Category: Entrepreneurship

Descartes Saw that a Great City Is “an Inventory of the Possible”

(p. 226) Joel Kotkin writes about “The Broken Ladder: The Threat to Upward Mobility in the Global City.” “A great city, wrote Rene Descartes in the 17th Century, represented ‘an inventory of the possible,’ a place where people could create their own futures and lift up their families. In the 21st Century–the first in which the majority of people will live in cities–this unique link between urbanism and upward mobility will become ever more critical.”

Source:
Taylor, Timothy. “Recommendations for Further Reading.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 24, no. 4 (Fall 2010): 219-26.

With iTunes, Apple Leapfrogged CD Burners (a Boat Apple Had Missed)

Is the example sketched below, and in a previous entry, a case of a first mover disadvantage? Or is it simply a case of a lucky or wise bounce-back from a genuine mistake?

(p. 382) . . . [Job’s] angry insistence that the iMac get rid of its tray disk drive and use instead a more elegant slot drive meant that it could not include the first CD burners, which were initially made for the tray format. “We kind of missed the boat on that,” he recalled. “So we needed to catch up real fast.” The mark of an innovative company is not only that it comes up with new ideas first, but also that it knows how to leapfrog when it finds itself behind.

Source:
Isaacson, Walter. Steve Jobs. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011.
(Note: ellipsis and bracketed “Job’s” added.)

Apple “Finding a Way to Leapfrog Over Its Competitors”

Isaacson says Jobs wanted two refinements in the iMac. One was new colors. The other is discussed below.
I am not sure what to make of this episode. Is Isaacson suggesting that it was good for Apple that Jobs made a mistake on the type of CD hardware to put in the iMac? That this added constraint “would then force Apple to be imaginative and bold”?
Or is the moral that good people who make a lot of quick decisions, make mistakes, sometimes big mistakes, and that Jobs found a way to bounce back from this one?

(p. 356) There was one other important refinement that Jobs wanted for the iMac: getting rid of that detested CD tray. “I’d seen a slot-load drive on a very high-end Sony stereo,” he said, “so I went to the drive manufacturers and got them to do a slot-load drive for us for the version of the iMac we did nine months later.” Rubinstein tried to argue him out of the change. He predicted that new drives would come along that could burn music onto CDs rather than merely play them, and they would be available in tray form before they were made to work in slots. “If you go to slots, you will always be behind on the technology,” Rubinstein argued.

“I don’t care, that’s what I want,” Jobs snapped back. They were having lunch at a sushi bar in San Francisco, and Jobs insisted that they continue the conversation over a walk. “I want you to do the slot-load drive for me as a personal favor,” Jobs asked. Rubinstein agreed, of course, but he turned out to be right. Panasonic came out with a CD drive that could rip and burn music, and it was available first for computers that had old-fashioned tray loaders. The effects of this (p. 357) would ripple over the next few years: It would cause Apple to be slow in catering to users who wanted to rip and burn their own music, but that would then force
Apple to be imaginative and bold in finding a way to leapfrog over its competitors when Jobs finally realized that he had to get into the music market.

Source:
Isaacson, Walter. Steve Jobs. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011.

UnCollege Seeks “to Open People’s Minds to a Different Set of Opportunities”

StephensDaleUnCollegeFounder2013-01-01.jpg

“Dale J. Stephens, who founded UnCollege.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. 1) BENJAMIN GOERING does not look like Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, talk like him or inspire the same controversy. But he does apparently think like him.

Two years ago, Mr. Goering was a sophomore at the University of Kansas, studying computer science and philosophy and feeling frustrated in crowded lecture halls where the professors did not even know his name.
“I wanted to make Web experiences,” said Mr. Goering, now 22, and create “tools that make the lives of others better.”
So in the spring of 2010, Mr. Goering took the same leap as Mr. Zuckerberg: he dropped out of college and moved to San Francisco to make his mark. He got a job as a software engineer at a social-software company, Livefyre, run by a college dropout, where the chief technology officer at the time and a lead engineer were also dropouts. None were sheepish about their lack of a diploma. Rather, they were proud of their real-life lessons on the job.
“Education isn’t a four-year program,” Mr. Goering said. “It’s a mind-set.”
The idea that a college diploma is an all-but-mandatory ticket to a successful career is showing fissures. Feeling squeezed by a sagging job market and mounting student debt, a groundswell of university-age heretics are pledging allegiance to new groups like UnCollege, dedicated (p. 16) to “hacking” higher education. Inspired by billionaire role models, and empowered by online college courses, they consider themselves a D.I.Y. vanguard, committed to changing the perception of dropping out from a personal failure to a sensible option, at least for a certain breed of risk-embracing maverick.
Risky? Perhaps. But it worked for the founders of Twitter, Tumblr and a little company known as Apple.
When Mr. Goering was wrestling with his decision, he woke up every morning to a ringtone mash-up that blended electronic tones with snippets of Steve Jobs’s 2005 commencement address at Stanford University, in which he advised, “love what you do,” “don’t settle.” Mr. Goering took that as a sign.
“It’s inspiring that his dropping out basically had no effect, positive or negative, on the work and company and values he could create,” he said of the late Apple co-founder.
In that oft-quoted address, Mr. Jobs called his decision to drop out of Reed College “one of the best decisions I ever made.” Mr. Jobs’s “think different” approach to education (backpacking through India, dining with Hare Krishnas) is portrayed in countless hagiographies as evidence of his iconoclastic genius.
. . .
. . . Dale J. Stephens, [is] the founder of a group called UnCollege that champions “more meaningful” alternatives to college. . . .
. . .
UnCollege advocates a D.I.Y. approach to higher education and spreads the message through informational “hackademic camps.” “Hacking,” in the group’s parlance, can involve any manner of self-directed learning: travel, volunteer work, organizing collaborative learning groups with friends. Students who want to avoid $200,000 in student-loan debt might consider enrolling in a technology boot camp, where you can learn to write code in 8 to 10 weeks for about $10,000, Mr. Stephens said.
THEY can also nourish their minds from a growing menu of Internet classrooms, including the massive open online courses, or MOOCs, which stream classes from elite universities like Princeton. This guerrilla approach hits home with young people who came of age seeking out valuable content free on Napster and BitTorrent.
Mr. Stephens, a dropout from Hendrix College in Arkansas (he later earned a Thiel Fellowship), started UnCollege less than two years ago, and already its Web site attracts 20,000 unique visitors a month. “I get on scale of 10 to 15 e-mails a day from people who say something along lines of, ‘I thought I was the only one out there who thought about education like this, I don’t feel crazy anymore,’ ” he said.
. . .
The goal is not to foment for a mass exodus from the ivy halls, Mr. Stephens said, but to open people’s minds to a different set of opportunities.

For the full story, see:
ALEX WILLIAMS. “The Old College Try? No Way.” The New York Times (Sun., December 2, 2012): 1 & 16.
(Note: ellipses and bracketed “is” were added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date November 30, 2012, and has the title “Saying No to College.”)

“A Fairy Tale About a Lonely Candle that Wants to Be Lighted”

TallowCandleManuscript2013-01-01.jpeg “A newly found manuscript of a fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen, which has been located in Odense, is pictured in the State Archives in Copenhagen, Denmark, Wednesday, Dec. 12, 2012. The story of ‘The Tallow Candle’ might have been written about 1823, when he was 18 year old.” Source of caption and photo: http://www.ctvnews.ca/entertainment/new-found-tale-of-a-lonely-candle-could-be-early-work-of-hc-andersen-1.1077533#ixzz2GmTQNcFvhttp://www.ctvnews.ca/polopoly_fs/1.1077539!/

(p. C2) A fairy tale about a lonely candle that wants to be lighted had been languishing in a box in Denmark’s National Archives for many years. In October it was discovered by a retired historian, who now believes it is one of the first fairy tales ever written by Hans Christian Andersen.
. . .
The six-page manuscript, called “Tallow Candle,” is dedicated to a vicar’s widow named Bunkeflod who lived across the street from Andersen’s home. Ejnar Stig Askgaard, a Hans Christian Andersen expert, said the work was probably one of Andersen’s earliest.

For the full story, see:
CAROL VOGEL. “Discovery of Story Is Like a Fairy Tale.” The Wall Street Journal (Fri., December 14, 2012): C2.
(Note: ellipsis and underline added; bold in original.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date December 13, 2012, and has the title “Like a Fairy Tale: Hans Christian Andersen Story Is Found in a Box.”)
(Note: the words underlined by me above, were in the online, but not the print, version of the article.)

“Think Profit”

(p. 339) At the January 1998 San Francisco Macworld, Jobs took the stage where Amelio had bombed a year earlier. He sported a full beard and a leather jacket as he touted the new product strategy. And for the first time he ended the presentation with a phrase that he would make his signature coda: “Oh, and one more thing . . .” This time the “one more thing” was “Think Profit.” When he said those words, the crowd erupted in applause. After two years of staggering losses, Apple had enjoyed a profitable quarter, making $45 million. For the full fiscal year of 1998, it would turn in a $309 million profit. Jobs was back, and so was Apple.

Source:
Isaacson, Walter. Steve Jobs. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011.
(Note: ellipsis in original.)

“People Said He Was a Fraud, But He Turned Out to Be Right”

WhitfieldWillisCleanRoom2013-01-01.jpg

“Willis Whitfield with a mobile clean room in the 1960s.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. B16) Half a century ago, as a rapidly changing world sought increasingly smaller mechanical and electrical components and more sanitary hospital conditions, one of the biggest obstacles to progress was air, and the dust and germs it contains.
. . .
Then, in 1962, Willis Whitfield invented the clean room.
“People said he was a fraud,” recalled Gilbert V. Herrera, the director of microsystems science and technology at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque. “But he turned out to be right.”
. . .
His clean rooms blew air in from the ceiling and sucked it out from the floor. Filters scrubbed the air before it entered the room. Gravity helped particles exit. It might not seem like a complicated concept, but no one had tried it before. The process could completely replace the air in the room 10 times a minute.
Particle detectors in Mr. Whitfield’s clean rooms started showing numbers so low — a thousand times lower than other methods — that some people did not believe the readings, or Mr. Whitfield. He was questioned so much that he began understating the efficiency of his method to keep from shocking people.
“I think Whitfield’s wrong,” a scientist from Bell Labs finally said at a conference where Mr. Whitfield spoke. “It’s actually 10 times better than he’s saying.”

For the full obituary, see:
WILLIAM YARDLEY. “W. Whitfield, 92, Dies; Built Clean Room.” The New York Times (Weds., December 5, 2012): B16.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the obituary has the date December 4, 2012, and has the title “Willis Whitfield, Inventor of Clean Room That Purges Tiny Particles, Dies at 92.”)

Jobs Laid Off 3,000 from Apple to Save It from Bankruptcy

(p. 339) In his first year back, Jobs laid off more than three thousand people, which salvaged the company’s balance sheet. For the fiscal year that ended when Jobs became interim CEO in September 1997, Apple lost $1.04 billion. “We were less than ninety days from being insolvent,” he recalled.

Source:
Isaacson, Walter. Steve Jobs. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011.

“The Arpanet Was Not an Internet”

XeroxParcSign2012-12-18.jpg “Xerox PARC headquarters.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. A11) A telling moment in the presidential race came recently when Barack Obama said: “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.” He justified elevating bureaucrats over entrepreneurs by referring to bridges and roads, adding: “The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all companies could make money off the Internet.”
. . .
Robert Taylor, who ran the ARPA program in the 1960s, sent an email to fellow technologists in 2004 setting the record straight: “The creation of the Arpanet was not motivated by considerations of war. The Arpanet was not an Internet. An Internet is a connection between two or more computer networks.”
If the government didn’t invent the Internet, who did? Vinton Cerf developed the TCP/IP protocol, the Internet’s backbone, and Tim Berners-Lee gets credit for hyperlinks.
But full credit goes to the company where Mr. Taylor worked after leaving ARPA: Xerox. It was at the Xerox PARC labs in Silicon Valley in the 1970s that the Ethernet was developed to link different computer networks. Researchers there also developed the first personal computer (the Xerox Alto) and the graphical user interface that still drives computer usage today.
According to a book about Xerox PARC, “Dealers of Lightning” (by Michael Hiltzik), its top researchers realized they couldn’t wait for the government to connect different networks, so would have to do it themselves. “We have a more immediate problem than they do,” Robert Metcalfe told his colleague John Shoch in 1973. “We have more networks than they do.” Mr. Shoch later recalled that ARPA staffers “were working under government funding and university contracts. They had contract administrators . . . and all that slow, lugubrious behavior to contend with.”

For the full commentary, see:
Gordon Crovitz. “INFORMATION AGE; Who Really Invented the Internet?” The Wall Street Journal (Mon., July 23, 2012): A11.
(Note: ellipsis between paragraphs was added; ellipsis internal to last paragraph was in original.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date July 22, 2012.)

I read the Hiltzik book several years ago, and my memory of it is not sharp, but I remember thinking that it was a useful book:
Hiltzik, Michael A. Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age. New York: HarperBusiness, 1999.

Debating Grammar: “Think Different” or “Think Differently”

(p. 329) They debated the grammatical issue: If “different” was supposed to modify the verb “think,” it should be an adverb, as in “think dif-(p. 330)ferently.” But Jobs insisted that he wanted “different” to be used as a noun, as in “think victory” or “think beauty.” Also, it echoed colloquial use, as in “think big.” Jobs later explained, “We discussed whether it was correct before we ran it. It’s grammatical, if you think about what we’re trying to say. It’s not think the same, it’s think different. Think a little different, think a lot different, think different. ‘Think differently’ wouldn’t hit the meaning for me.”

Source:
Isaacson, Walter. Steve Jobs. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011.

“The People Who Are Crazy Enough to Think They Can Change the World Are the Ones Who Do”

(p. 329) . . . those who could stand up to Jobs, including Clow and his teammates Ken Segall and Craig Tanimoto, were able to work with him to create a tone poem that he liked. In its original sixty-second version it read:

Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.

Source:
Isaacson, Walter. Steve Jobs. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011.
(Note: ellipsis added.)