Re:You Can't Predict Who Will Change The World
by davidw on Tuesday October 16, 2007 @08:56AM
(#68484)
I don't think he's saying to just take a bumble-along happy go lucky approach, with no rigor, training or mental discipline, but that you can't "sit down and invent things" most of the time. Sure, you can point yourself in a direction, but even then, you have to try, fiddle, experiment, and calibrate as you go along, and you might even then arrive somewhere that you didn't set out to go, if you're well placed to grab opportunities.
Re:You Can't Predict Who Will Change The World
by alaskamiller on Tuesday October 16, 2007 @01:27PM
(#68636)
<3 50 cal, slammed the bolt onto my hands a couple of times. Thanks, Browning!
This is of course why we're all using a neighborhood DC power station provided by Edison Electric.
Nope, sorry, "random tinkering" will get you only so far.
Not so random tinkering can get you farther, it's no accident that about the most popular handgun design in the USA was made by John Browning (the greatest firearms design genius in history) and adopted by the US Army in 1911 (!). (We're also still using his M2 .50 cal machine gun with no real need to replace it, just as there was no real reason to replace the M1911.)
But if you combine "random tinkering" with "European math" (i.e. Tesla and the polyphase AC that Edison could not do the math for), now, there you really have something.
When I read some histories of the founding concepts of MIT, it was very clear they desired to meld these two powerful themes into something new, the motto Mens et Manus (Mind and Hand) and the seal expressing this quite clearly.
And while I understand that a lot of you all who are focused on a niche that richly rewards "random tinkering" don't think there's much value add to e.g. the sorts of engineers that MIT turns out, I submit to you that you wouldn't be here unless you were standing on the shoulders of the people who produced artifacts like the transistor, the IC and TCP/IP (and maybe even ACID databases :-), none of which were pure "random tinkering".
To recast this a bit, maybe look at it through Clayton Christensen's lens:
The transistor, IC and TCP/IP were all sustaining innovations, replacing the tube, mechanically integrated modules and previous networking systems respectively. Each dropped right into the place of their predecessors with the usual teething pains, but represented qualitative improvements that in a while were game changers.
What you are doing is disruptive innovation at its finest (read The Innovator's Dilemma for the full treatment).
There's a place for both, but I believe that while what one is working on might strongly emphasize one or the other, one should be reasonably grounded in both.
Otherwise you might find your lunch eaten by a disruptive innovation, or hit a brick wall when you're in the sustaining axis and e.g. something doesn't scale in an important way.
(And I thank keaneu for reminding why I dropped my subscription to Forbes a long time ago (before SCO vs. The World). :-)