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Technological Genius Is Timeliness, Not Inspiration
Hugh Pickens writes "Ezra Klein has an interesting essay in the Washington Post about 'simultaneous invention,' where technology advances to the point that the next step is obvious to multiple people at once, and so they all push forward with the same or similar inventions. While the natural capabilities of human beings don't change much from year to year, their environments do, and so does the technology and store of knowledge they can access. 'The idea of the lone genius who has the eureka moment where they suddenly get a great idea that changes the world is not just the exception,' says Steven Johnson, author of Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation, 'but almost nonexistent.' Consider Adam Goldberg's CU Community, created in 2003 at Columbia University, a social network that launched first and had cooler features than Facebook, with options for pictures and integrated blogging software. Klein writes, 'Zuckerberg's dominance can be attributed partly to the clean interface of his site, partly to the cachet of the Harvard name and partly to luck. But the difference between Mark Zuckerberg and Adam Goldberg was very small, while the difference between what Mark Zuckerberg could do and what the smartest college kid in 1999 could do was huge. It was the commons supporting them both that really mattered.'"
Timing is wrapped up in the luck. An idea before its time is still a failure.
Dear god that is an actual patent...
"If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants." - Isaac Newton. The corollary is there is no such thing as a self-made man.
Actually the whole story is crap, typical mass media drivel aimed at the worship of the rich and greedy. Truth is, putting together the right team and getting the right support is the real difference between winning and losing. Forget all the crap about worship of the corporate leader driven by public relations ass hats.
The staff counts first, the engineers, the accountants, the coders, the marketing and sales team. Put together the wrong team and your product dies, end of story, time to cut the crap, the illusion of the CEO that builds buildings (they hire workers who build buildings), the CEO who writes top selling software (they hire coders that write it and sales staff who sell it), the CEO who creates great hardware (nowadays that contract it out to ODM other device manufacturers, who in turn hire the engineers and industrial designers and of course all the factory staff who actually make the product). Truth is CEOs don't even hire the staff other employees do that.
So the really truly outstanding skill of a modern CEO, taking credit for other peoples work and blaming them those people for the CEO's mistakes. The skill they do this with will define how much the profit when the company goes public, generally speaking the skills of the manipulative psychopath count far more than the intellect of a genius (geniuses unlike Saturday cartoons are never motivated by power and greed, theirs goals are intellectual comes with brain make up). Psychopaths seem really smart but it simply is because they spend nearly every waking moment plotting, scheming, lying and manipulating, it is their brain make up.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen