Robin's Interesting Thoughts

When Bill Gates demoed the Tablet PC in 2001, he predicted it would become the most popular form of PC within five years. But by the end of 2006, Tablet PCs still accounted for less than 2% of all laptops shipped, with about 1 million devices sold that year. Tablets seemed destined to remain stuck in niche markets.

Then came the iPad in 2010. During its first year on the market, 15 million iPads were sold. After two and a half years, over 100 million had been purchased. Worldwide shipments of tablet computers shot up from being 3% of the computer market in 2010 to 25% of the market in 2012. In Apple’s stores, iPads now outsell Macs by more than 5x, despite the product being less than three years old.

Gates’ prediction had finally come true, but something was amiss. “It’s just a big iPod Touch!” Analysts didn’t think it fit the definition of a PC. It appeared to be, at best, just a media consumption device – not a personal productivity tool. Most technology pundits believed that the iPad would fail. (Some still do.)

“Why is the iPad a disappointment? Because it doesn’t allow us to do anything we couldn’t do before. Sure, it is a neat form factor, but it comes with significant trade-offs, too.” -David Coursey, PC World, 28 January 2010

The iPad was indeed disappointing to technologists. Compared to a PC, it could hardly do anything. All of the apps were stripped down to the bare minimum features. The web browser didn’t support plugins such as Flash. You could only run one app at a time. It was hard to get data from one app to another. The on-screen keyboard felt awkward. The list went on. In sum:

“It’s a nice reader, but there’s nothing on the iPad I look at and say, ‘Oh, I wish Microsoft had done it.’” –Bill Gates, February 2010

The surprise was that non-technologists saw things very differently. They walked into an Apple Store and found to their delight that the iPad was a computer they could actually understand. It was far simpler and easier to use than a traditional PC (tablet, laptop, or otherwise). Want to do email? Tap the email app. Photos? Tap the photos app. Press the home button at any time and you’re back to a familiar place. No need to worry about window management, battery life, files or folder hierarchies.

In other words, many of the shortcomings that remain infuriating to technologists are precisely what makes the iPad delightful to consumers. Apple’s engineers and designers did many things right, but the most important reason for the product’s widespread appeal is its radically simpler user interface.

The iPad is a classic disruptive technology. It competes on new dimensions of quality and does not appeal to the best customers of traditional PCs. Instead of processor speed, flexibility, and power, it prioritizes simplicity, size, and convenience. But as tablet computers improve, they will incorporate more and more of the features that currently require a PC. For example, new versions of the iPad have already added video chat, limited multitasking, tabbed browsing, basic Microsoft Office integration, and many other improvements. Eventually, traditional PCs will be overkill for most people, most of the time.

“PCs are going to be like trucks. They’re still going to be around, they’re still going to have a lot of value. But they’re going to be used by one out of X people.” –Steve Jobs, June 2010

Almost all of the companies in the Fortune 500 are already testing or deploying iPad, despite their historical risk aversion when it comes to adopting new technology. Why? Because it’s also simpler, cheaper, and more convenient for many business tasks, such as accessing and creating information at the point of need in a meeting, hospital, field site, or during a commute.

Plenty of iPad apps for doing these tasks are just as complex as their PC brethren. But the most successful apps are those that maintain the iPad’s radically simple interface standards. If it isn’t easy to get the job done on the spot, users might as well wait until they’re back at their desk computer – or give up entirely because they have other work to do.

Shawn Otto makes several interesting historical observations in the November 2012 Scientific American article, “America’s Science Problem“. First:

The steady flow of federal funding [for science after WWII] had an unanticipated side effect. Scientists no longer needed to reach out to the public or participate in the civic conversation to raise money for research. […] University tenure systems… provided strong disincentives to public outreach, and scientists came to view civics and political involvement as a professional liability.

Second: While scientists were disappearing from public view, their growing knowledge of technological problems (such as DDT poisoning) increasingly “led to new health and environmental regulatory science. The growing restrictions drove the older industries… to protect their business interests by opposing new regulations.”

It turned out that a powerful way to undermine environmental regulations was to deny the legitimacy of environmental science. This stance aligned industrialists with “religious fundamentalists who opposed the teaching of evolution” and were skeptical of science more broadly. Together, “industrial money and religious foot soldiers” not only proved effective in blocking regulations, but also “gave fundamentalism renewed power in the public debate.”

This antiregulatory-antiscience alliance largely defines the political parties today and helps to explain why, according to a 2009 survey, 9 out of 10 scientists who identified with a major political party said they were Democrats.

“Overcome any bitterness that may have come because you were not up to the magnitude of pain that was entrusted to you.”

-Pir Vilayat Khan (via Megan Carroll)

“Creativity is not a process… It’s people who care enough to keep thinking about something until they find the simplest way to do it. They keep thinking about something until they find the best way to do it. It’s caring enough to call the person who works over in this other area, because you think the two of you can do something fantastic that hasn’t been thought of before. […] So just to be clear, I wouldn’t call that a process. Creativity and innovation are something you can’t flowchart out.”

– Tim Cook (interview)

“To try and make something great — the only way you can do that is to care to an extraordinary level.”

-Jony Ive (interview)

“[Innovative people] act in unusual ways, as it’s the only way they know how…. They are honest, cheeky, questioning, amusing, disruptive, intelligent, and restless.”

– Richard Branson

I’m going to pretend for a moment that I’m being interviewed.

Q: Which products have influenced your thinking the most?

A: The mechanical typewriter and the TI-83 calculator.

I was born in the 80’s and went to elementary school in the 90’s, so I grew up with word processors. As a kid I also played with programming languages such as BASIC and LOGO, advancing as I got older. Then, sometime in high school, I discovered a mechanical typewriter in a box in the basement. It was a revelation. I couldn’t believe how ingenious it was. Metal rods and gears were shaped exactly right to swing up to hit an ink strip and then shift the page horizontally for the next letter. Pressing the “shift” key literally shifted the entire typing mechanism so that a different part of the rod hit the ink strip. Incredibly, the shift key accomplished this without even being difficult to hold down.

By contrast, it was so rare to see truly ingenious software designs. Computers were so powerful that it didn’t matter much whether they were well designed. A poorly-made spreadsheet program on a PC was still far more useful that a spreadsheet on paper. In comparison to the typewriter, software seemed like a crutch. Programming made it easy to manipulate numbers and graphics any way you liked. When you don’t know how to write programs, software seems like magic; but I knew how to code, and I knew that you could kludge together impressive-looking apps without doing anything particularly clever.

I was humbled before this typewriter. It immediately set my gold standard for elegance.

I had a longer history with the TI-83. I received one in eighth grade and immediately started exploring its depths. By the end of the year, I knew the product inside and out. I was creating ASCII racing games using its built-in programming language. I gave these games to my friends and marveled at my ability to entertain them with a bunch of pixels blinking on and off.

The information architecture of a TI-83 is extraordinary. There is no pointing device — just buttons and a small black-and-white screen. The extensive feature set of the calculator is stored within a giant submenu system, accessed by pressing buttons in the right order. Today this kind of limitation on a user interface sounds like a recipe for disaster. But the TI-83 was so carefully engineered that the interface worked. The grouping of submenus made sense. Function-graphing capabilities were together; trigonometric operators were together; statistical routines were together; everything had its place.

There was still a learning curve — you didn’t pick up a TI-83 and immediately know how to graph y = sin(x). But this learning curve had been optimized. You only had to learn a few concepts to understand the organization of the entire device. There were some shortcuts and power-user features that I occasionally looked up in the user manual, but the answers were never surprising. They seemed obvious, in retrospect, and were easy to remember. The design was truly thoughtful and clever. It remained virtually unchanged over decades of use in math classrooms across the country.

Like the typewriter, the TI-83 set the bar high.

C. Christensen and M. Raynor, in a footnote in The Innovator’s Solution (p. 144), explain why it is rational for large existing firms to have (or fund) scientific research laboratories.

Disruptive innovations usually do not entail technological breakthroughs. Rather, they package available technologies in a disruptive business model. New breakthrough technologies that emerge from research labs are almost always sustaining in character, and almost always entail unpredictable interdependencies with other subsystems in the product. Hence… the established firms have a strong advantage in commercializing these technologies.

In other words, incumbent firms are more likely than startup companies to successfully bring breakthrough technologies to market (even if those breakthroughs are published and visible to all). So it makes sense for a large incumbent company to encourage new breakthroughs via a research lab, as a channel for new successful products or features.

It strikes me as crucial (and counterintuitive) to remember that startup companies are more likely to succeed if the technology they rely on is not a breakthrough. This was certainly the case with internet companies like Amazon, Zappos, Facebook, and Twitter — only after they gained a foothold did they start to develop breakthrough technologies to scale up their products and add new features.

I made an animated fractal video by having the computer gradually update three rotation parameters as it renders fractals for each video frame. The three-minute video took about 45 minutes to render in fancy mode (but in normal mode, TeraFractal can display animations in real time).

(Click the preview to go to the video.)

Over the past few years, I’ve read quite a few books related to organizational psychology and culture, such as:

• Emotional Intelligence (Goleman)
• The Element (Robinson)
• Authentic Happiness (Seligman)
• Mindset (Dweck)
• Switch (Heath & Heath)
• The Innovator’s Dilemma (Christensen)
• The Lean Startup (Ries)
• Peopleware (DeMarco & Lister)

All of these books use scientific evidence to support ideas that in many ways fly in the face of conventional wisdom. What’s surprised me most is that many of the clear best practices have still not been widely adopted, sometimes decades after first publication. Culture and habits are difficult to change.

But I’m still an idealist at heart, and I want to work at a place where learning is rampant, emotional support is plentiful, work-life balance is required, and creativity is allowed to flourish. Not just to pay lip service to these things, but to achieve them for real. We know that happier employees do better and more valuable work, and we know how to create this kind of environment. It just requires upsetting a lot of the assumptions of mainstream business culture.

I came up with a partial list of what I see as indicators of organizational health. These are meant to be provocative, since most companies do not fit all of these descriptions. Also, I realize that in many cases the devil is in the details, and taking these ideas to the extreme would generally be disastrous. But I stand behind the overall goals.

1. Employees should goof off and be silly together.
   If not, the community is weak and team members need to get to know each other better or be re-assigned.
    
2. Employees should go home early more often than work overtime. If teams feel the need to stay late, there is too much pressure and not enough focus on long-term priorities.
    
3. Employees should typically be working on something different than last year. If not, we have stopped learning; work will become boring and our products and culture will become stale.
    
4. Employees should frequently make mistakes and celebrate them. If everything works on the first try, then we are not being creative enough.
    
5. Employees should feel comfortable challenging any assumption or idea. If the boss is always right, team members feel shut out. If crazy ideas are not encouraged, the environment is not supportive enough.
    
6. Evaluation should be qualitative. Easy metrics such as quotas and billable hours convey a lack of trust and reduce our intrinsic motivation.
    

Achieving goals like these will always be a work in progress, but I think they are worth striving for.