5 ms·

Sounds a bit backwards to me in some respects. Some companies ask, "What product can we build with this technology?" Good companies ask, "What technology does

Sounds a bit backwards to me in some respects. Some companies ask, "What product can we build with this technology?" Good companies ask, "What technology does this product need?" Great companies ask, "What product will this customer buy?"

bradfordcross 16y ago
Is Apple is a "great company"? They are a research-driven company that builds great products. Products drive research. From the post: "Solving problems with products, build on research, driven by processing data problem <- product <- intelligence <- research <- information <- processing <- data" Product is the top of the food chain.
- tansey 16y ago
  How is Apple a research-driven company like what the author was describing? I suppose you could argue they are researching new designs for technologies, but really that's it. They don't tackle new conceptual challenges like Google did with automated page ranking, for instance.
  - neilc 16y ago
    I think Apple is very strongly research-driven with respect to materials science and industrial design: the basic design of the iPhone / multitouch interface, the unibody design of recent MacBook Pros, the stainless steel antenna in the iPhone 4, and so forth.
    - strlen 16y ago
      Don't forget NeXT. I never considered owning Mac until OS X (that is, until I got a functional UNIX OS). Prior to OS X they were for graphic designers and people wanting a better typewriter, I stuck to Sun workstations (before the Ultra-5, past that point, the switch to PCI bus and IDE drives, they essentially became slow commodity machines) and Linux PCs. NeXT was probably even more technology driven than the startups Bradford describes: formed around an operating system, hardware, OOP and a programming language. Sun was much the same way, but unfortunately they devolved to the extreme of making science projects rather than products.
jbooth 16y ago
And visionaries say, "Holy crap, the ceiling just got lifted off of our capabilities in a huge way -- we can process 100X more data per second/minute than we could 4 years ago, due to changes in the way we think about these things. Ok, let's think of an application in this space." Big data isn't just a new keyword in your PL/SQL routines.

bradfordcross 16y ago

Is Apple is a "great company"? They are a research-driven company that builds great products. Products drive research. From the post: "Solving problems with products, build on research, driven by processing data problem <- product <- intelligence <- research <- information <- processing <- data" Product is the top of the food chain.

tansey 16y ago
How is Apple a research-driven company like what the author was describing? I suppose you could argue they are researching new designs for technologies, but really that's it. They don't tackle new conceptual challenges like Google did with automated page ranking, for instance.
- neilc 16y ago
  I think Apple is very strongly research-driven with respect to materials science and industrial design: the basic design of the iPhone / multitouch interface, the unibody design of recent MacBook Pros, the stainless steel antenna in the iPhone 4, and so forth.
  - strlen 16y ago
    Don't forget NeXT. I never considered owning Mac until OS X (that is, until I got a functional UNIX OS). Prior to OS X they were for graphic designers and people wanting a better typewriter, I stuck to Sun workstations (before the Ultra-5, past that point, the switch to PCI bus and IDE drives, they essentially became slow commodity machines) and Linux PCs. NeXT was probably even more technology driven than the startups Bradford describes: formed around an operating system, hardware, OOP and a programming language. Sun was much the same way, but unfortunately they devolved to the extreme of making science projects rather than products.

jbooth 16y ago

And visionaries say, "Holy crap, the ceiling just got lifted off of our capabilities in a huge way -- we can process 100X more data per second/minute than we could 4 years ago, due to changes in the way we think about these things. Ok, let's think of an application in this space." Big data isn't just a new keyword in your PL/SQL routines.