Sublime

If one believes, as I have argued at many places in this book, that creativity comes from individuals and not from structures or processes, then a central question facing the software manager is how to design structure and process so as to enhance, rather than inhibit, creativity and initiative. Fortunately, this problem is not peculiar to software

In hindsight, it helped explain how some of our breakthroughs came about: they ended up betting on Moore's law, the microprocessor subsystem, and avoiding the entrenched bottlenecks in the storage subsystem

For some years I have been successfully using the following rule of thumb for scheduling a software task: 1/3 planning 1/6 coding 1/4 component test and early system test 1/4 system test, all components in hand.

The origins of the current great surge, the fifth since the end of the eighteenth century, dates back to 1971 when the first microprocessor was developed by Intel, a company founded three years earlier by Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore[46]. Thanks to the integration of all the key components of a computer on a single chip, the microprocessor would g

Could such an organization be patterned on biological concepts and methods? [...] What if we quit arguing about the structure of a new institution and tried to think of it as having some sort of genetic code?

Handwriting recognition software had to recognize a wide variety of writing styles. That necesssarily required complex code. And at the time even the best handwriting software—the software in the Newton was state-of-the-art—was not very good. Palm decided to reverse the logic. Rather than having software learn how to recognize people’s handwriting,

we decided to focus on seven that have had enduring impact. They are the Walt Disney studio, which invented the animated feature film in 1937 with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs; the Great Groups at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) and Apple, which first made computers easy to use and accessible to nonexperts; the 1992 Clinton campaign, wh