Don't look for the gilded road to fortune. Look for passion.
Think again: The World Wide Web was started by Englishman Tim Berners-Leebecause he was frustrated with how hard it was to share information at CERN, the huge physics lab in Switzerland where he worked. Linux was developed by a Finnish college student who wrote the operating system "just for fun"and is only one example of thousands of open-source software projects begun around the world by people who were writing software to "scratch their own itch" and giving it away for free. Even the personal computer revolution, which took root in Silicon Valley, began with a bunch of hobbyists at the Homebrew Computer Club.
It turns out that many of the great waves of creative destruction that have reinvented Silicon Valley didn't start there. More important, they didn't even start with the profit motive.
Rather, they started with interesting problems and people who wanted to solve them, exercising technology to its fullest because exploring new ideas was fun.
I call these people "alpha geeks." They are smart enough to make technology do what they want rather than what its originator expected. The alpha geeks exercise an idea or a gadget, pushing it past its current limits, reinventing it and eventually paving the way for entrepreneurs who figure out how to create mainstream versions of their novel ideas.
I've watched this process now for better than 30 years as a computer book publisher, conference producer, technology activist and early-stage investor. I learned early on that many of the innovations behind my best-selling books weren't coming from companies but from individuals. Their ideas spread through a grassroots network of early adopters and tinkerers long before entrepreneurs and investors
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2. PEOPLE are our ultimate clients. As designers, we
collaborate with a lot of other disciplines to bring our designs
alive. We often come up with the vision for a program, develop the
details and then spend a lot of time protecting the original design
intent through production. But after these efforts are complete, they
matter little. The end results are all people see, experience or
remember. No one typically cares how you got to the result--the
battles, the compromises, the inspirations--they only know the final
product. Because of this, I believe that as the other disciplines
cover their specialties, designers should be the end-user advocates
through the entire program, reminding the team that people are our
ultimate clients.
5. DESIGN is not a democracy.
Democracies are fine, mainly for collecting diverse input. But they can
kill design. Often too many opinions water down the clarity of the
design intent. I've had many clients where there are way too many
brilliant people involved in programs. They find it their duty to
provide all the alternative solutions or insights to every
program--always broadening the thinking--instead of focusing on
decision-making. If not for the benevolent dictatorship of the program
director in these programs, they would never reach the goal. Design
requires focused leadership, not democratic consensus.
Today's Web has terabytes of information available to humans, but hidden
from computers. It is a paradox that information is stuck inside HTML pages, formatted in
esoteric ways that are difficult for machines to process. The so called Web 3.0, which is
likely to be a pre-cursor of the real semantic web, is going to change this. What
we mean by 'Web 3.0' is that major web sites are going to be transformed into web
services - and will effectively expose their information to the world.
