Many of us associate this rather unethical quote with Steve Jobs of Apple. At least that’s where I heard it first. The second time around I came across this quote was in Cringley’s excellent book Accidental Empires. The opinions are no doubt sound, and does make one ponder about the real experiences these famous entrepreneurs went through before getting at where they are.
I must admit, I liked the final passage about computing as a transitional technology. The actual paragraph as quoted from Cringley’s book goes something like this-
“We overestimate change in the short-term by supposing that dominant software architectures are going to change practically overnight, without an accompanying change in the installed hardware base. But we also underestimate change by not anticipating new uses for computers that will probably drive us overnight into a new type of hardware. It’s the texture of the change that we can’t anticipate. So when we finally get a PC in every home, it’s more likely to be as a cellular phone with sophisticated computing ability thrown in almost as an after thought, or it will be an ancillary function to a 64-bit Nintendo machine, because people need to communicate and be entertained, but they don’t really need to compute.
Computing is a transitional technology. We don’t compute to compute, we compute to design airplane wings, simulate oil fields, and calculate our taxes. We compute to plan businesses and then to understand why they failed. All these things, while parading as computing tasks, are really experiences. We can have enough power, but we can never have enough experience, which is why computing is beginning a transition from being a method of data processing to being a method of communication.
People care about people. We watch version after version of the same seven stories on television simply for that reason. More than 80 percent of our brains are devoted to processing visual in formation, because that’s how we most directly perceive the world around us. In time, all this will be mirrored in new computing technologies. We’re heading on a journey that will result, by the middle of the next decade, in there being no more phones or televisions or computers. Instead, there will be billions of devices that perform all three functions, and by doing so,will tie us all together and into the whole body of human knowledge.”
I must admit the opinions are very plausible. It is more “correct” to consider technology as a transition than destination. Indeed … ! Success does look planned in retrospect.
Yet another context set off echoing my own thoughts in the same book, which goes like this-
“It was in the clay room, a closet filled with plastic bags of gray muck at the back of Mr. Ziska’s art room, where I made my move. For the first time ever, I found myself standing alone with Nancy Wilkins, the love of my life, the girl of my dreams. She was a vision in her green and black plaid skirt and white blouse, with little flecks of clay dusted across her glasses. Her blonde hair was in a ponytail, her teeth were in braces.
‘Run away with me, Nancy,’ I said, wrapping my arms around her from behind. Forget for a moment, as I obviously did, that we were both 13 years old, trapped in the eighth grade, and had nowhere to run away to. ‘Why would I want to run away?’ Nancy responded, gently twisting free. ‘Let’s stay here and have fun with everyone else.’ It wasn’t a rejection, really. There had been no screams, no slaps, no frenzied pounding on the door by Earl Ziska, eager to throw his 120 pounds of fighting fury against me for making a pass at one of his art students. And she’d used the word let’s, so maybe I had a chance. Still,Nancy’s was a call to mediocrity, to being just like all the other kids.
Running away still sounded better to me.
What I really had in mind was not running away but running toward something, toward a future where I was older (16 would do it, I reckoned) and taller and had lots of money and could live out my fantasies with impunity, Nancy Wilkins at my side. But I couldn’t say that. It wouldn’t have been cool to say, ‘Come with me to a place where I am taller.’
We never ran anywhere together, Nancy and I. It was clear from that moment in the clay room that she was content to live her life in formation with everyone else’s and to limit her goals to within one standard deviation on the upside of average. Like nearly everyone else in school and in the world, she wanted more than anything else to be just like her best friends. Only prettier, of course.
Fitting in is the root of culture. Staying here and having fun with everyone else is what allows societies to function, but it’s not a source of progress. Progress comes from discord—from doing new things in new ways, from running away to something new, even when it means giving up that chance to have fun with the old gang.
To engineers—really good ones, interested in making progress—the best of all possible worlds would be one in which technologies competed continuously and only the best technologies survived. Whether the good stuff came from an established company, a start-up, or even from Earl Ziska wouldn’t matter. But it usually does matter because the real world, the one we live in, is a world of dollars, not sense. It’s a world where commercial interests are entrenched and consumers typically pay closer attention to what everyone else is buying than to whether what they are buying is any good. In this real world, then, the most successful products become standards against which all other products are measured, not for their performance or cleverness but for the extent to which they are like that standard.”
It is like looking straight in the mirror talking to myself. How many times do I feel the same way? Mediocrity is considered normal, and anything that challenges that, even sarcastic humor, is seen as an insult or even a challenge to intellect blinded by a zeal to fit “in” no matter what it means for oneself.
A good memo of the thoughts that concern me as an entrepreneur set out to change the very same world I’ve lived in.
