Re:The Unreasonable Effectiveness of IT
by jon-wood on Tuesday July 07, 2015 @02:33AM
(#9843913)
It's very rare that in our industry someone goes in without even knowing if a thing is theoretically possible.
Uber knew they could do GPS tracking and send messages to phones.
Apple knew they could integrate a mobile phone chipset with a PDA one, and put some software on top.
Google knew you could index web pages.
None of these things were fundamentally hard problems on the scale of nuclear fission or landing men on the moon. There was little risk beyond some money, and it was largely a case of taking existing technology and putting it together in new ways. I'm not trying to claim these things didn't take some imagination and skill to develop, but to claim they were potentially impossible is overstretching, sometimes as an industry I think we just need to get over ourselves a bit!
Uber knew they could do GPS tracking and send messages to phones.
Apple knew they could integrate a mobile phone chipset with a PDA one, and put some software on top.
Google knew you could index web pages.
None of these things were fundamentally hard problems on the scale of nuclear fission or landing men on the moon. There was little risk beyond some money, and it was largely a case of taking existing technology and putting it together in new ways. I'm not trying to claim these things didn't take some imagination and skill to develop, but to claim they were potentially impossible is overstretching, sometimes as an industry I think we just need to get over ourselves a bit!