Why do you see goalposts? Why are you trying to squeeze between them?
I made an effort to clarify there wasn't anything criminal about going from 1 to n, or with the companies that do that (such as Apple and potentially some of the YC companies). Sure, that can be part of the cycle. There's nothing wrong with "tinkering and ... capitalizing on the tinkering of others." There's a lot of money in that -- and YC is quite clear that that's what they're about. It's an accelerator for making money.
But it's not an incubator for innovation. It's not for those attempting to do something in the 0-to-1 space. But without those people, the 1-n's can't do much. Alan Kay famously asked on StackOverflow, "Has there been any new innovation since 1980?" and the answer was no.
Then we have to ask ourselves, "What happened in 1980?" Right? Where did it go wrong? I suspect that it is, at least partly, when the money exploded in a distributed way. There suddenly was a huge volume of customers asking to "get something working today, it doesn't matter how." Fast forward to today and we have -- at this moment -- hundreds of thousands of the developers, including some of our top minds, writing applications in HTML/CSS/Javascript, etc. And no one is laughing. Almost every app written today is on a huge, ludicrously stupid stack. And we smile and work hard to optimize it, without questioning the stack as a whole. Everyone is still trying to get 'something working today' because that's where the money is. At the last StrangeLoop there was only one presenter from the pre-1980's: Joe Armstrong. His talk? "We can do better" Everyone else's talk? "How to optimize or manage this part of the stack."
Doug Englebart's kids found out about his innovation from newspapers. He never talked about it. He said it was never about money or fame. Alan Kay is relatively unknown and relatively poor compared to people like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, who invented nothing but were better at marketing, and I don't think Alan cares. And isn't that the adult way? You give kids rewards: "Clean your room and you get a cookie." But as an adult, you just clean your room.
I think that before 1980, we got 0-to-1 revolutionary innovation because it was done for the reasons we do true science or art. It's not about childish rewards of money or fame. Artists/scientists don't do it for glory or gold. They do it because the mountain stands before them. Because they see a better world, they see something beautiful, and it pulls them forward.
I made an effort to clarify there wasn't anything criminal about going from 1 to n, or with the companies that do that (such as Apple and potentially some of the YC companies). Sure, that can be part of the cycle. There's nothing wrong with "tinkering and ... capitalizing on the tinkering of others." There's a lot of money in that -- and YC is quite clear that that's what they're about. It's an accelerator for making money.
But it's not an incubator for innovation. It's not for those attempting to do something in the 0-to-1 space. But without those people, the 1-n's can't do much. Alan Kay famously asked on StackOverflow, "Has there been any new innovation since 1980?" and the answer was no.
Then we have to ask ourselves, "What happened in 1980?" Right? Where did it go wrong? I suspect that it is, at least partly, when the money exploded in a distributed way. There suddenly was a huge volume of customers asking to "get something working today, it doesn't matter how." Fast forward to today and we have -- at this moment -- hundreds of thousands of the developers, including some of our top minds, writing applications in HTML/CSS/Javascript, etc. And no one is laughing. Almost every app written today is on a huge, ludicrously stupid stack. And we smile and work hard to optimize it, without questioning the stack as a whole. Everyone is still trying to get 'something working today' because that's where the money is. At the last StrangeLoop there was only one presenter from the pre-1980's: Joe Armstrong. His talk? "We can do better" Everyone else's talk? "How to optimize or manage this part of the stack."
Doug Englebart's kids found out about his innovation from newspapers. He never talked about it. He said it was never about money or fame. Alan Kay is relatively unknown and relatively poor compared to people like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, who invented nothing but were better at marketing, and I don't think Alan cares. And isn't that the adult way? You give kids rewards: "Clean your room and you get a cookie." But as an adult, you just clean your room.
I think that before 1980, we got 0-to-1 revolutionary innovation because it was done for the reasons we do true science or art. It's not about childish rewards of money or fame. Artists/scientists don't do it for glory or gold. They do it because the mountain stands before them. Because they see a better world, they see something beautiful, and it pulls them forward.