Great documentary can be found here: ;) http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/edison/
Great documentary can be found here: ;) http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/edison/
Finding a long-lasting bulb filament was, to Edison, basically an implementation detail. But he knew it wouldn't catch on without a full system to power it that was mechanically and economically sustainable.
It's analogous to Apple's approach to a smartphone. The iPhone succeeded not just because it was a good piece of hardware running a good OS, but because of the systems that supported it. When it launched, iTunes was running on a ton of computers already thanks to the iPod, so that's how Apple synced personal data and updated the OS.
And then when they released the SDK, they again took a systems approach--not just a collection of APIs to build apps, but a whole networked and managed online store for qualifying, distributing, and updating the apps.