The Parable of the Stones

Re: the previous item, on ideas being merely multipliers and the real value of anything being in the execution, here’s a terrific excerpt Philip Elmer-DeWitt pulled from Robert X. Cringely’s 1995 interview with Steve Jobs:

You know, one of the things that really hurt Apple was after I left John Sculley got a very serious disease. It’s the disease of thinking that a really great idea is 90 percent of the work. And if you just tell all these other people “here’s this great idea,” then of course they can go off and make it happen. And the problem with that is that there’s just a tremendous amount of craftsmanship in between a great idea and a great product. […]

Designing a product is keeping five thousand things in your brain and fitting them all together in new and different ways to get what you want. And every day you discover something new that is a new problem or a new opportunity to fit these things together a little differently.

And it’s that process that is the magic.

★ Tuesday, 15 November 2011