Viswanathan K's Thoughts

My 6 year-old loves the Computer Science period. Maybe it’s the teacher, maybe it’s the chance to go to a lab… who knows? Anyways, I wondered how she’d learn to type or get familiar with the keyboard layout. It’s not like a kid that age has anything to type, so what’s the incentive to struggle and learn, I thought. And then I saw this keyboard familiarization app called Tux Typing listed in her school book. I installed it on the laptop. As letters enclosed in fireballs dropped from the top, she had to find and hit those letters on the keyboard before the letter slammed into the buildings at the bottom of the screen. Fun way to familiarize oneself with the layout of a keyboard, I thought. Soon she had mastered it. Like any good pushy parent, I then increased the speed at which the letters fell. Inevitably, she lost all her lives quickly. Then, instead of practicing to master the higher speed, this was her solution: She: “You call out the letters as they fall. I’ll find ...

There are plenty of examples of companies seeing the Next Big Thing right in front of them and yet passing on them. Like Xerox PARC when it developed both the mouse and the graphical user interface (GUI) and yet sold them to Apple for peanuts! How could Xerox have been so dumb, we wonder? Malcolm Gladwell wrote a very interesting article on the creativity myth where he told the “true” story of the mouse (the mouse wasn’t Xerox’s idea; rather, it was devised by a computer scientist, Douglas Engelbart, at Stanford Research Institute). Here’s the interesting part that doesn’t get told often: “If you lined up Engelbart’s mouse, Xerox’s mouse, and Apple’s mouse, you would not see the serial reproduction of an object. You would see the evolution of a concept.” The GUI too evolved from what was at Xerox to what Apple finally sold to users. The key word here? Evolution. Xerox didn’t have the next big thing ready…they had a concept. Apple took the next step in both cases and product...