Working Backwards to the Technology

http://daringfireball.net/2014/02/working_backwards

by webwielder • 12 years ago

87 35 12 years ago

I would generally agree with the overall thrust of the post, that successful products come from looking at the customer's problems first rather than what technologies you happen to have on hand to sell them. But the bit about how basic, non-product-oriented research is a distraction and a waste of effort leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

Look at one of the cited examples:

AT&T had Bell Labs, created Unix, and never made a successful product out of that work.

Which, sure, OK. But on the other hand, ask yourself where Apple (since we're talking about them here) would be today if Bell Labs had never existed. Bell Labs invented UNIX; no UNIX means no BSD, which means no NeXTSTEP, which means no OS X. Bell Labs invented C; no C means no Objective-C. Bell Labs invented the freaking transistor, without which the idea of a "personal computer" would have been utterly ridiculous. These are all fundamental inventions that made entire generations of tech businesses possible.

So one way to look at it is Gruber's way, that skipping out on R&D means that Apple is "focused." Another way to look at it would be that Apple is a freeloader. That they cheerfully take useful things that are only available to them due to the generosity of others to build products on, without seeing a need to ever be the generous ones themselves -- to replenish the commons that made their own fortune possible.

That's probably good business, at least in the near term. If there's a pile of gold sitting out in the town square, you'd be a fool not to grab as much of it as you could for yourself. But unless someone's throwing new gold onto that pile, eventually it's going to run out. And if you've used the gold to set yourself up as a goldsmith, that's going to be a pretty bleak day for you. You know?

IBM• 12 years ago

It's not that Apple is a freeloader, it's that those companies were terrible at allocating capital. Apple does R&D on technology, its just done with the goal of being utilized in a product that is viable enough to have real business value. It's not R&D for R&D's sake, which was the example companies' mistake. That R&D wasn't being done out of charity for the public good, that was shareholder capital being risked for the prospect of reaping returns from it.

adamnemecek2• 12 years ago

Apple does R&D on technology, its just done with the goal of being utilized in a product that is viable enough to have real business value.

It's not basic research then which is what most people understand under 'research'.

seaco• 12 years ago

I think it's probably good business in the long term as well. Apple isn't consuming the supply of public innovation. Apple might not add broadly to the pile, but it's not shrinking. Spending wildly on R&D doesn't ensure long term sustainably, or meaningful contributions to the public either. The Nokia comparison is pretty persuasive.

The WSJ reported that between 2004 and 2007, Nokia outspent Apple on R&D by a factor of 9 ($22.2 billion vs. $2.5 billion).

It's worth noting that Apple's $2.5 billion had a pretty big impact. Mobile computing as we now enjoy it was arguably ushered in by Apple. Focused contribution is still valuable.

icebraining• 12 years ago

Apple isn't consuming the supply of public innovation. Apple might not add broadly to the pile, but it's not shrinking.

While I know that the economy isn't zero-sum, the pie can grow bigger, etc, it also does happen that a very successful company can weaken or kill its competition, or at least force them to focus more on the short term themselves, so in way, they might be.

simonh• 12 years ago

That's a good argument for publicly funded research, the products of which become available to be leveraged by business across the economy. That doesn't mean that vertically directed, product focused research within companies is a bad thing. Without it smartphone tech would be years behind where we are today, and the Mac would never have happened which means Windows may never have happened, at least when and in the form that it did.

This is also an argument against a strictly enforced and restrictive patent system. If inventors are incapable of turning their inventions into viable products, then the broader economy and public interest may actually be best served by allowing others to make use of those inventions without punitive licensing terms. I'm not anti-patent, but it seems to me the current patent system is far from optimal.

melling3• 12 years ago

Wrong. Absolutely wrong.

Steve Jobs adopted Mach when he started NeXT because it was available and good at the time. If it hadn't existed, he would have gone off in another direction. If C, hadn't existed he wouldn't have used something else. People on HN always bring these up but they fail to realize that Steve would have simple done something else.

melling3• 12 years ago

My first response got downvoted so I'm going to try again.

You're completetely wrong. Steve would have simply come up with another solution, or used a different technology. The original Mac wasn't C or Unix based.

Perseids• 12 years ago

And with what logic does it help to post it again with basically no change to the content? You make it sound like downvotes are a calamity of nature and not a deliberate process.

(The old post for reference: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7304693 )

jimbokun• 12 years ago

Apple isn't completely a free loader.

http://www.opensource.apple.com/

Can't argue Apple's contributions rise to the level of Bell Labs (that's the gold standard of research groups). But WebKit, for example, certainly has been leveraged to great effect outside of Apple.

0xdeadbeefbabe• 12 years ago

Also Shannon's work on entropy.

Bell Labs' saying "no bucks no Buck Rogers" sounds great, but how did they implement that idea?

Jobs' statements about scarring, animals, and macrocosms do not convince me he's right about focusing on customer's problems, even if his approach at the time worked out well.

EDIT: Jobs disappointed at least two actual NeXT users I knew who really liked the NeXT.

cromwellian2• 12 years ago

Someone has to do the basic research. If everyone was "product focused", there would be no long term research. Sometimes researching stuff just for the hell of it yields serendipitous benefits, positive externalities for all of society, including your competitors.

Gruber spends an awful lot of time trying to justify and enshrine every action Apple takes. My guess is, if Apple got an Advanced Tech Group again, we'd have a blog article talking about how it's a masterful bit of Apple strategy.

The other thing is, is Apple reallty so different? We see on the Patently Apple website, that Apple is constantly patenting all kinds of crazy stuff that never becomes products.

The only difference between Apple and Google here is that Google will expose the prototype to the public and let people play with it, and Apple will just file patents on it.

gress3• 12 years ago

I think you're on Apple's payroll, working to undo the damage Gruber does as he reveals the master strategy to competitors.

gress3• 12 years ago

Irony does not go over well here, it seems,

jccc• 12 years ago

Gruber spends an awful lot of time trying to justify and enshrine every action Apple takes. My guess is, if Apple got an Advanced Tech Group again, we'd have a blog article talking about how it's a masterful bit of Apple strategy.

"This is such bullshit it hurts my head." [...] "The point isn’t about what Apple can do but what they should do. And they shouldn’t be doing this." http://daringfireball.net/2008/09/podcasters_rejection

From an imaginary app-store reviewer diary: "Rejecting all of them, consistently, would in fact be no good at all. The feeling of being part of the monolith — of being the monolith — really only surges when I use my position to act capriciously. To act fairly would be to follow the rules. To act capriciously is to be the rules." http://daringfireball.net/2009/05/diary_of_an_app_store_revi...

"Translation" of Apple PR into English: "We decided from the outset to set the formula for our bars-of-signal strength indicator to make the iPhone look good — to make it look as if it 'gets more bars'. That decision has now bitten us on our ass." http://daringfireball.net/2010/07/translation_iphone_4

cromwellian2• 12 years ago

The exceptions that prove the rule.

somid32• 12 years ago

This is one of the best blog articles I've read. Thank you.

adamnemecek2• 12 years ago

What part exactly did you enjoy if I may ask? Or are you being sarcastic?

parasight2• 12 years ago

I enjoyed it too. It didn't teach me anything new. Apple's focus on the product is old news. I enjoyed it because it reminded me of what a great performer Steve Jobs was on stage.

somid32• 12 years ago

Like others said, there wasn't anything new covered here. It was just a nice, brief, and on topic blog article on an aspect of product development.

There are many strategies to develop a product, but I liked his analysis, the videos, and the overall format.

xerophtye• 12 years ago

No offense, but you need to read more blog articles then. Yes, the idea that you should first find a problem and THEN figure out the tech to solve it is a brilliant idea but it isn't something radically new. In fact this has been discussed far better in so many other articles.

In fact, Steve says u gotta think about the customer experience first, but do note that his philosophy was more of "Don't ask the customers what they want. Make something super cool and then convince people that they want it." It worked brilliantly for Apple (because they genuinely made super cool stuff), but it doesn't work for everyone. And there are several blog articles that present the "customer-first" idea in a more "customer-first" way.

PS: Personally I find Stratechery's articles much more insightful than Daring Fireball's.

www.stratechery.com

e28eta• 12 years ago

When I see R&D spending comparisons, I wonder if certain companies are more liberal about what they account as R&D.

Every year at work we fill out a survey where we estimate what portion of our time was spent on R&D vs other things like maintenance. We're told it's important because there's a tax credit for R&D. My (probably faulty) memory says that our guidelines classify all development on new features and products, as well as any research necessary in executing my job, as R&D. Which is very different from something like Bell Labs or ATG.

There're clearly also companies with divisions purely focused on advanced technologies unrelated to products for this year or the next, and I'm curious where the majority of spending falls.

Edit: or, maybe it comes down to very different numbers of employees making products. A quick browse online suggests that Nokia has more employees, does some (all?) of their own manufacturing, and that many of Apple's employees work in the retail stores.

Marazan• 12 years ago

Remember, in Daring Fireball world when Apple repeatedly rejects an idea before embracing it then that's demonstration of their incredible savvy. When "Apple competitor" rejects an idea before embracing it then that's claim chowder.

gjm11• 12 years ago

There is no instance in this post of Apple repeatedly rejecting an idea before embracing it, nor of an Apple competitor rejecting an idea before embracing it.

How is your criticism in any way related to the OP?

(Also: the great majority of the instances I can recall where Gruber has called something "claim chowder" have not been about an Apple competitor rejecting an idea, let alone subsequently embracing it. Top results for me on Google right now: (1) Henry Blodget saying the iPhone is dead -- not an Apple competitor; (2) someone at "Fast Company" saying Google Plus is going to have lots of users -- not an Apple competitor, not rejecting an idea; (3) someone at The Register predicting that Apple will launch a phone and it will fail within a year or two -- not an Apple competitor, not really rejecting an idea; (4) lots of people, mostly not Apple competitors, being unimpressed by the iPad in various ways; (5) BGR claiming that Apple were going to launch a new version of the Apple TV OS -- not an Apple competitor, not rejecting an idea. I'll stop there but the next few were also not Apple competitors rejecting ideas.)

(Yeah, Gruber is a zealot and not perfectly impartial between Apple and Apple's competitors. That is not news. If there's something he's actually done wrong on this occasion, let's hear it. If not, what's the point of irrelevant criticisms?)

gilgoomesh• 12 years ago

Apple's approach since 1997 has shown where Apple thinks "Advanced Technology Group" technology should be developed: small startups. When Apple need that type of technology, they acquire smaller companies.

Apple made just 5 acquisitions in 20 years to 1997. In the 17 years since, they've made 49.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...

And that's not counting open source adoptions or developer hirings like LLVM, KHTML, CUPS, etc.

This makes sense when you think about it. Large companies are too expensive, too inefficient, too concerned about their existing market and too risk averse to lay the groundwork in interesting technology. But large companies do have lots of money and can afford to pay small, innovative researchers and developers handsomely when they need the technology.

logicallee2• 12 years ago

The problem is that engineers, including the people here, hate elegance.

If step 1 is identifying a customer problem. (I still have to cook myself eggs every morning.)

Step 2 is identifying a solution. I know - what if a robot can cook breakfast.

Step 3 is proof of physical concepts - is it possible for a roomful of expensive equipment to cook eggs? How do you even cook eggs - I've never really thought about it... I just kind of do it.

step 4 is prototyping - how could we get this down to something integrated that still works

step 5 is even more prototyping - can we make this any simpler?

step 6 is simplifying - how could we make this EVEN simpler and more foolproof. We need a breakthrough.

step 7 is wowww is that ever elegant.

steps 8-10 are simplifying even more and getting down to the smallest thing that could possibly work.

step 11 is sourcing market-available chips and components

steps 12-15 are programming them.

Then you announce step 15. It's just a magic fucking box that cooks you breakfast in the morning.

Then the tech reaction will be - "This is just a hot plate in a minifridge - the electronics are just a temperature sensor, and power relay, driven by a $0.50 8-bit chip. It's probably less than 200 lines of code. Cute, but worth maybe $1.5 over the cost of a hot plate and a minifridge, if we're generous. This thing maybe takes an hour to make†. Now what was done by Doc Brown in the intro to Back to the Future - 29 years ago; THAT is cool. That actually had motors."

† copy

Solution? Stop at step 3, back when it was a complicated solution with stepper motors and pumps. Or if step 3 wasn't complicated enough, abandon project - as it's obviously trivial.

On the other hand, if it involves a novel application of a completely impractical physical phenomenon - maybe directed 2.4 Ghz radiation while backscatter levels are monitored.

Well that, you can announce.

parasight2• 12 years ago

The problem is that engineers, including the people here, hate elegance.

... and all the year I considered myself an engineer ;) What am I if I love elegance?

logicallee2• 12 years ago

a product designer :)

xzkakjel• 12 years ago

Not for me. It makes sense business wise but I need to come from the technology side and then find a problem to solve it. I'm a dabbler unfortunately. If I look at problems first I lose interest pretty fast.

scj• 12 years ago

I prefer ESR's take on the subject: http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/ch20s05.html

himangshuj• 12 years ago

Another POV could be that since the death of proper R n D at apple, they have made amazing products but they have not created anything that advances the technology landscape. Google is making self driving cars, they are working on quantum computers. Apple has created an ipod which gave lots of profits for half a decade.

gress3• 12 years ago

Google proclaims a new sci-fi project every other week, but hasn't delivered any amazing products to users since Maps. Apple doesn't proclaim anything but consistently changes people's lives by making new and useful product categories.

nyrulez• 12 years ago

This blog post is a slap in the face of all the inventors who may not be good businessmen or may not have a good product sense. Being an apple fan boy and all I understand, but discounting things that Apple doesn't do or doesn't have the capabilities/inclination to do is just retarded.

Apple would be no where without the technologies it DID NOT invent or work backwards for all of its products. Standing on the shoulders of other giants and making good products on top should be acknowledged and something to be grateful for, not minimized so arrogantly.

If only Steve Wozniak could comment on this, I feel he would violently disagree with Gruber.

Working Backwards to the Technology

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