News

About forty years ago a “charismatic engineer with a creative vision matched only by his skill at self-promotion,” together with his brilliant technical business partner, launched from a trade show a unique technology product that went on to spawn an entire industry.

I’m talking, of course, about Nolan Bushnell, the co-founder of Atari and creator of the world’s first coin-operated arcade video game: Computer Space.

Technologizer (which might be TIME magazine, but I’m not really sure) recently posted a profile on Bushnell and the creation of “Computer Space,” which is a fascinating story with, as you can tell, some obvious parallels to other notable success stories.

One of the parallels I noticed is that Bushnell’s first video game creation was in fact not an entirely original game. It was modeled after the action game “Spacewar!” – which was created on MIT’s own computer systems in 1962 by programmers at MIT. Bushnell first encountered it in 1964, and essentially reproduced it in 1971 for mass production as “Computer Space.”

This aligns with Malcolm Gladwell’s (criticized) “tweaker” version of Steve Jobs. It certainly hints at the fact that there’s more to the process of denting the universe than coming up with an idea, and in fact coming up with an idea may not even be necessary.

Rather, it’s the ability to successfully force an idea into the restrictions of reality – in the case of Bushnell, he was able to make a commercially viable computer game before anyone else by leaving out the computer.

Back in 2010 the 37Signals blog posted about a John Scully interview where Scully talked about Steve Jobs and his inspirations on product creation:

Dr Land was saying: “I could see what the Polaroid camera should be. It was just as real to me as if it was sitting in front of me before I had ever built one.”

And Steve said: “Yeah, that’s exactly the way I saw the Macintosh.”

The Scully interview transcript is on Cult of Mac here.

The big news today is that Twitter is launching a whole new interface (again) that will change the way we all interact with our accounts on the web, on our mobile devices, and TweetDeck. This makes me think of a great post on visionary leadership from Fred Wilson called Long Roadmaps, where he includes a statement from Jack Dorsey as he re-took the product helm at Twitter earlier this year:

When Jack Dorsey came back to Twitter, he said he was finally going to build Twitter 1.0. Think about that. And think about what Twitter 5.0 is in Jack’s mind.

Understanding the long-term, and having a vision in your head not only of what is ten years out, but of the platforms to reach in between here and there, seems critical to putting a dent in the universe. A lot of people have noticed, with hindsight, how well Steve Jobs described iCloud and a cloud-oriented computing experience in 1997:

This kind of vision is of course only one component of the process.

There are many leaders who can envision a future seven to ten years out, just as there are many leaders who are truly excellent at execution and process, and many leaders who can inspire people to produce amazing work. The combination is what seems harder to find.

I am currently reading a book called the Mythical Man Month by Frederick Brooks, a classic collection of essays on engineering management, and while many particular aspects have become somewhat outdated (through agile methodologies or new communication technologies), much of the theory seems to stand the test of time.

There is a section in the book which talks about the role of the software “architect,” and in particular the way in which an architect works. First, the architect will design an initial system, and it will be very minimal and spare — all extraneous “cool” features and ideas will be set aside for later consideration.

The great danger facing an architect, according to Brooks, is when the second system is being designed:

The general tendency is to over-design the second system, using all the ideas and frills that were cautiously sidetracked on the first one. The result, as Ovid says, is a “big pile.”

Brooks lists out several (rather technical) examples referring to things like “batch debugging without recompilation” and “managing a fixed-batch job stream,” but the point is clear: good system design relies heavily on the self-control of the architect, and her ability to properly limit the scope of new systems, both by removing vestigial components and by preventing unnecessary additions.

There is, I think, an obvious lesson for the creation of successful systems (programs, businesses, or laws, or others) of all kinds: that good complex systems grow slowly from good simple systems, and that this work is very, very hard to do.

Had a nice chat with my former co-worker Steve Gillmor at the Rackspace party last week. I told him about how we are trying to document the people/processes that are “denting the future.” Steve’s new gig is at Salesforce, and he informed me that Marc Benioff and Steve Jobs were close, and that Jobs had mentored Benioff.

With that information, I am now hunting online for examples of any advice Jobs proffered to Benioff. Here is a nice instance.

This Bloomberg video interview with Marc Benioff talks about Benioff’s “special relationship” with Jobs and how Jobs advised Benioff to do more than simply create a platform. He pushed Benioff to create (and own) a complete ecosystem.

Note how Benioff wisely took it to the level of owning the term “App Store”.

And one really good – good example of that is – happened in around 2003. And I went down to talk to him and brought a few members of my executive team with us. And he said something really exciting. He goes, “Look, you’ve got a fantastic enterprise application here, but you’ve got to build an ecosystem.” So to us, we went back and we were like, “Well, we don’t know how to do that.” That was like a zen co-on (ph). How do we build an ecosystem?

So we designed this whole technology that we called App Store, which was the ability to basically buy these apps and run them in Salesforce. And when we launched it we actually called it AppExchange, and you can see it at AppExchange.com. But we like the App Store name so much that we bought the URL and we trademarked it. And then I was in the audience when he announced App Store. And I went up to him and I said, “I have a gift for you. I’m going to give you the trademark and the URL because of the help you gave me in 2003.”