I cannot understand why you cannot understand that.
It’s relatively simple: Many people believe that it’s important to make moral choices even if the law doesn’t force you to. That’s a pretty widely spread view. Not everyone has it (you don’t seem to), but you should be perfectly able to understand it. It’s not like that’s something new.
That is not quite right. Cuusoo is a Japanese company and independent from Lego. (In the beginning Lego Cuusoo also launched only in Japan – but it blew up internationally.) They offer their “social creation platform” (also called Cuusoo) to customers – of which Lego is now most certainly their biggest and most prominent one. I’m unsure of the exact relationship, but I think it’s fair to say that Cuusoo is a SaaS business.
Cuusoo seems to host the platform and I assume (but don’t know) that they take care of all technical issues, Lego seems to take care of the review process. So Lego Cuusoo is basically the Cuusoo installation run by Lego.
You are completely correct about the review process, though (basically everything you wrote after the first sentence).
It’s pretty astonishing to think that Jony Ive was working on the design of that thing for eight years until it finally came to market.
This also seems like a perfect demonstration of Apple’s outstanding patience and timing. Microsoft(’s partners) was (were) making tablets in 2002. (As a niche product, basically.) Apple could probably also have brought one to market (probably with some sort of desktop CPU and running a mostly unchanged OS X) around that time had they really wanted to – but they didn’t.
They waited until the right technology (mobile CPUs, capacitive touch screens, …) at the right price and the right software was available to them.
Am I completely wrong in suspecting that in many other companies a prototype like that would either be pushed to market prematurely or killed outright because it wasn’t possible to turn it into a viable product for five years, how is that supposed to change now.
It’s relatively simple: Many people believe that it’s important to make moral choices even if the law doesn’t force you to. That’s a pretty widely spread view. Not everyone has it (you don’t seem to), but you should be perfectly able to understand it. It’s not like that’s something new.