You should help projects in kickstarter or do ANY R&D on a company or on your own to learn something:
In real life, the time it takes to do something compared with what you planned it is at least triple.
I had experience as the responsible person of a very talented R&D team for years. My parents were also researchers all their lives.
One of the amazing things is that in the end if you persist, you get it, but it is extremely easy to abandon as progress slows down(and it always happens with anything if it is new and nobody has done it before). The main problem with researchers is that they have the tendency to start new projects and finish none.
Steve Jobs learned this early from his mentor Robert Noyce.
The planning fallacy was named in 1979, so it's not exactly news that one's inside view estimate will be optimistic. I believe the poster you are are replying to is implicitly criticizing HP for publicly claiming commercialization earlier than was ever realistic.
The people at HP who are responsible for providing timeline estimates either should know about the planning fallacy and correct for it, or they are hopelessly incompetent planners in 2013. A more realistic explanation is that they knew they were being optimistic and lied about it for the short term press benefits that they realized when they made those statements. Companies lying about their development timelines is a valid object of complaint.
In real life, the time it takes to do something compared with what you planned it is at least triple.
I had experience as the responsible person of a very talented R&D team for years. My parents were also researchers all their lives.
One of the amazing things is that in the end if you persist, you get it, but it is extremely easy to abandon as progress slows down(and it always happens with anything if it is new and nobody has done it before). The main problem with researchers is that they have the tendency to start new projects and finish none.
Steve Jobs learned this early from his mentor Robert Noyce.