Great article. Highlights:
1. store mockups before rollout 2. focus with simplicity and customer orientation 3. obsession with materials
typical Steve Jobs
Posts filed under Technology
Technology lost - for 1,000 years
An ancient Greek lunar calculator - the first "computer" - is found to be more complex than expected.
But a century ago, pieces of a strange mechanism with bronze gears and dials were recovered from an ancient shipwreck off the coast of Greece. Historians of science concluded that this was an instrument that calculated and illustrated astronomical information, particularly phases of the Moon and planetary motions, in the second century B.C.
....
Dr. Charette noted that more than 1,000 years elapsed before instruments of such complexity are known to have re-emerged. A few artifacts and some Arabic texts suggest that simpler geared calendrical devices had existed, particularly in Baghdad around A.D. 900.
It seems clear, Dr. Charette said, that “much of the mind-boggling technological sophistication available in some parts of the Hellenistic and Greco-Roman world was simply not transmitted further,†adding, “The gear-wheel, in this case, had to be reinvented.â€
Hard to imagine this type of technology gap ever reoccuring short of a planetary catastrophe.
Full article from the NY Times (free reg required)
How Steve Jobs prepares for a speech
It looks so easy
If the chief executive of Cadbury-Schweppes speaks at a conference, or Nike's boss introduces a new kind of trainer, you might expect to see it covered in specialist magazines, then quickly forgotten. But on Tuesday a chief executive will stand up and announce something, and within minutes it will be scrutinised across the web and on stockbrokers' computers. It will be in newspapers. They'll talk about it for months.That chief executive is Steve Jobs, and I know why that speech makes an impact. To a casual observer it is just a guy in a black shirt and jeans talking about some new technology products. But it is in fact an incredibly complex and sophisticated blend of sales pitch, product demonstration and corporate cheerleading, with a dash of religious revival thrown in for good measure. It represents weeks of work, precise orchestration and intense pressure for the scores of people who collectively make up the "man behind the curtain". I know, because I've been there, first as part of the preparation team and later on stage with Steve.
The perfectionist has not gone away
Steve wanted material that looked great, yet was possible for an average person to achieve. So we called on everyone we knew at Apple to submit their best home movies and snapshots. Before long we had an amazing collection of fun, cool and heartwarming videos and photos. My team picked the best and confidently presented them to Steve. True to his reputation as a perfectionist, he hated most of them. We repeated that process several times. At the time I thought he was being unreasonable; but I had to admit that the material we ended up with was much better than what we had begun with.
The Money Quote:
The team and I spent hundreds of hours preparing for a segment that lasted about five minutes.
Overall article from Guardian worth reading.
A lot of work goes into the "casual" presentation
Guy Kawasaki and Commercialization
Amusing post by Guy Kawasaki on the perils of commercialization. Net conclusion: If you can, hire away one of the junior folks if they are passionate and legally clean. Full post here
The Art of Commercialization
One of the consequences of a boomlet is that organizations like research labs, defense contractors, and aerospace companies are going to want a piece of the action. Their logic will go like this:
"The technology we invented for satellite imaging can be used for amateur video, so we could have created YouTube and sold to it to Google for $1.6 billion. Let's find an investor to fund this since our budget is set for the year. How hard could it be to create a better YouTube?"
I've been on the other side of the table as these organizations try to negotiate a deal to spin out, license, or sell their technology. I can tell you that it's almost always Mission: Impossible to get a deal done because most organizations try to stipulate the following conditions:
- The startup can't hire away any employees. It cannot talk to them because they don't want them distracted from their Department of Defense contract work.
- The sole contribution is a CD-ROM with their research findings. They'll mail it to the startup when the deal is done. They repeat: Do not talk to the employees. Everything they think a startup needs is on the disk.
- Their technology is so great that they aren't offering any kind of exclusivity or perpetual license. They might find a better deal, and they will take it. This is what's called vacuosity wrapped in pomposity.
- Since their technology is the company, they want to own 80% of the spinoff. In addition, they want a 50% royalty structure with a $5 million advance. Unfortunately $5 million is twice the size of the first round of financing.
- They want to restrict the markets that the startup can sell into because they know best who should use their technology and for what purposes. (Did you hear the story about the inventor of Novacaine who insisted that the drug be used for operations and not for dentistry because it was too important a discovery to be used for something as mundane as tooth extraction?)