Steven Sasson finished a working digital camera in a Kodak lab in 1975. It weighed about eight pounds, wrote a hundredth‑of‑a‑megapixel black‑and‑white image onto cassette tape, and took roughly twenty‑three seconds to do it. Sasson has said management's reaction was, in effect, that the thing was cute and that he should not tell anyone about it. Kodak did eventually sell digital cameras, and by the mid‑2000s it was among the largest sellers of them in the United States. It filed for bankruptcy protection in 2012 anyway.

The failure was not that Kodak never shipped. It was that Kodak shipped after the open questions had already been settled — after the file formats, the retail channel, the sharing habits, and the customer's sense of what a photograph costs had all been decided by companies that spent those years in the market while Kodak protected film. Shipping early is valuable for a reason that has little to do with being first: it starts the clock on information you cannot obtain any other way. A prototype answers questions about the product. A shipment answers questions about the market, and those are the expensive ones.

The trap on the other side is treating a launch as a verdict rather than an instrument. A team that ships early and then spends a year defending what it shipped has paid the full cost of exposure without collecting the return, and the record is full of pioneers who established a category and then watched a fast follower read their results and build the version that won. What separates the two cases is whether the release was designed to produce a specific answer. Cut the next version until a disappointing result costs a week rather than a year, and write down the question it is supposed to settle before it goes out. The advantage was never in being early; it was in being early enough to still change your mind.