Airlines were way out of Virgin’s comfort zone. Best airline I’ve ever flown domestically in the US. Before Tesla Elon Musk made Paypal. What did he know about cars? Arguably one of the coolest cars on the market.
This described the phone market before apple got into it. Carriers were making design and cost decisions for phone makers. Nokia and Moto were eeking out ever slimmer margins on undifferentiated product (silver flip phone or silver flip phone?) with low cost product treating to destroy them from new Asian makers (Samsung at the time, Kyocera, et all). The market disruptor was Blackberry who made what looked like a calculator, but was smart enough to sell directly to IT making them the corporate solution… then… iPhone.
I’m mainly playing the role of devils advocate here. I agree with everything you said Scott. This could go very wrong. I just see it as a win for us as designers and consumers. They will likely push the acceptable design, manufacturing, and innovation boundaries in the category pushing us all across industries.
When I was at Nike we (design team) used to get excited when Adidas or someone else came out with a crazy cool product. It gave us all the ability to win every argument with development and marketing for six months. 