Re:Ideas and execution – an enormous difference in effort
by viveka on Friday December 14, 2012 @04:53AM
(#4920250)
At ABC Innovation, where I am at the moment, every day is like this. There is a constant flurry of research, ideation, analysis - but the most important part of all that is figuring out which approach, of all these, to put our energy behind. Because the next part is a massive amount of hard work, with dev, ops, design, project management, editorial people; the deployment of serious resources. Which in the end is time spent away from our families, as well as the unstinting attention of a lot of skilled people.
So damn right, the effort of making something real is huge. All the more reason to be sure that you're working on a really good, important idea.
And yes, a lamp with a LAMP stack is a bloody great idea. http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cloudlight/light-1
Backed.
Re:Ideas and execution – an enormous difference in effort
by TheZenPsycho on Friday December 14, 2012 @07:32AM
(#4920633)
As a fellow ABC co-worker, and platform dev on the light, Thank you.
However, what always, always strikes me is that no matter the good idea, and no matter how well thought out and planned it is, it's always going to need a heap of work to make it move beyond the initial concept phase into something that has half a hope of standing the whims and vagaries of a real production environment, with real users.
Whatever project wins the day, gets company support to continue development -- and so far, months of solid work from extremely high-functioning and skilled teams is what it's taken to get anything that can actually be deployed and used consistently. There is no such thing as a quick win, even with a quick good idea.
It all goes to show, hard work always wins in the end, and execution is more often than not the downfall of so many otherwise great ideas.
The project written about in the linked article, which might seem like a simple piece of controllable hardware, will require months of significant time and effort from many, many dedicated folks to reach reality as a manufacturable product, but that's the same as almost anything that successfully sees the light of day. TANSTAAFL, indeed.
The interesting thing about modern systems of involvement is that it's entirely possible to assist a project along its way, without having to be a marketing genius, technical whiz, or market playing venture capitalist. As we see in our hack days, lots of little pushes can make more difference in some cases than one big push.