I’ve been thinking about the following comment by Vasco on my post the other day about the relationship between University research and the research done at for-profit corporations:
P(You spending time) << P(google spending time) P(You doing research) << P(google research rezults)
It’s weird to me that people might think this is actually the relevant concept. Because it doesn’t come even close to describing the underlying value proposition.
When you use Google maps, and a server smoothly delivers a collection of power-of-two resolution image tiles that your web client then assembles into differently scaled views, do you really think that those algorithms originated at Google?
It is rarely the case that the fundamental work behind a product originated at a major corporation. Major corporations exist primarily to develop techniques and approaches into robust and viable products — a process which takes an enormous amount of focus and hard work by many people. Those corporations do not exist primarily to be the source of entirely new concepts.
The thing that Vasco is not taking into account is when time was spent, and the cumulative power of the decades of influences from the time an idea was first introduced to the time when it it ready for commercial deployment.
More on this tomorrow. But meanwhile I will leave you with a brilliant chart by Bill Buxton, which will be the subject of tomorrow’s post:
Good recent example: Apple’s haptic trackpad.
https://twitter.com/worrydream/status/575070019203153921
Bret is exactly right. I remember when Margaret first showed me her lateral haptic texture algorithm at work. Very exciting. And one of the first height field textures she simulated with it was my noise function!