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Tools for Conviviality, by Ivan Illich, an Austrian-born, American-raised philosopher and Catholic priest who criticized the domineering role of technocratic elites. Part of Illich’s remedy was to create technology that would be intuitive, easy to learn, and “convivial.” The goal, he wrote, should be to “give people tools that guarantee their right to work with high, independent efficiency.”
A computer created in, say, a basement in Iowa that no one writes about becomes, for history, like a tree falling in Bishop Berkeley’s uninhabited forest; it’s not obvious that it makes a sound. The Mother of All Demos helped Engelbart’s innovations catch on. That is why product launches are so important. The MITS machine might have languished with the unsold calculators in Albuquerque, if Roberts had not previously befriended Les Solomon of Popular Electronics, which was to the Heathkit set what Rolling Stone was for rock fans.
was BASIC, Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code, which had been developed a few years earlier at Dartmouth to allow nonengineers to write programs.
So he teamed up with a friend he had met at MIT, Bob Frankston, another software engineer whose father was an entrepreneur. “The ability for Dan and me to work as a team was crucial,” Frankston said. Although Bricklin could have written the program alone, instead he sketched it out and had Frankston develop it. “It gave him the freedom to focus on what the program should do rather than how to do it,” Frankston said of their collaboration.86
Because both Bricklin and Frankston had good business sense and a feel for consumer desires, they focused on making VisiCalc a product, not just a program.
“The goal was to give the user a conceptual model that was unsurprising,” Frankston explained. “It was called the principle of least surprise. We were illusionists synthesizing an experience.”
There were three major innovations on display. The first was Ethernet, the technologies developed by Bob Metcalfe for creating local area networks. Like Gates and other pioneers of personal computers, Jobs was not very interested—certainly not as interested as he should have been—in networking technology. He was focused on the ability of computers to empower individuals rather than to facilitate collaboration. The second innovation was object-oriented programming. That, likewise, did not grab Jobs, who was not a programmer. What caught his attention was the graphical user interface featuring a
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conception is just the first step. What really matters is execution.
Torvalds said. “Folks do their best work when they are driven by passion. When they are having fun. This is as true for playwrights and sculptors and entrepreneurs as it is for software engineers.”
“The best and most effective way to lead is by letting people do things because they want to do them, not because you want them to.”
Software may want to be free, but the people who write it may want to feed their kids and reward their investors.
“The street finds its own uses for things,” William Gibson wrote in “Burning Chrome,”
Sometimes innovation involves recovering what has been lost.
But he had the mix of tenacity and rebelliousness that makes for a good entrepreneur.
use. Case applied the two lessons he had learned at Proctor & Gamble: make a product simple and launch it with free samples.
Over sushi at a nearby restaurant, Bricklin told the tale of how, years earlier, when his own company was foundering, he had run into Mitch Kapor of Lotus. Though competitors, they shared a collaborative hacker ethic, so Kapor offered a deal that helped Bricklin stay personally solvent. Bricklin went on to found a company, Trellix, that made its own website publishing system. Paying forward Kapor’s band-of-hackers helpfulness to a semicompetitor, Bricklin worked out a deal for Trellix to license Blogger’s software for $40,000, thus keeping it alive. Bricklin was, above all, a nice guy.
I was only the bumblebee. I had buzzed around the wiki flower for a while, and then pollinated the free-encyclopedia flower. I have talked with many others who had the same idea, just not in times or places where it could take root.”99 That is the way that good ideas often blossom: a bumblebee brings half an idea from one realm, and pollinates another fertile realm filled with half-formed innovations. This is why Web tools are valuable, as are lunches at taco stands.
Wikipedia was not about building a machine that could think on its own. It was instead a dazzling example of human-machine symbiosis, the wisdom of humans and the processing power of computers being woven together like a tapestry.
“I had learned from my human-computer interaction course that blaming the user is not a good strategy, so I knew they fundamentally weren’t doing the right thing. That insight, the user is never wrong, led to this idea that we could produce a search engine that was better.”
“The main lesson of thirty-five years of AI research is that the hard problems are easy and the easy problems are hard,” according to Steven Pinker, the Harvard cognitive scientist.12
“The first generation of computers were machines that counted and tabulated,” Rometty says, harking back to IBM’s roots in Herman Hollerith’s punch-card tabulators used for the 1890 census. “The second generation involved programmable machines that used the von Neumann architecture. You had to tell them what to do.” Beginning with Ada Lovelace, people wrote algorithms that instructed these computers, step by step, how to perform tasks. “Because of the proliferation of data,” Rometty adds, “there is no choice but to have a third generation,
SOME LESSONS FROM THE JOURNEY
First and foremost is that creativity is a collaborative process. Innovation comes from teams more often than from the lightbulb moments of lone geniuses.
People don’t invent things on the Internet. They simply expand on an idea that already exists.”
There were three ways that teams were put together in the digital age. The first was through government funding and coordination.
Private enterprise was another way that collaborative teams were formed.
Throughout history, there has been a third way, in addition to government and private enterprises, that collaborative creativity has been organized: through peers freely sharing ideas and making contributions as part of a voluntary common endeavor.
Innovation is most vibrant in the realms where open-source systems compete with proprietary ones.
