In fact it required a rework of pretty much every computer from the transistors on up, which is just too much to ask for a lousy 25 to 30 percent improvement. This led to Cringely's Fifth Law of Technology, that people will a adopt a new technology at almost any cost if it improves performance by 100 times and they'll adopt it at some cost if it improves performance by 10 times, but if the payback is less than 10X, the technology has to be free or it will die. Many ideas aren't based so much in technology as in the whole idea of getting rich. Here, too, there is a tendency to ask too much from the rest of us. People are lazy.
Whole industries are lazy.
So don't expect us to walk across a road, remember your name, or do much of anything as consumers to make your idea fly if it doesn't involve sex or the successful avoidance of labor. As a rule, capital is hard to get, too. Forget the Good Old Days of one to two years ago when newspaper stories suggested that any idiot who could walk down Sand Hill Road could get venture funding. Those Good Old Days never existed. There are at any moment in Silicon Valley about 10,000 business plans in circulation, looking for money.