Fun facts
- Silicon Valley first appeared in print in 1971
Insights
- Alan Kay: In the history of art, the most powerful work in any genre is not done by the adults who invent it, but by the first generation of kids who grow up in it
- Engelbart: Original intention of AI was to increase the capacity of human to tackle a complex situation for his needs
- The mythical man month
- Talent critical mass is important for any technology movement to succeed
Behavior
- when a new tool alleviates a pain, people in pain rapidly adopt and restructure their workflows around the tool
- Threshold of impatience – beyond which people run out of patience with the machine
- Tinkerers feel the urge to custom things to their own needs
Monetization
- While getting paid for tinkering is unimaginable at first, expecting to pay eventually becomes the norm
Disruption
- Why new entrants from the fringes of a domain cause disruption?
- Incumbent fall in love with their existing technology – sunk cost fallacy
- new entrants
- do not have psychological and infrastructural legacy
- lack resources
Different hats, different views
- Paradigm shifts
- batch processing computers versus interactive computers
- people who think in terms of water fall versus
- people expects interaction from computers – Spacewar the first computer game
- after reading Copernicus, when first looked up from a different Earth to a different Heaven
- batch processing computers versus interactive computers
- Lick: Psychology brings fresh perspective to computing versus mathematics and engineering
- seeing computers in relation to the workings of the human brain
- rather than an exercise of pure technology
- enhancing and enriching human creativity
- Being a visionary and a director are two different things
- management needs to be taken seriously as a job
- don’t just invent the future, go live in it
- Object-Oriented Programming: Sometimes it takes years of exploration before we can clearly define what something is
- Financial guys (Wall Street) will always have problems quantifying the intangible
Importance of marketing
- Computer wizards don’t necessarily understand marketing. Mega profile weakness
- customer needs might not be what you imagine:
- Apple’s spreadsheet versus STAR’s word processing
- Jobs took the Alto display and used it for his Apple products
References
- Augmenting the Human Intellect: A conceptual framework, Engelbart
- Symbiosis, Lick
- Some moral and technical consequences of automation, Norbert Wiener, Science 131 (1960)
- The Passing of a great mind, Life, February 25, 1957
- I am a mathematician: The Later life of a prodigy, Norbert Wiener
- Dark Sun: The making of a hydrogen bomb, Richard Rhodes