4 ms·

I'm sympathetic to the small idea thing (I wrote a long comment to your original reply). But that doesn't seem true in the case of the web and the PC. https:/

by chubot 9y ago

I'm sympathetic to the small idea thing (I wrote a long comment to your original reply). But that doesn't seem true in the case of the web and the PC. https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-Lee https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-Lee This project is experimental and of course comes without any warranty whatsoever. However, it could start a revolution in information access. - (19 August 1991), the announcement of the first WWW hypertext browser on the Usenet newsgroup comp.sys.next.announce. TBL knew that the WWW would be "world wide". He explicitly designed it that way. So I would say the web is small TECHNOLOGY, but not a small idea. It was a huge idea. Although honestly, I don't think the tech was that small for the day either. GUIs + networking was not super easy in 1991. There were still a lot of unsolved problems (e.g. DOS wasn't even a multi-tasking OS, I remember you had to download WinSock or whatever to use NetScape on Windows 3.1). Likewise, Wozniak wanted to "own his own computer" so he built one. I don't think that's a small idea either. I guess you can say that it is one that most people wouldn't understand the utility of though.

bhaumik 9y ago
Linus Torvald's first email re: Linux belongs here: > I’m doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones.
- chubot 9y ago
  Yeah that quote definitely crossed my mind. However I think the OP is confusing ideas vs. systems: The next big idea invariably seems to grow out of the next small idea; ideas that are big from the beginning almost never work. That doesn't really make sense with respect to ideas. The real quote is about SYSTEMS, from this book: https://www.amazon.com/Systems-Bible-Beginners-Guide-Large/dp/0961825170 https://www.amazon.com/Systems-Bible-Beginners-Guide-Large/d... The system is the realization of the idea. You can have a big idea, but you can't implement it all at once. TBL had a big idea, which is necessarily a big system. So he grew it from a very small piece of code (HTTP 1.0 was ridiculously simple.) There was an unbroken chain from small system to big system. The misleading thing about Linux is that it IS IN FACT a big idea -- it's just not a technological idea. We already knew how to write monolithic kernels. But the real innovation is the software development process. The fact that thousands of programmers can ship a working kernel with little coordination is amazing. That Linus wrote git is not an accident; he's an expert in software collaboration and evolution. Linux is a universal hardware abstraction layer, which is an easy idea in theory, but extremely difficult in practice until Linus figured out how to make it work. So Linux is a big idea too, as well as a small system that grew into a big system. ----- This reminds me of Paul Graham's advice: http://www.paulgraham.com/ambitious.html http://www.paulgraham.com/ambitious.html Let me conclude with some tactical advice. If you want to take on a problem as big as the ones I've discussed, don't make a direct frontal attack on it. Don't say, for example, that you're going to replace email. If you do that you raise too many expectations. Your employees and investors will constantly be asking "are we there yet?" and you'll have an army of haters waiting to see you fail. Just say you're building todo-list software. That sounds harmless. Empirically, the way to do really big things seems to be to start with deceptively small things. Want to dominate microcomputer software? Start by writing a Basic interpreter for a machine with a few thousand users. Want to make the universal web site? Start by building a site for Harvard undergrads to stalk one another. I think that's pretty much in line with what's said here. You can have a big idea, a big 10 year goal, but you have to break in into steps. Gates had an explicit goal of "a PC on every desk" and Zuckerberg had an explicit goal of "connecting the world" (at some point, not at the very beginning). But they necessarily started small.

by chubot 9y ago

bhaumik 9y ago

Linus Torvald's first email re: Linux belongs here: > I’m doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones.

chubot 9y ago
Yeah that quote definitely crossed my mind. However I think the OP is confusing ideas vs. systems: The next big idea invariably seems to grow out of the next small idea; ideas that are big from the beginning almost never work. That doesn't really make sense with respect to ideas. The real quote is about SYSTEMS, from this book: https://www.amazon.com/Systems-Bible-Beginners-Guide-Large/dp/0961825170 https://www.amazon.com/Systems-Bible-Beginners-Guide-Large/d... The system is the realization of the idea. You can have a big idea, but you can't implement it all at once. TBL had a big idea, which is necessarily a big system. So he grew it from a very small piece of code (HTTP 1.0 was ridiculously simple.) There was an unbroken chain from small system to big system. The misleading thing about Linux is that it IS IN FACT a big idea -- it's just not a technological idea. We already knew how to write monolithic kernels. But the real innovation is the software development process. The fact that thousands of programmers can ship a working kernel with little coordination is amazing. That Linus wrote git is not an accident; he's an expert in software collaboration and evolution. Linux is a universal hardware abstraction layer, which is an easy idea in theory, but extremely difficult in practice until Linus figured out how to make it work. So Linux is a big idea too, as well as a small system that grew into a big system. ----- This reminds me of Paul Graham's advice: http://www.paulgraham.com/ambitious.html http://www.paulgraham.com/ambitious.html Let me conclude with some tactical advice. If you want to take on a problem as big as the ones I've discussed, don't make a direct frontal attack on it. Don't say, for example, that you're going to replace email. If you do that you raise too many expectations. Your employees and investors will constantly be asking "are we there yet?" and you'll have an army of haters waiting to see you fail. Just say you're building todo-list software. That sounds harmless. Empirically, the way to do really big things seems to be to start with deceptively small things. Want to dominate microcomputer software? Start by writing a Basic interpreter for a machine with a few thousand users. Want to make the universal web site? Start by building a site for Harvard undergrads to stalk one another. I think that's pretty much in line with what's said here. You can have a big idea, a big 10 year goal, but you have to break in into steps. Gates had an explicit goal of "a PC on every desk" and Zuckerberg had an explicit goal of "connecting the world" (at some point, not at the very beginning). But they necessarily started small.