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To: willcousa who wrote (173526)	3/13/2003 5:22:36 PM
From: deibutfeif	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

re:I also think the people who come up with real break-through ideas are few and far between. You don't simply put some great programmers in a room and say "now create". Not only that, but all too often when there is a great idea in a large company, it is either 1) not recognized due to the signal/noise ratio or 2) deliberately suppressed by the "fellows" who believe that they are the one and only source of any possible innovation. Sorry to be bitter... ~dbf

To: willcousa who wrote (173526)	3/13/2003 5:47:08 PM
From: tcmay	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 186894

"I also think the people who come up with real break-through ideas are few and far between. You don't simply put some great programmers in a room and say "now create". " Agreed. This is my point about why roomfuls of cubedwellers do not make for great products. And, even if the percentage of creative people is the same as in less-crowded environments, the pressures to conform are greater. "Conform or be cast out," as Rush says. It's hard to imagine Marc Andreesen or Bob Frankston coming up with their ideas, and seeing them through to a beta release, inside Dell or Intel or IBM. A friend of mine had some very good ideas which were funded by Autodesk. Had John Walker not left and been replaced by Carol Bartz, an unimaginative drone (in my opinion), they had a real chance to have been in the "e-markets" business years before EBay and in the hypertext market years before Netscape. The core work was done by 3-4 people, with a cloud of unhelpful drones buzzing around. Anyway, Autodesk killed their projects during one of their corporate restructurings and belt-tightenings. Years later, Carol Bartz had the gall to say that what was causing stagnation at Autodesk was their failure to participate in Web-based business opportunities! My friend went on to develop other ideas. And he has an interesting tale to tell about Dilberts in cubes and their attempts to be creative. One of his products was bought by a very large Japanese software company, with the intent of cracking the American software market. So my friend made several trips to Japan to help get them up to speed--training and also "how we do things in America" innoculations. On one trip, he found all of the normally staid "salarymen" assigned to this project were adopting the American hacker uniform: t-shirts with Mickey Mouse, Jolt Cola, sandals, and all the usual ephemera associated with the hacker culture. But it didn't make them creative. And no significant software product of the "killer app" variety has ever come out of Japan, except for video games, a market invented by American programmers. (Including another friend of mine, the programmer of "Pong.") The verdict is not yet in on India, but I am not expecting that roomfuls of Indian programmers in Bangalore, no matter how poorly paid relative to Americans, will break this pattern. For grunt work programming, the modern equivalent of keypunching and data entry, sure, software mills have their place. The modern equvalent of garment manufacturing. "India, the Cybernetic Sweatshop!" --Tim May