"Ideas that diverged too much from the existing successful tech had a huge obstacle in their way: they had to recreate all of the existing solutions in their new model.”
You’re so right! There are great examples of companies that preserved the existing ecosystem of solutions (Facebook with PHP, Microsoft with C++, Google with Java and C++, maybe also Amazon with Perl 5 and C++).
There are also great examples of successful companies that in a certain sense did or had to do things in an entirely new model (WhatsApp with the Open Telecom Platform, F5 Networks with their data center FPGA-powered hardware load balancers, Tesla and SpaceX, and so on).
There are also great examples of companies that did both, where they preserved an existing ecosystem but also added another ecosystem on top to fix flaws (NeXT Computer with Smalltalk and C, Stripe with the modern version of that as Ruby and Go, Twitter with Ruby and Java, so on).
Microsoft is the best example of a company that can succeed even with what seems like a crazy choice. Almost everything being written in C++ sounds insane to the point of being business suicidal, but they worked hard enough to make it work. If Microsoft can succeed in the ways that they have with C++, and if Facebook could succeed for as long as they did with PHP, and Instagram can allegedly succeed with Django[1], then anyone can succeed with anything as long as you can endure the stress that a seemingly peculiar decision might cause you. And those standard ecosystems that they chose all had immense benefits, they just also had some pretty immense weaknesses as well (Powering 500 million daily users primarily with Python scripts?? That just seems pretty crazy to me, if it’s true).
I absolutely absolutely know what you mean. With my twin that has schizophrenia, there are entire months where I'm convinced he's never coming back. That he's permanently gone this time. Then when I give up, there will be just one exclusive random day where he'll be a normal functioning person.
It sounds harsh, but when he's in that illness 'phase', the person seems more like a demon-possessed creature and not even like much of a person. When you hear the things and intonations that the person will say in conversations to themselves in particular.. that's what sounds the least person-like.
Thank you so much for sharing this. My fraternal twin has schizophrenia and was diagnosed at 23. We're 25. I don't have schizophrenia.
But his problem is that he refuses to take medication, so not sure where things will end up in the future with him. It's very up and down. One day like yesterday he's hearing voices and talking to himself, then the next day he's sort of normal.
Hearing that someone else also has a family member that is going through that is helpful.
An indigenous person without literacy in any documented language, from a tropical and jungle-like area, is able to use an iPad. Without even one minute of teaching. A person in the biography on Steven Jobs mentions seeing this firsthand. People who are the very best in their field such as Dieter Rams, the Chief Design Officer at Braun, have deeply praised Apple's results.
If anyone here sincerely thinks for even a fraction of one second that this team is giving design a bad name (because your Macintosh didn't come with 8 ports), then you're every bit as stupid as the person at Fast Company that wrote this article.
This only makes me want to cry.. I never got the opportunity to meet him but I will miss him so much. I've always known since high school that his work in certain ways just had no equal. The Open Telecom Platform is straightforwardly just a masterpiece of programming - it basically turns any server into this data processing god machine with almost no possibility of a (code) failure.
Just kind of curious.. why will you then switch to a MacBook after all this time?
I originally got one in 2016 because I thought I was going to be making iPhone apps, but after I got it and used it, I discovered that macOS is really good for personal computers. Definitely better than any other UNIX system I had used for a personal computer.
Yeah, you're almost definitely right. Apple is an extremely design-first company, in the sense that the designers have always run the company.
This isn't the first time that sticking to a design led to a technical hardware/physics problem. This happened originally when Steven was designing the iPhone 4 with his team and took out most of the antenna lines, leaving only a small antenna line at the top and not the noticeable ugly antenna lines you see on every single iPhone today. Steven's antenna design was incredibly simple and aesthetically pleasing - just one of several incredible advances of the iPhone 4 - but Steven's antenna design led to some radio frequency problems I definitely don't understand which caused the entire "you're holding it wrong" scandal.
That is just another example from 2011 or so of designers running the company but running into a technical issue with the laws of physics - there it was just radio frequencies instead of whatever it is here with this AirPower and the the heat or frequencies or something created from the as many as possibly 15 or 32 coils inside of it.
There are so so so many examples of where this design-first approach has definitely worked. One example is how the external aluminum case of the 2-pound MacBook from 2015 was designed first, and then once lithium ion batteries were created which had to be custom and have a custom internal chemistry so that they could be stacked on top of each other in a terraced structure. A second example is in Face ID which is very fast and simple conceptually but technically requires a custom chip running a custom neural network and for PrimeSense to miniaturize their Kinect hardware that they created for the Xbox into a the super small menu bar of the iPhone X. The chip team and the PrimeSense team started with a simple concept/design of a user looking at their iPhone, and then filled in all of the extremely technical and multi-disciplinary practicalities.
When you start doing something that nobody has done before, you absolutely do not know that it can work. You will fail in every way – Jonathan mentioned that when they were creating Face ID, all that they had for such a long time were failed engineering designs that simply put did not work.
Nobody knew that you could miniaturize the Kinect hardware, or that this chip could actually run their custom neural network quickly and with low power consumption to get Face ID. But you can. For MacBook batteries, if you mess the chemistry of these batteries up, the batteries will absolutely explode just like Samsung's did the following year. Nobody knew that you could stack the batteries of a MacBook on top of each other either. But you can. Nobody knew that you could remove most of the ugly antenna lines on an iPhone and just place just one antenna line at the top. Oh wait, but you can't. Nobody knew that you could charge 3 devices at the same time within whatever FCC regulations and still maintain low heat. Oh wait, but you can't (I guess, if that's the problem).
The point is that whenever you're doing something that nobody else in the world has done, you can't know it's going to work and you will fail. You will succeed but you will also fail, if you are truly doing creative work. Here, Apple failed. I guess because what they finished in the lab was possible according to the laws of physics but not safe (coils might overheat and catch fire or melt, might explode, might stop a person's pacemaker, and so on).
You’re so right! There are great examples of companies that preserved the existing ecosystem of solutions (Facebook with PHP, Microsoft with C++, Google with Java and C++, maybe also Amazon with Perl 5 and C++).
There are also great examples of successful companies that in a certain sense did or had to do things in an entirely new model (WhatsApp with the Open Telecom Platform, F5 Networks with their data center FPGA-powered hardware load balancers, Tesla and SpaceX, and so on).
There are also great examples of companies that did both, where they preserved an existing ecosystem but also added another ecosystem on top to fix flaws (NeXT Computer with Smalltalk and C, Stripe with the modern version of that as Ruby and Go, Twitter with Ruby and Java, so on).
Microsoft is the best example of a company that can succeed even with what seems like a crazy choice. Almost everything being written in C++ sounds insane to the point of being business suicidal, but they worked hard enough to make it work. If Microsoft can succeed in the ways that they have with C++, and if Facebook could succeed for as long as they did with PHP, and Instagram can allegedly succeed with Django[1], then anyone can succeed with anything as long as you can endure the stress that a seemingly peculiar decision might cause you. And those standard ecosystems that they chose all had immense benefits, they just also had some pretty immense weaknesses as well (Powering 500 million daily users primarily with Python scripts?? That just seems pretty crazy to me, if it’s true).
[1]Still very unclear about how much Python actually powers the web services behind Instagram. <https://instagram-engineering.com/tagged/python>.