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Turing was extraordinary, but was he better than Einstein and von Neumann and Claude Shannon and Richard Feynman combined? Because at roughly the same era Turin
by SiVal 14y ago
Turing was extraordinary, but was he better than Einstein and von Neumann and Claude Shannon and Richard Feynman combined? Because at roughly the same era Turing would have been hatching England's Silicon Valley, Einstein, von Neumann, Shannon, Feynman and others like them were in New Jersey, along all the other smart guys at Princeton, combined with the booming US economy, all the defense spending, with AT&T, joined by Bell Labs, lasers, the transistor...
...And still Silicon Valley ended up in the orchards of California, not the New York suburbs of New Jersey.
Then there's that smelly hippy Steve Jobs, nobody's idea of a brilliant information theorist, who revolutionizes industry after industry. Without Wozniak, he would have done what? Founded Jamba Juice? Had an art gallery in Carmel? Who knows?
Sure, maybe a butterfly in Brazil can produce a hurricane in Florida, but speculating that a specific butterfly, even an unusually large one, might have produced a hurricane eventually is absurd.
- derleth 14y ago> Then there's that smelly hippy Steve Jobs ... who was a marketing genius, especially when he had Wozniak's brilliant design to sell. Jobs was great at something, but it wasn't computer technology. It was marketing. NeXT is a prime example: Coolest computers on the block (according to a lot of people), but they went nowhere without the Apple team backing Jobs up. And, once Jobs went back to Apple and got the Apple engineers behind him, NeXT became OS X and started to succeed.
- Zenst 14y agoJobs gift was to be able to think like a consumer clearer than the consumer and at the same time techinicaly minded enough to get the best from the techs who are so obvistacted from the end user mind-set wise that they need that grounding that Jobs gave them. Not saying all Apple products are stoner friendly, but they wont give you a bad vibe on a acid trip with there sharp edges. Food for thought but nomatter how you think of him, he stood above the crowd at a level he defined.
- nitrogen 14y agoJobs gift was to be able to think like a consumer clearer than the consumer and at the same time techinicaly minded enough to get the best from the techs who are so obvistacted from the end user mind-set wise that they need that grounding that Jobs gave them. What word is "obvistacted" standing in for? A Google (EN_US) search returns two results, both of which are this post.
- philwelch 14y agoIt's a bit weird to argue that Next failed because its technology didn't live up to its marketing. On the contrary, its technology was excellent but there was no product-market fit. In other words, Next's failure was in marketing, not in engineering.
- 6ren 14y agoI think of NeXT as Jobs' "second system effect", he tried to get everything right. BTW: the www was developed on a NeXT box http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXT#Software_applications http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXT#Software_applications