It's because I could never build anything, I just competed with myself to come up with ideas that nobody else would come up with.
Avoided local maxima of the at-that-time-doable, while still making -- completing designs on paper = iterating faster. Iterate more times than competition on paper, never build anything, then when time comes to build, you can supersede competition.
This approach may only work for perfectly logical, deterministic systems, like computers.
Re:How Woz Gets Things Done
by access_denied on Saturday April 25, 2009 @10:48AM
(#578926)
This comment is a positive example of what I want to see here on HN. It's not just commenting or adding an association one had. It's developing the material further. He really said something. That's good.
Thanks for the link, wallflower. I forgot about that. (Buy the book anyway. You just don't know which chapter might change your life.)
This pretty much sums it up for me:
"When you design with very few parts, everything is so clean and orderly you can understand it more deeply in your head, and that causes you to have fewer bugs. You live and sleep with every little detail of the product."
I was going to object to your "finger on the pulse of every detail of their project", because as complexity increases, it eventually becomes overwhelming and too difficult to understand, and you have to construct intermediate representations to handle the complexity - that is, a form of modularity, not for coding it, but just for understanding it.
But then I saw your quote here, about the need to understand it, and the having very few parts makes that possible, by limiting the complexity.
http://www.foundersatwork.com/steve-wozniak.html