For all I know they might have been "thinking" about it,
but why didn't they do more than think about it if it was
that obvious at the time that capacitive touchscreen
phones would dominate the future?
Note that obviousness of an idea and obviousness of the quality of that idea are two entirely different things. It is possible for two companies to have an obvious idea at the same time, but one doesn't think it's quite obvious that it's a good idea while the other does.
For example, many of us here on HN would agree that tv/movie video content streamed over the internet was an obvious idea even in the late 90s. But it wasn't necessarily an obviously good idea at the time.
Maybe you would agree (or not, doesn't matter, the point stands, just pick a different company) that Netflix was the company that made watching videos online enjoyable. Should they enjoy a monopoly on streaming video content over the internet simply because they had the vision to decide that the idea was obviously good enough to pursue at the time that they did?
If they had patented streaming video, or something smaller, like auto-detecting your available bandwidth to optimize delivery quality, would we be so accepting of them trying to destroy Hulu or Amazon VOD in order to protect that "innovation"?
For example, many of us here on HN would agree that tv/movie video content streamed over the internet was an obvious idea even in the late 90s. But it wasn't necessarily an obviously good idea at the time.
Maybe you would agree (or not, doesn't matter, the point stands, just pick a different company) that Netflix was the company that made watching videos online enjoyable. Should they enjoy a monopoly on streaming video content over the internet simply because they had the vision to decide that the idea was obviously good enough to pursue at the time that they did?
If they had patented streaming video, or something smaller, like auto-detecting your available bandwidth to optimize delivery quality, would we be so accepting of them trying to destroy Hulu or Amazon VOD in order to protect that "innovation"?