المبتكرون

مقتطفات واقتباسات من نفس الكتاب باللغة الإنجليزية

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The Innovators (excerpts & quotes)
By: Walter Issacson

P.172: He began to read every new patent issued. “You read everything – that’s part of the job”. Kilby said. “You accumulate all this trivia, and you hope that someday maybe a millionth of it will be useful”.

P.196: Andy Grove\’s mantra was \”Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive.\”

P.220: “A nation which depends upon others for new basic scientific knowledge will be slow in its industrial progress and weak in its competitive position in world trade.\” -Vannevar Bush

P.276: Dozens of options for moving an on-screen cursor were being tried by researchers, including light pens, joysticks, trackballs, trackpads, tablets with styli, and even one that users were supposed to control with their knees.

P.314: For Gates, the magic of computers was not in their hardware circuits but in their software code. \”We\’re not hardware gurus, Paul,\” he repeatedly pronounced whenever Allen proposed building a machine. “What we know is software.\” Even his slightly older friend Allen, who had built shortwave radios, knew that the future belonged to the coders.

P.317: One trait that differentiated the two was focus. Allen\’s mind would fit among many ideas and passions, but Gates was a serial obsessor. “Where I was curious to study everything in sight, Bill would focus on one task at a time with total discipline,\” said Allen. “You could see it when he programmed–he\’d sit with a marker clenched in his mouth, tapping his feet and rocking, impervious to distraction.\”

P.344: Wozniak said. \”He taught me how to make an and gate and an or gate out of parts he got- parts called diodes and resistors. And he showed me how they needed a transistor in between to amplify the signal and connect the output of one gate to the input of the other. To this very moment, that is the way every single digital device on the planet works at its most basic level.\” It was a striking example of the imprint a parent can make, especially back in the days when parents knew how radios worked and could show their kids how to test the vacuum tubes and replace the one that burned out.

P.351: At 10 p.m. on Sunday, June 29, 1975, a historic milestone ocurred: Wozniak tapped a few keys on his keyboard, the signal was processed by a microprocessor, and letters appeared on the screen.

P.353: By early 1977 a few other hobbyist computer companies had bubbled up from the Homebrew and other such cauldrons… But the Apple II was the first personal computer to be simple and fully integrated, from the hardware to the software. It went on sale in June 1977 for $1,298, and within three years 100,000 of them were sold.

P.353: The Apple II also established a doctrine that would become a religious creed for Steve Jobs: his company\’s hardware was tightly integrated with its operating system software. He was a perfectionist who liked to control the user experience end to end.

P.354: For personal computers to be useful, and for practical people to justify buying them, they had to become tools rather than merely toys… Thus there arose a demand for what became known as application software, programs that could apply a personal computer\’s processing power to a specific chore.

P.358: Gates picked up the phone and called Kildall. “I’m sending some guys down,\” he said, describing what the IBM executives were seeking. \”Treat them right, they\’re important guys.\”
Kildall didn\’t. Gates later referred to it as \”the day Gary decided to go flying.\” Instead of meeting the IBM visitors, Kildall chose to pilot his private plane, as he loved to do, and keep a previously scheduled appointment in San Francisco. He left it to his wife to meet with the four dark-suited men of the IBM team in the quirky Victorian house that served as Kildall\’s company headquarters.
…Sams recalled. \”We spent the whole day in Pacific Grove debating with them and with our attorneys and her attorneys and everybody else about whether or not she could even talk to us about talking to us, and then we left.\” Kildall\’s little company had just blown its chance to become the dominant player in computer software.

P.362: Years later, at an event at Harvard, the private equity investor David Rubenstein asked Gates why he had saddled the world with the Control+ Alt+Delete startup sequence: \”Why, when I want to turn on my software and computer, do I need to have three fingers? Whose idea was that?\” Gates began to explain that IBM\’s keyboard designers had failed to provide an easy way to signal the hardware to bring up the operating system, then he stopped himself and sheepishly smiled. \”It was a mistake,\” he admitted. Hard-core coders sometimes forget that simplicity is the soul of beauty.

P.362: The IBM PC was unveiled, with a list price of $1,565, at New York\’s Waldorf Astoria in August 1981. Gates and his team were not invited to the event. \”The weirdest thing of all,\” Gates said, \”was when we asked to come to the big official launch, IBM denied us.\” In IBM\’s thinking, Microsoft was merely a vendor.

P.362: Gates got the last laugh. Thanks to the deal he made, Microsoft was able to turn the IBM PC and its clones into interchangeable commodities that would be reduced to competing on price and doomed to having tiny profit margins. In an interview appearing in the first issue of PC magazine a few months later, Gates pointed out that soon all personal computers would be using the same standardized microprocessors. \”Hardware in effect will become a lot less interesting,\” he said. \”The total job will be in the software.\”

P.363: Jobs was aroused by competition, especially when he thought it sucked. He saw himself as an enlightened Zen warrior, fighting the forces of ugliness and evil. He had Apple take out an ad in the Wall Street Journal, which he helped to write. The headline: \”Welcome, IBM. Seriously.\”

P.364: On Jobs\’s first visit, the Xerox PARC engineers, led by Adele Goldberg, who worked with Alan Kay, were reserved. They did not show Jobs much. But he threw a tantrum-\”Let\’s stop this bullshit!\” he kept shouting and finally was given, at the behest of Xerox\’s top management, a fuller show. Jobs bounced around the room as his engineers studied each pixel on the screen. \”You\’re sitting on a gold-mine,\” he shouted. \”I can\’t believe Xerox is not taking advantage of this.”

P.365: Later, when he was challenged about pilfering Xerox\’s ideas, Jobs quoted Picasso: \”Good artists copy, great artists steal.\” He added, \”And we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.\” He also crowed that Xerox had fumbled its idea. \”They were copier-heads who had no clue about what a computer could do,\” he said of Xerox\’s management. \”They just grabbed defeat from the greatest victory in the computer industry. Xerox could have owned the entire computer industry.\”

P.399: Case applied the two lessons he had learned at Proctor & Gamble: make a product simple and launch it with free samples.

P.417: Andreessen\’s focus on continual improvement impressed Berners-Lee: \”You\’d send him a bug report and then two hours later he\’d mail you a fix.\” Years later, as a venture capitalist, Andreessen made a rule of favoring startups whose founders focused on running code and customer service rather than charts and presentations. \”The former are the ones who become the trillion-dollar companies,\” he said.

P.447: When the Mosaic browser was released, Yang turned his attention to the Web, and he and Filo began compiling by hand an ever-expanding directory of sites. It was organized by categories- such as business, education, entertainment, government- each of which had dozens of subcategories. By the end of 1994, they had renamed their guide to the Web \”Yahoo!\”

P.457: Page\’s method for reversing links was based on an audacious idea that struck him in the middle of the night when he woke up from a dream. \”I was thinking: What if we could download the whole Web, and just keep the links,\” he recalled. \”I grabbed a pen and started writing. I spent the middle of that night scribbling out the details and convincing myself it would work.\” His nocturnal burst of activity served as a lesson. \”You have to be a little silly about the goals you are going to set,\” he later told a group of Israeli students. \”There is a phrase I learned in college called, \’Having a healthy disregard for the impossible.\’ That is a really good phrase. You should try to do things that most people would not. \”

P.457: Early that summer, Page created a Web crawler that was designed to start on his home page and follow all of the links it encountered. As it darted like a spider through the Web, it would store the text of each hyperlink, the titles of the pages, and a record of where each link came from. He called the project BackRub.

P.458: As the project evolved, he and Brin conjured up more sophisticated ways to assess the value of each page, based on the number and quality of links coming into it. That\’s when it dawned on the BackRub Boys that their index of pages ranked by importance could become the foundation for a high-quality search engine. Thus was Google born. \”When a really great dream shows up,\” Page later said, \”grab it!\”
At first the revised project was called PageRank, because it ranked each page captured in the BackRub index and, not incidentally, played to Page\’s wry humor and touch of vanity. \”Yeah, I was referring to myself, unfortunately,\” he later sheepishly admitted. “I feel kind of bad about it.\”

P.460: Partly because of the huge number of pages and links involved, Page and Brin named their search engine Google, playing off googol, the term for the number 1 followed by a hundred zeros. It was a suggestion made by one of their Stanford officemates, Sean Anderson, and when they typed in Google to see if the domain name was available, it was. So Page snapped it up. \”Im not sure that we realized that we had made a spelling error,\” Brin later said. \”But googol was taken, anyway. There was this guy who\’d already registered Googol.com, and I tried to buy it from him, but he was fond of it. So we went with Google.\” It was a playful word, easy to remember, type, and turn into a verb.

P.461: The desire to turn their dissertation topic into a business made Page and Brin reluctant to publish or give formal presentations on what they had done. But their academic advisors kept pushing them to publish something, so in the spring of 1998 they produced a twenty-page paper that managed to explain the academic theories behind PageRank and Google without opening their kimono so wide that it revealed too many secrets to competitors. Titled \”The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine,\” it was delivered at a conference in Australia in April 1998.

P.463: They knew that Google was good enough to spread by word of mouth, so every penny they had went to components for the computers they were assembling themselves. \”Other Web sites took a good chunk of venture funding and spent it on advertising.\” Bechtolsheim said. \”This was the opposite approach. Build something of value and deliver a service compelling enough that people would just use it.\”

P.473: So why not make a computer that mimics the processes of the human brain? \”Eventually we\’ll be able to sequence the human genome and replicate how nature did intelligence in a carbon-based system,\” Bill Gates speculates… That won\’t be easy. It took scientists forty years to map the neurological activity of the one-millimeter-long roundworm, which has 302 neurons and 8,000 synapses. The human brain has 86 billion neurons and up to 150 trillion synapses

P.474: These latest advances may even lead to the singularity, a term that von Neumann coined and the futurist Ray Kurzweil and the science fiction writer Vernor Vinge popularized, which is sometimes used to describe the moment when computers are not only smarter than humans but also can design themselves to be even supersmarter, and will thus no longer need us mortals. Vinge says this will occur by 2030.

P.478: \”The first generation of computers were machines that counted and tabulated,\” Rometty says, harking back to IBM\’s roots in Herman Hollerith\’s punch-card tabulators used for the 1890 census.
\”The second generation involved programmable machines that used the von Neumann architecture. You had to tell them what to do.\” Beginning with Ada Lovelace, people wrote algorithms that instructed these computers, step by step, how to perform tasks. \”Because of the proliferation of data,\” Rometty adds, \”there is no choice but to have a third generation, which are systems that are not programmed, they learn.\”

P.478: In other words, is it possible that humans and machines working in partnership will be indefinitely more powerful than an artificial intelligence machine working alone?
If so, then \”man-computer symbiosis,\” as Licklider called it, will remain triumphant. Artificial intelligence need not be the holy grail of computing. The goal instead could be to find ways to optimize the collaboration between human and machine capabilities- to forge a partnership in which we let the machines do what they do best, and they let us do what we do best.

P.479: When one of the cofounders, Jack Dorsey, started taking a lot of the credit in media interviews, another cofounder. Evan Williams, a serial entrepreneur who had previously created Blogger, told him to chill out, according to Nick Bilton of the New York Times. \”But I invented Twitter,\” Dorsey said. \”No, you didn\’t invent Twitter,\” Williams replied. \”I didn\’t invent Twitter either. Neither did Biz [Stone, another cofounder]. People don\’t invent things on the Internet. They simply expand on an idea that already exists.\”

P.480: The best innovators were those who understood the trajectory of technological change and took the baton from innovators who preceded them. Steve Jobs built on the work of Alan Kay, who built on Doug Engelbart, who built on J. C. R. Licklider and Vannevar Bush.

P.485: Brilliant individuals who could not collaborate tended to fail. Shockley Semiconductor disintegrated. Similarly, collaborative groups that lacked passionate and willful visionaries also failed. After inventing the transistor, Bell Labs went adrift. So did Apple after Jobs was ousted in 1985.

P.485: Most of the successful innovators and entrepreneurs in this book had one thing in common: they were product people. They cared about, and deeply understood, the engineering and design. They were not primarily marketers or salesmen or financial types; when such folks took over companies, it was often to the detriment of sustained innovation. \”When the sales guys run the company, the product guys don\’t matter so much, and a lot of them just turn off,\” Jobs said. Larry Page felt the same: \”The best leaders are those with the deepest understanding of the engineering and product design.\”

P.485: Another lesson of the digital age is as old as Aristotle: \”Man is a social animal.\” What else could explain CB and ham radios or their successors, such as WhatsApp and Twitter? Almost every digital tool, whether designed for it or not, was commandeered by humans for a social purpose: to create communities, facilitate communication, collaborate on projects, and enable social networking.

P.486: At his last such appearance, for the iPad 2 in 2011, he stood in front of that image and declared, \”It\’s in Apple\’s DNA that technology alone is not enough- that it\’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our heart sing.\” That\’s what made him the most creative technology innovator of our era.