"he expected he’d have to make a choice between becoming an academic and building a company. Choosing the former would mean giving up the opportunity to become the inventor of widely used applications. But building a company would force him to deal with people in a way he didn’t enjoy."
How overly simplistic and descriptive that is. Going academic, would, in it's most 2014'ish, pop-cultaral-way, mean that you probably wouldn't go on to make any cool apps.
I mean, yeah, obviously? And how weird it is to have such a big life choice distilled down to the possibility of creating popular apps or not. Such black and white-ification with the intention of creating a conflict heavy narrative, with a healthy dose of current tech mindset splashed onto it.
And that whole "Page is the Jobs of Google" section was entirely grasping at reader-revelations, without actually creating any. It's lazy thinking to compare two iconic tech heads, especially if one of them is Jobs. Another one in the long row of heirs (cook, ive, musk etc etc).
"Forty-one years after those words were published, in 1985, a 12-year-old in Michigan finished reading Tesla's biography and cried.
This was Larry Page."
If you manage to get through the introductory number slalom, it reads like the script for a trailer to a new action flick!
I appreciated the info in the article, but the writing was so sloppy.
> How overly simplistic and descriptive that is. Going academic, would, in it's most 2014'ish, pop-cultaral-way, mean that you probably wouldn't go on to make any cool apps.
I read that as the dilemma that Page was facing, not an absolute truism. This is an article about Larry Page at Google. It seems silly to be annoyed at the author for simplifying the dichotomy between academia and industry to move us through his life.
> If you manage to get through the introductory number slalom, it reads like the script for a trailer to a new action flick!
Oh shut up, that was a nice piece of writing. It was an interesting hook, a nice way to introduce a main theme of the article; Larry Page's admiration of Nikola Tesla. It may have been flashy but considering how well it fits into the rest of the article (and indeed, the quality of the writing) I'd hardly call it sloppy. Although maybe we just have different standards.
> I read that as the dilemma that Page was facing, not an absolute truism. This is an article about Larry Page at Google. It seems silly to be annoyed at the author for simplifying the dichotomy between academia and industry to move us through his life.
No, I get that it was about Larry, and I see why the author set it up like that. But writing "...the opportunity to become the inventor of widely used applications", seems like such a simplification of what it's actually about: A choice between two very different ways of expressing your creativity (granted you do research/publicise in academia). I really hope Larry built a company with more thought behind it than making the next Flappy Bird. I.e. SpaceX wasn't founded because Musk wanted to be an "inventor" of top 40 apps, and it seems like Larry didn't either, judging from the article.
And the other phrase "... would force him to deal with people in a way he didn’t enjoy". Something about that rubs me the wrong way as well. Maybe it's a bit too soft? I mean, sucks to be you Larry, not enjoying socialising, but welcome to the real world.
I don't want to seem too harsh, I'm only replying because it's nice to put ones thoughts into writing once in a while.
> Although maybe we just have different standards.
Maybe, but starting that discussion means that we'll probably start talking about "high/low" standards, and I try not to think like that.
I don't really have much else to say about this, except that I definitely didn't take "applications" to mean Flappy Birds, because that seems ridiculous. Obviously the guy who they introduced as crying at the end of a Tesla biography doesn't want to spend his life making mobile games.
> Maybe, but starting that discussion means that we'll probably start talking about "high/low" standards, and I try not to think like that.
I was thinking more in terms of the entertainment/pragmatism scale. I think this is good writing more because it made me go "wow, I enjoyed reading that", whereas it seems like you're coming from more of a "this was kinda lame because some of the things they said were questionable" standpoint. Nothing wrong with that, but if we didn't recognize it we'd be yelling at each other for hours.
I thought it was an excellent piece. Even while reading it, I was aware that it most likely wasn't completely accurate, and over-romanticized things. It also jumps back and forth through the timeline a bit much.
Certainly not perfect, but it really put into perspective a lot of the things I'd seen from Google. I never realized how much of it came directly from Larry Page until this article.
So while it may not be 100% accurate (could it ever be?), I found it to be extremely informative in a high level way.
What's interesting is the style of writing - very short sentences, words of few syllables. https://readability-score.com/ indicates it has a Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level of 7.9 - it read fast, and I thoroughly enjoyed the journey it took us on.
