So I guess that failing doesn't offer any guarantees either.