July on Deescuss

1/ About "Lateral Thinking Withered Technology" 「枯れた技術の水平思考」

Gunpei Yokoi, one of the main architects of Nintendo's original Game Boy, and many other hits like Donkey Kong, Mario Bros, etc -- I think this used to be one of his mottos. An interesting thing that Nintendo did was they meticulously understood that their way of competing with the market was not latest state of the art technology -- but rather to utilize mature (used to be cutting edge but now is now) technology - to do something fun, exciting and give an experience to the customer

There's a story about How Yokoi and his team was about to release the Game Boy, and some Nintendo engineer got concerned about a competitors product. Yokoi asked them, is the screen color? and they said yes (the original gameboy was monochrome) and he was like phew, that's great. They constrained themselves to use a "reliable" technology like monochrome displays at the time which cost significantly less - and had longer battery life

2/ I think about this a lot - technology when it is adapted for humans (I think some people call it consumer) is so often requires that leap, to make the technology delightful and wonderful. It's a very different muscle to flex compared to coming up with a technology itself.

More often than not, coming up with a new technology, an invention, requires tremendous amount of R&D. Often the company or institution that invests time and resources into said R&D don't often even benefit significantly from it (see Bell Labs, Xerox PARC etc.) Another way this happens often in my opinion is look at the graveyard of startups (esp in Silicon Valley) where VC funded startups have tried different things, and if anything it becomes another stab at a different path in the idea maze

3/ Often these folks at failed startups go on to other startups, or start startups of their own that remedy that idea, and capitalize on that (and of course the failed startup that helped with their R&D don't have much to show.) Though many companies do end up in the Computer History Museum, and that is a glory of a different sort in my opinion

4/ So, very often, I think in the same way that cultivating this new technology requires a tremendous amount of focus in bringing to life an idea - the commercialization takes, not a back seat, but rather it is usually a known market you are working towards. And often it is B2B

I think when you operate in this B2C market - and you are taking something that already exists - you just have no idea if its going to work or not, and you just have to try it out. A lot of this is a feel thing - a vibe that you have to go off in many ways.

But I don't think it is just a "vibe" and you can just do whatever - intuition is a bit more nuanced I think

5/ This is where the lateral thinking withered technology comes in, essentially you have to combine a bunch of unexpected technologies together - areas that others didn't think were worth exploring, or just never had an opportunity to look into.

In many ways, Invention of a new technology (and the subsequent commercialization of it) is a DFS type thing, where you are going really deep into a subject, and you go so deep that you know it inside out, and you're in a territory that others are not even close to, where you find the edge of human knowledge

6/ Some ways, this lateral thinking withered technology view imo is more about finding different connections - so its a lot more exploratory, and is more BFS - you're getting into so many different subjects, and through this scattering of ideas, you find the connections between the different branches essentially

This is why "cutting edge" which is often about going deep on one subject, and "lateral thinking withered technology" is more about finding these connections that the folks who went deep on the cutting edge missed, because they are now looking for the new cutting edge

It's about finding the magic in the connections of the mundane

Source:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunpei_Yokoi