context assembly

I call this set of functions "context assembly," a phrase I picked up from Groove co-founder Jack Ozzie. When collaboration devolves to the common denominator of e-mail, every participant has to weave context around an otherwise chaotic stream of messages, and there's no canonical view. Context assembly in disposable shared spaces is the essence of Groove, and in that sense TimeDance was very Groove-like.

Unlike Groove, though, TimeDance had universal reach. I have never encountered a diverse group whose members were all willing and able to use Groove. Today, its entry barrier remains about where it was five years ago. For a Web-based application like TimeDance, though, the barrier is now even lower than it once was.

Jon Udell, "What TimeDance got right," InfoWorld, 27 Apr 2005

Hear the music

When Boyd saw them, he reacted as if he had been handed the Ten commandments. He sat sown and reverently turned the pages. Christie realized that Boyd had the ability to look at pages of numbers and visualize their meaning. He could look at what to most people would be a confusing jumble of arcane math and see an airplane with the variable of altitude, airspeed, temperature, angle of bank, and G-load. As Boyd sat at the table, his head moved and his shoulders rolled and his fist pulled back on the stick and he mumbled as he flew the numbers. He said to Christie, "The charts sing to me. I hear music when I read them."

....

Several days later the two men were driving to Andrews AFB outside Washington when Boyd went into one of his trances. He stopped talking and stared out the window. A few minutes later he snapped out of it, turned to Riccioni, and said, "Tiger, I'm plotting some E-M data and I need to know how to take a derivative of --"

"You're plotting E-M data?" Riccioni interrupted. "In your head?"

In the mathematics doctoral program at MIT, Riccioni had studied disciplines and schools and theorems that Boyd had never heard of. But Riccioni could not plot E-M data in his head. He could not visualize the charts. He could not hear the music.

, Boyd : The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War, p. 146 & 241. (link is to Amazon)

Thinking Visually

At an autocross track, Lucas met his first mentor in the film industry - famed cinematographer Haskell Wexler, a fellow aficionado of sleek racing machines. Wexler was impressed by the way the shy teenager handled a camera, cradling it low on his hips to get better angles. "George had a very good eye, and he thought visually," he recalls.

Steve Silberman, "Life After Darth," Wired, May 2005.

It's about experimenting and discovering

It's hard for corporations to understand that creativity is not just about succeeding. It's about experimenting and discovering./p>

Anna Muoio, "How Is Your Company Like a Giant Hairball?" Fast Company, Dec 1997/Jan 1998

what makes a good feature

For various reasons this doesn’t work: Big piles of hit and miss features, chosen thoughtlessly, is less desirable that small piles of good features, chosen carefully. Consider this: what makes a good feature? It’s not an abstract quality: goodness means a problem is solved for a user. If you don’t spend some time considering who these people are and what they’re doing, odds are slim you’ll find features that matter much: unless of course you’re building the browser exclusively for people that that look, smell and think like you do.

Scott Berkun, "How to build a better web browser," scottberkun.com, Dec 2004 via Tomalak's Realm

at the core of every game, there's timing, tensioning and strategy

The classic Atari games still show up on phones and other gadgets. Have you been surprised at how durable those games have been?

Bushnell: Actually not. I think that at the core of every game, there's timing, tensioning and strategy. In some ways, the old games are a little bit purer because they completely focused on those elements instead of production values.

If you have a tournament chess player, they will only play with one kind of chess set. They don't want pieces made of glass or intricately carved things. All those production values that make very pretty chess sets actually make the game harder to play. In some ways, if you focus on production values and you short-change rules and structure, you end up with a poorer game than something that's really simple.

David Becker, "The return of King Pong," CNET News.com, 15 Mar 2005

rarely able to verbalize what their real needs are

Touhey began looking for new ways to inject excitement into his products. "Consumers are rarely able to verbalize what their real needs and problems are," says Touhey, who had previously worked at Bayer as a product manager for Alka-Seltzer Plus Cold Medicine. "When a moderator in a focus group asked about problems people had with basketballs, the number one answer was probably grip. But once the conversation was steered toward inflation, every hand would shoot up. Everyone had a story." Spalding managers had been aware of inflation frustration for years, but little had been done to address the problem.

The idea that changed how Spalding approached inflation hassles occurred on Thanksgiving Day, in 1998. As Touhey watched his father get ready to carve the family turkey, the birds plastic pop-up ther-mometer gave him the idea for a minia-turized pump that would reside inside the ball when not in use. ....

Spalding continues to seek out new insightsand not just by watching ballers on the playground or weekend warriors on the diamond. "A colleague clipped an ar-ticle about Pull-Ups diapers, of all things, that talked about how the diaper holds uncomfortable wetness against the toddlers skin for five minutes so that the kid seeks out potty training," says Touhey. "It got us thinking on new tangents. How could touch and feel become a part of learning good techniques for throwing a ball? Maybe new materials could show a thermal handprint on a football, so you could see if youre throwing with the right grip."

Jeremy B. Dann, "Spalding: An Idea with Bounce," Technology Review.com, April 2005

False similarities

As any logician will tell you, reasoning by analogy is a very dangerous game for most mortals. False similarities can capture our imagination, restrict our vision, and seduce us into seeing things that do not exist.

Franklin C. Spinney, "Genghis John," Proceedings of the U. S. Naval Institute, July 1997, pp. 42-47

batting .300 or .350

Let's talk about serial innovators. What's the secret to success?

I don't know if there's a secret to success. I've had a great deal of success myself. I also have had my share of failure. To me, being a great innovator is like batting in baseball. If you're batting .300 or .350, you're doing pretty well. Most people, they never get a hit. I try to think very hard about what's ultimately going to happen. Ultimately, everything's going to be wireless. Ultimately, everything's going to be portable. I figured that out a long time ago.

The trick is once you see that long-term vision, you then ask yourself, how do I get there step by step? You can't just solve all the problems at once and bingo, you have an industry. No, you have to solve a whole bunch of those problems, and along the way you have to make money while you're doing it.

And so what steps do you do? Even though I thought all computers would be mobile computers at some point, we said we can't do the wireless piece. We could do a connected organizer, and bingo, we did that. You always have the future vision in place. That tells you what you have to do.

"Voices Of Innovation: Jeff Hawkins," BusinessWeek, 11 Oct 2004.

killing our ability to make astonishing things

Profit is every CEO's major focus. Research almost always benefits an entire industry more than any particular company. And research doesn't have immediate results.

Sometimes it doesn't have the results that CEOs want. You invent a product that has a longer life-cycle, that doesn't need constant refills or upgrades. Research is expensive and unpredictable. Things that today's business world frowns on.

New technology typically has a five-year development cycle. The U.S. technology business stopped being serious about research in 2000 and the results are showing now.

People have a little more money but there's nothing they want to buy. There's nothing that makes you say, 'Wow." Ten years ago I was seeing something interesting every month, but now we're touting bloated software and cute case designs as innovation.

The damage to HP and the U.S. technology industry at large may already be irreversible. If we start investing today and let our engineers play we might have something exciting to show people in 2010. That's a long time to wait for the next big wow.

To me, this rabid fixation on short-term profits is a bigger threat than outsourcing -- it is killing our ability to make astonishing things.

As Told to Michelle Delio, "Carly's Way," TechnologyReview.com, 4 Mar 2005