Founder School Session: The Future Doesn't Have to Be Incremental

>He thinks that you can just design something nice from whole cloth and people will use it. Because that's exactly what they did in Xerox Park, many times over. >That's why his designs aren't deployed. No comment. >But he's basically confusing research and engineering, as if engineering wasn't even a thing, and you can just come up with stuff and have people use it because it's good. Kay has many talks about the difference between invention and innovation (which are much better terms than ones you're using). In fact, his analysis of this difference is probably the most insightful and though-provoking technology talk I have ever seen: ▶ this video Of course, this subject makes a lot of developers highly uncomfortable, hence a lot of shallow, ignorant, knee-jerk dismissals. "Everything is incremental." "Everything is the only way it could be." "This is fine." And so on. Thing is, Kay worked at Xerox and Apple. He read a myriad of books and research papers on computing, which he constantly references in his talks and writings. He worked and continues to work with some of the most forward-thinking people in the field of computing. In late eighties he foresaw most of the current computing trends - which is verifiable via YouTube. Even without any context his talks display a considerable depth of thought. In short: unlike some people, he actually knows what he is talking about. >The point is that it couldn't have been any different. It wasn't designed; it was evolved. And that is why someone who designed it just received a Turing award. Makes perfect sense. Edit: Regarding your other comment here. >If the web is a genius for hypertext, but not for app delivery, then he should have just said so. That is not a very hard sentiment to express. "The Web was done by Amateurs" doesn't capture it. He has several decades worth of talks and writing. If you haven't bothered to familiarize yourself with at least some of them to understand what he means it's your own fault.

Alan Kay spoke about it length in many of his talks. For example: ▶ this video Excellent video. I highly recommend everyone working in or with IT to see it. I think he is right. PCs and smartphone are mostly recreating thing from the past, and not the best things either. However, this isn't because we invented everything there is to invent. It has more to do with how research in computing is currently funded and how companies approach invention and innovation.

I'd like to argue something contrarian in this thread: you could be on the right path. Some facts to keep in mind: - There are on the order of 20,000 new startups each year; most of the other people in this thread are from this pool. - Only 2-5 of those 20,000 startups will end up mattering (i.e., will reach a high enough valuation/impact on the world to move a needle). - Of these 2-5 startups that matter per year, almost none of them were pivots (Twitter is LoudCloud are the only examples I can think of). - The conventional wisdom is to take an incremental idea and run with it; "ideas don't matter and execution is everything"; run sprints and use the Lean Startup methodology to pull the market out of an idea (or pivot), and reach a local maxima. - This will only get you the result that 20,000 startups a year typically get: incrementalism, small victories, and/or failure. - There's also lottery ticket mentality to this conventional style of thinking: you're no different than anyone else, so stop ideating and start doing, and maybe you'll get lucky. If you've been at it for a year and haven't found anything good enough to give your life to, it could mean you are different than the average HNer. It could mean you have a calling to think bigger than most people do. Here is some material you may be interested in which bolsters this viewpoint: - Alan Kay's "The Future Doesn't Have to be Incremental": ▶ this video - Peter Thiel's book Zero to One. Among other things, this book discusses the importance of avoiding competition and commoditized markets (unless you have something 10x better; i.e., Google's Page Rank). - Listen to interviews with Elon Musk, who claims he started by thinking about HUGE problems that humanity faces and worked backwards. Instead of thinking incrementally, Musk thinks extremely large and seems to plan for years in advance: link At some point, of course, you have to interact with reality, and that could involve interacting with negative people on HN (and especially real customers, etc). When Reid Hoffman started LinkedIn, he talked with dozens of people in his network and more than 2/3 said negative things about his idea. It's part of the process of getting calibrated with reality. But this shouldn't be your starting point; it should be what you do after you find something that actually moves you. Finally, I want to say that me and a friend were in a similar boat to you and your friends several months ago: we had been reading about technologies and problems for months and had rejected incremental ideas that didn't move us. It looked like we had just fucked around for several months and had nothing to show for it. We ended up working on a experimental VR Window Manager as an attempt to bring Linux to a new computing platform (i.e., VR): link Here was our rationale for this idea when we started: link It's very much in the spirit of the advice I just gave you. Lord knows we could be wrong, but one problem we don't have is in doubting whether our project could matter if we pulled it off. Good luck.

Apple had real Unix a decade before the Linux crap was made, a bad unix copy. Nextstep was much better than Linux crap. "A budget of bad ideas" is what Alan Kay said about Linux [1], he invented the personal computer. My 1987-1997 ISP was based on several different Unix running on Apple, probably long before you where born. Apple built several supercomputers. [1] link [2] Founder School Session: The Future Doesn't Have to Be Incremental ▶ this video

How about this quote instead, then? >"Big data" is a way that a lot of people are trying to make money today, and it's a favorite of marketing people because it's in the wind. ... But in fact, the interesting future is not about data at all, but about meaning, and Stephen[ Wolfram]'s demos showed you a thought which most people in the computing world haven't had, which is "What if my programming language actually knew something". And, in fact, what if my user interface actually knew something? Not like Siri, which "knows" things, but what if it actually knew about me, and what if it actually knew about the contexts in which I'm trying to do things? That's an example of a leap. That set of ideas is actually old, and it was funded back when a lot of leap ideas were funded, and when the funding went away many of those ideas that weren't realized by about 1980 just haven't been worked on since, and that's something that'd be interesting to talk about. "The Future Doesn't Have To Be Incremental": ▶ this video Not that I necessarily agree with the article's concludions, but if the thesis is supposed to be that Kay disagrees with how we use big data today as a jumping-off point for reexamination, then this and the reference to Likleider's communicating with aliens problem work just fine for me.

No, it's not about personal preference. It is about what is (im)possible when the only context to be considered is the status quo. The technologies you list are innovative but in the end just iterations of inventions of the 1970s. The 70s were so special because stuff happened there was the result of increased spending into science and research of the 60s after the Sputnik crisis [1]. Today's R&D is not focused on what could be possible in 10, 20, or 30 years but in 1, 2, or 3 quarters since companies funding the research need to be focused on their bottom line. The Eve project was special insofar in that it received funding not tied to short-term goals – but only to an amount that in the end wasn't enough. Similar things happened elsewhere and this bars the way to more meaningful inventions [2]. [1] The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal. Mitchell Waldrop. [2] Founder School Session: The Future Doesn't Have to Be Incremental ▶ this video

Dr. Kay, if you're still following... then with singular respect and gratitude for your life-changing work and ideas, I would like to ask you one question. Is there a good way to use bad systems? Such as the web, which you describe as a “broken wheel,” lacking even a fraction of (e.g.) Englebart's vision. Or Linux, which you call “a budget of bad ideas.” (And no small budget, at that.) Or the iPad (and all common tablets, I assume), whose interface you call “brain dead.”[0] What should we do with these things? Are they dead ends? Are they good for anything? Can they not be salvaged incrementally? Here in the Hacker News community, where I am happy to see that my enthusiasm about your work and message is strongly shared, there is yet a huge amount of energy being poured into the wrong end of the low-pass filter, or, as you call it, “the world.” I know that we are not averse to learning curves, but maybe there is too much sunk cost to question what's already “working”? What should we do? One answer is to use bad systems to simulate better ones. But—when this is even feasible—it's always done at the cost of performance, and VPRI's publications make no secret of that. A proof-of-concept does not equal a product. And at any rate, most of us are not researchers. Because of this apparent dilemma, the exhiliration that I always feel when I hear you speak or read your writing is always tainted with a sense of despair. Is there any enlightened way to use today's systems (for example, as application developers), or should all of our efforts be directed at fixing (or indeed replacing) the systems themselves? Thank you again, for all that you've done and continue to do. [0] ▶ this video link And others. I believe that these quotes are representative and not misused out of context.