A Past that Tells of the Future

“Innovation needs failure.” No, it’s not a slogan but the insightful words of the website of a small museum in Helsingborg, Sweden, which deserves rather more consideration than it gets. In its simplicity, that statement captures a truth that touches every one of us. All progress is built on learning from past mistakes and from the failures that have marked evolution, including technological evolution. That’s worth remembering in a world that treats the past as given, when instead it is the outcome of an incredible chain of pitfalls and restarts, failures and successes that have brought innovation.

In its digital gallery, the Museum of Failure showcases a colourful selection of objects—almost 200 today—that failed to cut the mustard with tastes, trends, and daily habits in recent history.
Among them, some actually seemed to have had what it takes to succeed, such as Sweden’s Facit and its mechanical calculators. A global giant in the early 1970s by production and workforce numbers, Facit went out of business virtually overnight, unable to compete with the flood of cheaper electronic calculators from Japan.
The rapid and unstoppable spread of those calculators on world markets eloquently highlighted the imperative of staying one step ahead of obsolescence by investing continuously in research and innovation.

Similar stories of success and failure abound in the Fiera Milano archives. Its collection of more than 500,000 images tells the story of the products, technologies, and processes launched and exhibited over the decades in the showcase that its pavilions have always provided for innovation.
It comes as no surprise that the Fair Board should have chosen right from the start to invest in the promotion of electronics and computers—two sectors it correctly predicted would prove fundamental in ushering Italian society into the modern age.

The task of the Milan Fair was to provide a stage for products, that of the exhibitors to present and promote them. Of course, not all the world’s inventions made their mark at the fair, or on world history. But some did and two in particular have now reached, in 2025 and 2026, a first major milestone.
Apple and Microsoft are each celebrating fifty years of business. An important anniversary, even though the far-reaching changes they have brought to our lives make the world before their existence seem much more remote than just half a century.

Founded in 1976 in Cupertino (California) by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, Apple is one of the biggest computer companies in the world. With its first Apple I and Apple II computers, the company rivalled the domination of IBM on the personal computer market, growing to become the biggest computer maker in the USA.
Since the Macintosh in 1984, its first model to feature a graphic user interface and mouse, Apple has churned out a continuing stream of innovative products—the iPod digital media player in 2001; the iPhone smartphone in 2007; the iPad tablet in 2010; the iCloud Internet storage and personal cloud service in 2011; the Apple Pay mobile payment service in 2015; the Apple Watch in 2015; through to the mixed-reality headset Apple Vision Pro in 2023 and the integration of artificial intelligence in its operating systems.
Despite a number of complete flops (such as the Apple Newton, a personal digital assistant, and the Lisa desktop computer) and a company history marked by conflict, Apple today is a Tech Titan, one of the world’s most valuable companies with a market cap in September 2025 of more than $3.4 trillion.

Apple’s epic rival, at least when it comes to consumer software and operating systems, Microsoft was established by Bill Gates and Paul Allen in 1975 in Albuquerque, before moving to Redmond (Washington) in 1979. Thanks to a partnership deal with IBM, the company developed its first operating system, MS-DOS, in 1981, before moving on to release a series of highly successful products—including the Windows OS and office suite software such as MS Word and Excel—which quickly conquered the world.

Microsoft’s journey, however, has not always been smooth sailing. Especially since the 1990s, accusations of monopolistic practices have seen the company locked in antitrust battles with the U.S. Department of Justice and the European Commission, greatly holding back its expansion. Nevertheless, the Tech Giant’s growth has been unstoppable, with some 90,000 employees around the world in 2010 and a turnover of more than $69 billion. Microsoft’s intense acquisition activity has targeted business units, patents (such as Nokia’s), and entire companies (LinkedIn in 2016), along with strategic partnerships, such as with the London Stock Exchange (2022) for the development of cloud infrastructure for data & analytics.

Since the 1980s, Fiera di Milano has actively supported the growth and spread of computing and other products among the general public. But its sharp focus on technological innovation can already be found a decade earlier, when in February 1975 the curtain was raised on INTEL—the International Electronics Show. That first show attracted 217 exhibitors and more than 17,000 visitors to the Milan fairgrounds. That same year, the CIS Computer Centre was opened at the fairgrounds, offering visitors an integrated system to access information on exhibitors and their products/services. It was the true precursor to the digital catalogue.

All this is documented by the pictures held in the digital archive and by the pages of the fair board’s official journal, as well as by the national press of the time. In one article run by Corriere della Sera on April 18th, 1984, a grainy photo shows Cardinal Martini visiting the technology pavilions, as he blessed the Milan Fair from the CIS booth.

Ten years on from its introduction, the CIS information system was a fixture nobody could do without. Another article from Corriere della Sera, this time dated April 12th, 1986, tells us that the number of CIS booths had risen to six, thanks to the partnership with SIP. At each CIS booth, hostesses would query the computers to provide visitors with personalized maps of the fair and print-outs showing the box number, pavilion, and position of exhibitors. Each booth had a Videotel terminal, which visitors could use directly to obtain information, and “fax machines for sending texts, drawings, and maps throughout the world.”

Fiera Milano’s experimentation with innovation to serve human applications is a good example of how an open, interconnected system works, where innovation influences human behaviour, while laying the bases for the introduction of further innovation.

Apple and Microsoft are two examples of success stories built on great vision and massive investment, suggesting that, over time, fortune favours the brave and the bold.
Or perhaps the real lesson is that success is reaped by companies with the acumen to grasp the seeds of the future sown in the past.