I hold up LASORB as another example. People have needed to protect laser diodes from ESD for a very long time. And there are numerous patents out there that cover different schemes. In our opinion (and according to our testing), none of them work very well. The best one is by Lucent Technology, but according to their own published results, all of their laser diodes died at some point...
Within LASORB, we are using parts that have been available to people for a very long time. So, there has been a need for a long time, and available parts for a long time. So why hasn't anyone else done it up until now? I don't know how, and I don't know why, but we always seem to find a new way of doing things.