"I have realized over time that I missed the mark with HyperCard," he said from his studio in Menlo Park, California. "I grew up in a box-centric culture at Apple. If I'd grown up in a network-centric culture, like Sun, HyperCard might have been the first Web browser. My blind spot at Apple prevented me from making HyperCard the first Web browser."
"If I thought more globally, I would have envisioned (HyperCard) in that way," he said. "You don't transfer someone's website to your hard drive to look at it. You browse it piecemeal.... It's much more powerful than a stack of cards on your hard drive.
No pussyfooting around it, no "My idea was so much better, it should have taken off," no "It has been demonstrated repeatedly that what has happened was bad," just flat out: "I messed up, and missed the boat."
So much better than almost everyone who also nearly struck the same gold mine as Berners-Lee.
There was a HN post earlier today about what people miss after leaving (mostly) big tech companies, and it almost was entirely about tooling.
There's also org structure (done right, this can be empowering), access to ideas, and ways of seeing the world. Like Atkinson realized, these can also be blind spots.