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They may laugh at the CEO when he talks in generic corporate new speech, but they also laugh at someone who tells them a certain problem can’t be solved. Suppress one, and you suppress the other.
There is something very American about Feynman breaking into safes during the Manhattan Project. It’s hard to imagine the authorities having a sense of humor about such things over in Germany at that time. Maybe it’s not a coincidence.
Hackers are unruly. That is the essence of hacking. And it is also the essence of American-ness. It is no accident that Silicon Valley is in America, and not France, or Germany, or England, or Japan. In those countries, people color inside the lines.
It’s odd that people think of programming as precise and methodical. Computers are precise and methodical. Hacking is something you do with a gleeful laugh.
If you made a graph of GNP per capita vs. civil liberties, you’d notice a definite trend.
Authoritarian countries become corrupt; corrupt countries become poor; and poor countries are weak.
“The spirit of resistance to government,” Jefferson wrote, “is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it always to be kept alive.”
For the first twenty or thirty years, you had to be a car expert to own a car.
Whatever it is, it will be consumer electronics: something that costs about $200, and that people choose mostly based on how the case looks.
The whole idea of “your computer” is going away, and being replaced with “your data.”
With web-based software, you should get new releases without paying extra, or doing any work, or possibly even knowing about it.
At Viaweb we often did three to five releases a day.
no one ever called us on it.
Software companies are sometimes accused of letting the users debug their software. And that is just what I’m advocating.
We never had enough bugs at any one time to bother with a formal bug-tracking system.
Functional programming means avoiding side effects. It’s something you’re more likely to see in research papers than commercial software, but for web-based applications it turns out to be really useful.
Being able to release software immediately is a big motivator.
shelving an idea probably even inhibits new ideas:
We had general ideas about things we wanted to improve, but if we knew how we would have done it already.
There was no protection against breakage except the fear of looking like an idiot to one’s peers, and that was more than enough.
I was always under pressure to hire more, because we wanted to get bought, and we knew that buyers would have a hard time paying a high price for a company with only three programmers.
Software should do what users think it will.
you can’t have
any idea what users will be thinking, believe me, unt...
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Hardware is free now, if your software is reasonably efficient.
the key to getting users was the online test drive. It was not just a series of slides built by marketing people.
(If you try writing web-based applications, you’ll find the Back button becomes one of your most interesting philosophical problems.)
Selling web based software through ISPs is like selling sushi through vending machines.
These are the users who are ready to try new things, partly because they’re more flexible, and partly because they want the lower costs of new technology.
The best intranet is the Internet.
There is always a tendency for rich customers to buy expensive solutions, even when cheap solutions are better, because the people offering expensive solutions can spend more to sell them.
Viaweb was a lot more sophisticated than what most of these merchants got, but we couldn’t afford to tell them.
A large part of what big companies pay extra for is the cost of selling expensive things to them.
Nearly all our users came direct to our site through word of mouth and references in the press.
It’s not so much that a competitor will trip them up as that they will trip over themselves.
“Rise up, cows!” he wrote. “Take your liberty while despots snore!”
Neither of these fences have any current in them.
There are only two things you have to know about business: build something users love, and make more than you spend.
As for building something users love, here are some general tips. Start by making something clean and simple that you would want to use yourself. Get a version 1.0 out fast, then continue to improve the software, listening closely to users as you do. The customer is always right, but different customers are right about different things; the least sophisticated users show you what you need to simplify and clarify, and the most sophisticated tell you what features you need to add.
software has to be designed by hackers who understand design, not designers who know a little about software.
Don’t be intimidated. You can do as much that Microsoft can’t as they can do that you can’t. And no one can stop you. You don’t have to ask anyone’s permission
A startup is a small company that takes on a hard technical problem.
you can think of a startup as a way to compress your whole working life into a few years.
If a fairly good hacker is worth $80,000 a year at a big company, then a smart hacker working very hard without any corporate bullshit to slow him down should be able to do work worth about $3 million a year.
It’s not a good idea to use famous rich people as examples, because the press only write about the very richest, and these tend to be outliers.
if there had been one person with a brain on IBM’s side, Microsoft’s future would have been very different.
You just have to do something people want.
If you had a magic machine that could on command make you a car or cook you dinner or do your laundry, or do anything else you wanted, you wouldn’t need money.
Wealth is what you want, not money.
A surprising number of people retain from childhood the idea that there is a fixed amount of wealth in the world.
