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This approach was made popular by Steve Jobs at Apple. He would have multiple teams competing to who's solution would survive, while the other teams products we
by shmatt 4y ago
This approach was made popular by Steve Jobs at Apple. He would have multiple teams competing to who's solution would survive, while the other teams products were thrown away
This goes all the way back to his early days (I think I remember a scene about this in The Pirates of Silicon Valley), but also reportedly multiple teams were building very different original iPhones
- no_wizard 4y agoI think this approach makes sense for hardware but not pure software. I think its easier to adjust pure software iteratively than hardware. So with hardware, it makes sense to have different teams working on similar but different things because variations of ideas need to be fleshed (and thoughts that spawn off those ideas) and it can be hard for one team to do this iteratively. If you're right and this is where it came from, I think largely pure software teams doing this are wasting resources, but if its hardware I don't agree its wasteful
- bitL 4y agoIt was way before Jobs, IBM was using it ages ago.
- kenjackson 4y agoIsn't this part of the premise of the book Hackers? Haven't read it in like 25 years, but that's what I vaguely remember.
- warner25 4y agoI don't recall this coming up in Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, but it was definitely in The Soul of A New Machine, the story about Data General trying to build their first 32-bit computer.
- kenjackson 4y agoThank you... it was Soul of a New Machine. I don't think I even ever read Hackers!
- kwertyoowiyop 4y agoJobs gets credit for everything in computing the way Churchill gets credit for all the good quotes.
- giaour 4y agoI think it was Mark Twain who said, “Hey, Churchill didn’t say that; that was me.”
- kwertyoowiyop 4y agoWell played, Abraham Lincoln!