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I'm not a vendor I'm not trying to sell you something for money but I'm going to put a few ideas in front of you and I
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view my job here is first to get us to lunch in a reasonable time second to get
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questions from you some of these will do at lunch but I'm going to go against my the people invited me here and I'm still going to go solicit questions at any
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time because otherwise I could have just made a video and we could do some sort of conference call for the for the questions that's not what I want and
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then the the third part is to put a few ideas in front of you that might get the questions to be important for you I was
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asked to talk about simplicity and there was some interesting paradoxes there but the first I like to deal with a metaphor about ideas and the question is our idea
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is made out of ponderable matter in which case ideas oppose each other they can't be in the same place at the same time or our idea is made out of light in
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which case we can have any number of ideas in the same place at the same time we don't have to choose between them and sometimes even the color changes can be very suggestible similarly our ideas
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things or are they processes so I'm going to take the right-hand side view here and put a bunch of things in front of you some of which may seem somewhat
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paradoxical in fact the likes curve here this is a curve everybody knows in this room represents quite a bit of the last maybe a hundred years but certainly for
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most of you the time that you've been in your career there's always some exponential happening and at any given point in time represented by the
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vertical line there there's a likes factor in corporations it's not just the competitive pressure but all the legacy
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this is in that's that need to be tended to people think but are costing more and more fact they're costing so much in the realm of software that corporations have
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actually been unwittingly destroying the very agencies that could help them namely corporations are telling universities that they need people who are experts in programming in this
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language or that language all of those languages are completely obsolete but they happen to be the ones that your legacy software is written in and because universities have decided to turn themselves into businesses they're
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feeling the pressure from businesses because they want to get money from the businesses and so the businesses are actually undermining their own future because you're systematically killing
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off the people who might actually come up with much better software solutions number fifty sixty years ago when I started most corporate software is written in machine code somebody had to
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invent the higher-level languages that were good for a few years unfortunately we're still using them ones basically from the 60s things have to be reinvented over and over again and the
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other thing about the Ickes curve is the actual complexity part of the Ickes might be a lot lower might actually be a
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tiny part of the Ickes and perhaps we could call the the other part of it from that nice little thing down there up to where the Ickes is we could call that
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complications so complications are basically noise bad technique old technique human bumbling inability to
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get on learning curves you name it's a whole bunch of factors and quite a bit of the stuff in corporations today if you examine it I think you'll all agree
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with me is most of you or CIOs if you've looked actually at the code and I think the tide is turning with CIOs because when I first started giving talks like this to CIO is about eighty percent of
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them were from the financial organization they really didn't know anything about computing and so it's very hard to explain what computers were possible what what they could do but now it's it's different and I think if
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you've looked at the code in your company you'll realize that wow I've got millions of millions of lines of code there and I have more than a sneaking suspicion that a lot of that code is
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actually in my way it doesn't represent the actual bang per line of code that we'd expect from a higher-level language so going back in history anybody ever
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seen a diagram like this before somebody they don't show them in business school but the other part of the campus so this is a this is what the planets the paths of
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the planets travel over an entire year this was actually done in the 17th century and I'll show you shortly one done a little bit earlier and you can see why they're called planets the
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planet is a Greek word meaning wanderer so these curlicues are actually for instance what the orbit what mercury does if you look at it every night it will come into view and it will go this way across the sky but then all of a
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sudden it will come back going in the opposite direction you can see why it's hard to do astronomy if you have two moving things in orbits going at different speeds and viewing each other
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at different times of the year very very hard to understand what's actually going on and there were some religious beliefs going all the way back to the Greeks that said God is a perfect being in the
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air four would only use circles to explain the course of these orbits and it turns out the orbits are not circular and especially if you put the earth in
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the center instead of the Sun and so they came up with this idea that you see here on the top right which is okay we'll take a circular orbit and we'll
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put another circle so as the planet goes around in the larger circle it's also going in the smaller circle and combining the two circles as you see there will give us something that has
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these loops that we see this is called an epicyclic theory of orbits and when Copernicus went over to putting the Sun
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in the center he also believed that God was perfect and so he decided they would be circular orbit so the problem is comparing whatever you've heard in school was wrong Copernicus's scheme only made things slightly more simple
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but in fact it still had this mess and you can put more emphasize just sound like anything you're familiar with you hang on to that old theory no matter
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what it is and you start putting fixes in just like software let's not rewrite it oh no let's not find a better way of rewriting this awful oh no let's not do that let's just patch it natural human
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tendency that's what they did in astronomy back then this is before science got invented for real Tycho was
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extremely meticulous and Kepler the site who worked with him decided to believe his measurements this is for Mars and
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Kepler decided well I sort of believe in God but let's try something else so the first thing he tried were ovals because they would fit the actual orbits better and not quite enough then finally got
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right he said what about ellipses and he had thought about ellipses because as the next thing after circles in it he didn't try ellipses for years you know why because he figured that the people before him who were really smart had
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already tried ellipses and found them wanting no they were really smart but they were too dumb to get off their circles that they loved so much so when
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Kepler plugged ellipses in lo and behold everything cleared up even comets were explained bingo what's the expense of
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getting simplicity and I'm going to go over this a few more times because it's it's not the only way of getting simplicity but boy one of the things that's worked the best the last three or
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four hundred years is you get simplicity by finding a slightly more sophisticated building block to build your theories out of its when you go for a simple building block that anybody can
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understand through common sense that is when you start screwing yourself right and left because it just might not be able to ramify through the degrees of freedom and scaling you have to go through and it's this
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inability to fix the building blocks that is one of the largest problems that computing has today in large organizations people just won't do it okay why won't we do it well one of the
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things is that our brains were set up for dealing with about a hundred people at a time living by our wits hunting and gathering and dying in the same world we
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were born into for hundreds of thousands of years there's no concept of progress in our genes we just don't have it but like all animals we have an enormous set
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of genetic apparatus to make us good copers anything happens to us we can find a way of being resilient about it and adapting to it we're copers and
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adapters and so when we come up against difficulties our tendency is to cope with these difficulties it's like working for a company go into a company
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and the company seems sort of screwed up maybe you can quit you can cope but your chances of actually changing the company are very low because nobody will listen
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to reason right that is not what the company is there for they are there for their a task this is something that engelbart the inventor of the mouse pointed out years ago that companies are
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devoted to their area a task which is what they think they were about most companies do not have a very good be process which is supposed to look at the
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a tasks and make them more efficient but almost no companies have a see process which questions the tasks are our goals still reasonable our processes still reasonable that's the last thing it gets
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question because Wow how do you do will change if we're going to change our basic process in the midst of everybody hammering on us for quarterly earnings so this is a huge huge problem and yet
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it can be done it's just really one really sees it so here's an old model from the 19th century of memory which actually in the 21st century has come
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back as a pretty good one as a metaphor anyway so the idea is that rain comes down on the ground and there's a little regularities randomly there and at some point those regularities will be a
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little more responsive to the rain and a little channel will form the channel acts as an amplifier and so wherever that channel got started it starts funneling lots more water through it other water is draining into
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it and all of a sudden it starts cutting deeper and you get these gullies and you get down into these gullies you have to remember to look up because everything
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down there in this gully is kind of pink you can think that the world is pink and in fact if you get into a real gully one of my favorites is Grand Canyon by the
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way that's only a hundred million years of erosion to get the Grand Canyon it's relatively recent get into one of these things and the enormity of what you see
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outwards Dwarfs what you can see if you look up if you've ever been on one of these things you're just in a different world it's a pink world you don't think
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about climbing out of it you think about moving along in it and so I'm gonna take that gully world and flatten it out here's our pink world and let's take human thought as being
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like an ant and that ant can move all over this two-dimensional world our world to us is basically two-dimensional maybe it's fear to larger beings but for
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us it's basically flat and we can move all over it we can make plans we can encounter obstacle fools we can solve those problems and get around them so in this two-dimensional world here we have all
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the paraphernalia of living and thinking and if we grow up in that world we don't know it's pink right because that's all there is that is the background color
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it's the thing we are least interested in because it's the most constant thing but every once in a while might have a little blue thought could be waking up
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in the morning taking a shower but then we grew up in this world we went to church we have parents going to school pink pink is what the reality is but
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every once in a while you get a cop out at kerpow is out of that world it's actually an escape from that world and
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the old days when people had one of these they would start a new religion because if you've how many people have had a Kirpal of any kind like the
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technical word for kerpow is holy how many people have had it come on how many people have had a holy holy where does that where does it come
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from so the subjective sense we have is we didn't have that thought something put that thought into our head it just
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happened so of course you don't have science and you're not wired to check out the kerpow seems to come from the heavens okay so we dip into another
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world this world let's call it a blue world blue plane world and there are three things here this explains why we have trouble making progress
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if we treat our beliefs as reality than how sane is blue the answer is well it's not sane sanity is relative to the
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things we believe are true so the first thing is you've immediately turned yourself into a crackpot for a few nanoseconds that's one of the fists that comes down and squashes you back out into the pink well I don't want to be
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crazy second one is when you're trying to explain this idea to somebody else they really have to go through a similar process this is probably the most difficult thing about an age of
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invention like the one that we live in the inventors actually invention is actually relatively easy with the right kind of funding so the problem is
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getting something is essentially pulling other people into a blue world given that the blue world isn't a complete isn't really completely nutty and then
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the third idea is that the blue plane is also a gully so they have a half life to each one of these things salvation 20
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years later it's got its the albatross around your neck right and so anytime a company does something successful and you can talk to corporate executives about it they really think it's like
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they invented something really important no in fact they just found a heuristic that's working for a while and if they forget to re-examine that heuristic they're going to be in the same plight
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once once again so this is a real picture it's not the sign says do not touch any of these wires and it's important to realize that every
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single one of these wires was a solution to a perceived problem there's no other reason why was done it was done over a period of time this is related to this
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idea no anybody can make a doghouse can make it out of almost anything matchsticks even you can make it out of cardboard you can make it out of just about anything maybe toothpicks you might have to take
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some care nothing to it but let's try and just scale that doghouse by a factor of 100 so now it's about 150 feet high
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it's tiny compared to the Super Dome but that doghouse will just fall in on itself completely has no structural integrity and the reason is that when
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you double a solid the mass goes up by a factor of eight and the strength in simple materials like wood and beams and stuff has to do with the area it's like
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the strength and our muscles this is why Jim Nast's are small they're small because they can have relatively large muscles they have short muscle arms and they weigh quite a bit less that's why a
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grasshopper can jump a hundred times its own length and we can't they have the same kind of muscle fibers as we do and so the scaling thing takes what is a very nice idea for a dog and one you can
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have in two seconds and hit it together into something that you really do not want to carry into any kind of larger scales because there there's no connection to the scaling and if we come
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back to what we can do with out special knowledge we wind up with an Egyptian pyramid it's the only big thing you can build without knowing how to build which is just a big garbage dump and plastered
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over with limestone so it looks good but if you think about it camp it has no room inside so in order to get the superdome you have to do that other thing you have to go back to a different
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conception of what the materials are was you're actually tensile structures and then you can build enormous domed structures that scale very very well so
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if we come back to this tangle I just put software in here it could be anything the result of incremental problem-solving so this research
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community I came out of Vance Research Projects Agency in the 60s and then Xerox PARC which was an outgrowth of it basically it was a bunch of small number
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of people who have big ideas who did not have big resources they didn't want to give up their ideas and so they were faced with this dilemma is that they could not handle they wanted to build a
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network that would go over the entire world it was called the intergalactic Network back before it was called the Internet and they could not use any
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technique that Bell Telephone 80 used because didn't scale just completely out of the scope and finally in the 60s one
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of the the organizing insights was hey computers are virtualizes that's what Universal turning machine means what that means is forget about wires you
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don't need no stinking wires what we need to do is to understand how to organize systems as virtual entities and we can render some of them and hardware and we'll render some of them in
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software but in fact everything winds up being something like a single communications line with an arbitrary number of entities on everyone can talk to everyone else and all of a sudden
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you've thrown away all the things that Bell Telephone had and every piece of the way most offer was done and replaced it with a simple messaging system all of a sudden few people could do
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amazing things so this is an example I'll bring this up again a couple of times but basically need to solve the context need to solve the Grand Canyon
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problem most people are rewarded in school for solving problems when was the last time your child or you were rewarded for finding a problem you found
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a new problem we've got too many already hi where's in fact finding what the real problem is is the big deal and people fight you every step of the
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way they'll fight your kids in school every step of the way if they're a problem find your type don't let the teachers hurt them most problems are bogus because they come out of the
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current context we're trying to get beyond the current context so forget about problem solving it's just a bad heuristic it's the last thing you do and so you get these leaps so here's a leap
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out of the context of the 20th century mid 20th century which is a gear kind of thing everything is closely articulated the interfaces are very tightly bound
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etc etc the problem is you can only make a thing with about a thousand gears in it before it seizes up you just can't get the tolerance is good enough that sound like software just can't do it but
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when you go to biology we have a hundred trillion cells in our body each and every body in here has about 100 trillion cells ok I'm going to ask the audience a question you haven't asked me
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one yet but the question I'll ask is who knows how many of these hundred trillion cells in our body have our DNA in them okay predominant answers all of them
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anybody else got an opinion so it turns out only 10% of them only ten trillion of those hundred trillion cells have our DNA the other ninety trillion
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nine tenths of the cells in our body are slide and that slime has people have been counting the species of
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microorganisms you know bacteria e.coli is one of them that should have been a clue Iko coli has its own DNA which is very different from ours so late last
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count I went on the internet the other night the sea was getting close to 25 thousand different species of microorganisms most of which we have no idea what they're doing inside of us and
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they're about 1 mm the size of our regular cells so the 90 trillion cells of slime is about a basketball-sized of stuff all over us everywhere that'll
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make you feel better about lunch but the point is nobody's come close to building anything with a hundred trillion parts or a trillion parts without we don't the
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only things we know that actually work with that many parts are biological things something to think about and that gave us researchers back then a kind of
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a unified vision everything this is a self-portrait of the Internet after we built it but this is the image hey everything is like this this is a
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biological model weak we can't scale and have central control big problem with companies they start off like families with a head of the family try and get
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bigger is why monarchies are tough right no way you have to find a way of distributing control and distributing responsibility in an ecological way this is not thing
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things that human beings like to think about people are uncomfortable who's running the show people say well the answer is the Internet does not have any Center and it's grown by almost ten
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orders of magnitude now without ever breaking your software breaks all the time the internet has never broken it's replaced all of its atoms and all its bits at least twice since it started in
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1969 it has never been taken down for maintenance think about that your software could be like that the software we did at Xerox PARC was like that your
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software could be just running eternally and so everything at the expense of going to something more complicated than a data structure or some wires
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everything can be built out of a single kind of entity that has functionality inside it provides services on the outside and there is something like a cell boundary on it it's worthwhile
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thinking about that so if we come to Park here a couple of things we did personal computer this is basically in the 70s bitmap screens the GUI
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WYSIWYG and desktop publishing what we like to call real loop now since the term object-oriented got taken from us by C++ and Java laser printer PostScript
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Ethernet pierre-pierre and client-server and about half of the internet because we had our own internet so these are about nine and a half inventions and how are they done and who did them well 25
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researchers did all of them 25 think about it cost about 12 million dollars a year in today's money every single company in this room every single
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500 fortune company these are fingernail clippings on your IT budgets you waste more than this every other week and despite that there's not a single
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company in America that until recently that has even taken the venture of doing a process like this you have to ask yourself why it's a question you really
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wouldn't need to understand because we're not talking about money here return 30 plus trillion dollars in counting actually around 35 trillion at last count what was the problem and was
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not the problem of Xerox not making any money this is a story made up by companies to avoid having to contemplate doing a long term Research Center this is an urban legend just absolutely
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untrue in fact Xerox paid for all of Park more than 200 times over with the laser printer alone isn't that the most obvious thing how many billions have
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been a big bottom with Xerox is they only wanted to make billions and that's the problem with most companies because when you're doing this kind of stuff you're actually in the trillion dollar
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range and no company has ever been able to step up to the plate and just one other point because I'll get to it in a second again is that of all of these
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inventions we had to have all of them you had to do all of them but the one that reached this stuff out to everybody was probably the GUI because it is the
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meeting ground between people who don't know computers speak and what the computer can do so it is the thing that allowed this to go out to multiple
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billions of people down ok so now you guys are mostly CIO so I don't ask you this question but what I mean CEO I always ask them are you going to
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be in business in ten years and prospering what do you think they say they look kind of like that you know I
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real I was searching for a face then I realized wait a minute Cheney Cheney has got the perfect face for this guy and my next question is well what is
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your ten year plan and the reaction I get is that right think about it the idea of a ten year plan that people are
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serious about is just it's fake companies just don't have it they don't set themselves up to be able to deal with this thing which is really just to
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find hope that they're going to be in business in ten years they have no idea so let me ask you a question just think for a second where were you ten years
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ago ten years ago it was 2005 country was going through some real problems back then and then realize how Fargo
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does 2005 scene well it doesn't seem that far ago but it was ten years ago so ten years ago today was ten years in the future think of what we could have done if we didn't think ten years was big we
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could have thought all kinds of things in 2005 and pulled them off by now but because ten years seems impossibly long in business terms most of these things never even get talked about way too far
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off we're worrying about next quarter so if we plot out an invention process like Xerox PARC let's imagine we can come up with a 10-year vision
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and basically everything we did at Xerox PARC was thought of as a five-year horizon when we did something it turns out five-year horizons are necessary in order to get done earlier so in a
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five-year Rison most of the inventions come up out in the first three years if you set a three year horizon you're not going to get them because death just isn't the way people work that five-year horizon allows people to do the right
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thing the first year if you try and narrow it in too much they will not do the right thing than the first year and same thing innovation taking an idea out
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into the marketplace five-year horizon there's a transfer process most of the when I was at Apple most of the innovation processes for big things we did took about three years but were
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organized kind of like this and so you get when everything's going well the wind is right the Creek hasn't risen you get about a seven-year thing out of this ten year framework that you have to set
00:35:19
up well that's kind of interesting so suppose we had done this we go back seven years now this is 2008 that was just next door and what happens well
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same thing can your vision all that stuff I showed before seven years bingo today is the day that the seven-year thing came out and if you just study how this stuff works from things that are
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basically new not simple increments like new web apps but things that are new seven years is about the fastest you can do it you can almost always do it in
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under ten so that means a small amount of money but allocated over a time that could be longer than most CEOs stay around is actually this is the problem
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in government it's hard to carry out long range policies when the politics are changing all the time now the problem with this in America is there's no business reward system
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here because the costs for this have to be expense right Reuben it's like the Reuben is a good guy here nobody has been more delightfully clever
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at helping these good processes along than Reuben in my experience but the cards are stacked against companies because every dollar you take out of
00:36:53
this thing is a dollar that could improve the bottom line for this quarter reporting and that is wrong change that law you've got every other law changed look at the laws on depreciation for
00:37:07
crying out loud those are ridiculous but they're in business's favor you have to have something that contrasts favorably rather than the huge disparity between
00:37:20
this where you've got the right process going but it's hard to pay for it with an idea that is not so good which is to acquire every time you want something
00:37:32
right acquiring acquisitions you can do with different money but you start killing your corporate culture right you have that problem but yet it's much more favorable because of the kind of money
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you're allowed to use for it so this is crazy and until that happens the universities are the only place that are going to save you that is how this stuff
00:37:56
got here ARPA funded universities because if I BM couldn't do it they were spending billions literally billions of dollars in research but it was a long
00:38:07
kind of process so okay so this is these are just a few slides from a talk I gave at Disney when I was there 15 years ago
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which is all the different ways new ways companies have invented to kill that goose so one of them as well let's just eat it forget about those eggs
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or this is a good one our latest innovation is a goose that lays eggs of solid gold that's a distraction from our core and we have no budget for goose related expenses on that note we'll need the feathers and liver for another
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project only one gold egg every 12 or I want gold coins this is a Disney one I want gold coins rather than golden eggs
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or I want platinum eggs no you can buy platon with the gold from these eggs make the goose a manager give the goose
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a deadline require the goose to explain to you how they're going to make the next egg every one of these this is as this is just at the level of
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ridiculousness that's going on they're missing the point that nobody who does these kind of worries has ever laid a golden egg it's not their business to
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deal what their business is is to count those golden eggs after they get laid okay so I'm going to going to wind up here yeah I'm gonna wind up here just give me
00:40:05
an example of a process that we use all the time back in the 60s and the 70s and we still use today and there enough I always look at the reflection from the
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heads in the room so if there's a lot of reflection it means there's white hairs and no hairs and what that means is there are a fair number of people who
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still remember who ring Wayne Gretzky was right greatest hockey player who ever lived and yet a couple of neat ones one was you miss 100% of the shots you
00:40:45
don't take asking why are the greatest hockey player in the world the only way like 106 the pounds he was tiny compared to the rest of these but his best one was was the good hockey players go to where the
00:40:58
puck is and great hockey players go to where the puck is going to be and he didn't mean tracking the puck he meant get to that place in the rink where somebody can pass you the puck that you
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can shoot a goal he was better at anybody at knowing where that place would be and his teammates would feed him in bingo and so the thirty year Wayne Gretzky game is to have a glimmer
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of an idea take it out thirty years where there is no possibility of incremental II think worrying about how am I going to get from where I am now to this idea right that is the the idea
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killer of all time how is this incremental to the present and the answer is forget it don't worry about now the president is the least interesting time to live in so
00:41:53
little glimmer of an idea I had and the sentence would be it would be ridiculous if we didn't have so I had a little idea about children we were thinking about personal computing in the 60s and I
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started thinking about well what about a computer for children personal computers are going to be the next greatest invention after the printing press and we have to do something for children and you don't want children to lean over a
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desk we want them to be outside and etcetera etcetera so I thought it'd be nice to have a little tablet and in this scenario they
00:42:33
are actually learning about orbital dynamics at age 12 from having written a little version of space war themselves and the two computers are communicating by wireless so that was a fairly you
00:42:47
know just turned out ARPA was fooling around not just with the internet in those days but called the ARPANET then but with wireless versions of it and so
00:43:00
if you take it out 30 years the puck is going to be there thirty years and Moore's law is going to go like that she been well covered and
00:43:15
predicted in 1965 out to 1995 the answers yeah goddamnit no question 1995 there is no way we are not going to have a tablet computer no way it's just going to happen we don't even have to worry about
00:43:28
right now what we're going to do it because what we have to do is to figure out what it should be once you start thinking about it then the next interesting part of it is bring back a
00:43:42
more concrete version so out there you can do pie-in-the-sky what about 10 or 15 years out what can we do then and the answer is yeah we can do one then what would that be like well we don't know we
00:43:56
have all these problems including the user interface problem no we've never had something like this for the general public now here's the cool thing about Moore's Law which still exists today and
00:44:07
you're seeing it in Hana and that is you can buy your way into the future so Hana could have appeared 15 years earlier if
00:44:19
people have realized that it isn't completely inevitable Hana is Moore's law applied to discs namely you don't
00:44:30
need them and we have to do all of this software stuff now so we want to get there earlier at higher expense because we're going to save more money this is where the simplicity comes from pay more
00:44:44
it's like a fram oil filter commercial by those five dollar things frequently and you don't wind up with the big expenses later on and so by just spending money you can take something
00:44:58
that's going to be a couple of thousand bucks ten to fifteen years you know out in the late 80s you can bring it back into the 70s for twenty thirty thousand
00:45:09
dollars so that's what we did that's where the Xerox thing that looks like the Mac so the Mac was actually a prototype this laptop because we couldn't build
00:45:21
that display in 1971 but we could build something that would do everything else so that's where Mac type personal computers came from and the we had a
00:45:33
genius by the name of Chuck Thacker who was able to actually build this machine in a little over three months and I had another genius working for me by the name of Dan Ingalls who could take some
00:45:47
of my object-oriented ideas and user interface ideas and actually make a system on this prototype laptop that happened to be a couple of cubic feet
00:45:57
big and I was kind of in there doing this I wrote the first interpreter for the first object-oriented language as part of this thing there and we made
00:46:15
2,000 of these now here's the two things you get by paying this money sounds like a lot I mean zahrk's went batshit twenty-two thousand dollars a computer and you want to make two thousand of
00:46:26
them we said now this is nothing it's nothing they have to be all networked together and all this stuff but you can do two things everybody has a supercomputer what does that mean it
00:46:41
means we can do zillions of experiments without having to optimize we can do 10 15 20 user interface experiments today so by the way these don't cut it you've
00:46:53
got all your people working on these things but these are the machines of the past so you cannot do a new user interface on this right because you haven't given them the super computers
00:47:05
you're trying to get next stage user interface out of last year's machines and the other thing you can do is if you do optimize then you can make for our future apps and we made quite a few of them the most famous one is Microsoft
00:47:19
Word which was actually made in 1974 and that very system was the one that ran in the 80s okay so that's how you get the the puck
00:47:35
into the goal and this particular process is needed because before you can deal with the present you have to deal with the future then you can bring back into the present that blue plane version
00:47:47
of the future rather than trying to increment off the off the pink plane okay last slide give you something to think about here is this idea of
00:48:01
thresholds so how many people have seen curves that look like these progress against time right everywhere reading
00:48:14
scores test scores people love these yay oh no yay oh no it's bad because our
00:48:32
nervous system is only set up for relative change and in fact there's cause for cheering if that's the threshold but in fact for reading
00:48:43
threshold is this this is all oh no doesn't matter whether it goes up or not because there are many many things that where you have to get to the real
00:48:58
version of the thing before you're doing it at all in the 21st century it doesn't have help to read just a little bit you have to be fluent at it so this is a
00:49:09
huge problem and once you draw the threshold in there immediately converts this thing that looked wonderful into a huge qualitative gap and the gap is
00:49:20
widening and we have two concepts that are enemies of what we need to do perfect and better right so better is a
00:49:36
way of getting fake success we had improvement see it all the time it's the ultimate quarterly report we had improvements here and perfect is
00:49:51
tough to get in this world so both of those are really bad so what you want is what's actually needed and the exquisite skill here which I'm going to use these
00:50:06
two geniuses Thakur and Engels to labor it I'm going to call that the sweet spot the way you make progress here is you pick the thing that is just over that threshold that is qualitatively better
00:50:21
than all the rest of the crap you can do you can spend billions turning around and once you do that you widen up you give yourself a little blue plane to
00:50:34
operate in and for a while everything you do in there is something that is actually going to be meaningful and will not just bring lots of money I mean
00:50:47
money you get automatically out of doing this stuff even reasonably well but the best thing you get out of this stuff is a way of enabling people to think about the situation that they're in better and
00:51:00
not be overwhelmed with it
End of transcript