
Technology First, Needs Last (2009) - dredmorbius
https://jnd.org/technology_first_needs_last/
======
dr_dshiv
I love Don Norman. He is the curmudgeon we all need. 83 years old and still
spritely. You know he (and Tim Shallice) also developed one of the most
important theories of executive functions and working memory?

His Human Information Processing textbook is still one of the best intro-to-
psych textbooks out there.

He ran the first cognitive science department in the world -- brought in Geoff
Hinton at the beginning of his career.

And, he always writes with the hope that people will disagree with him. That's
his jam.

~~~
dredmorbius
Yes, he is. I'd heard the name, mostly in the context of _The Design of
Everyday Things_. But going through his publications, there's a hell of a lot
more there:

[https://www.worldcat.org/search?q=au%3ANorman%2C+Donald+A.&q...](https://www.worldcat.org/search?q=au%3ANorman%2C+Donald+A.&qt=hot_author)

I've extended my reading killer asteroid of death somewhat over the past day
or so.

(It is most definitely no longer a list, pile, tower, or mountain.)

I was also stunned this particular essay hadn't been previously discussed on
HN.

------
doomlaser
> When I was at Apple, I watched many innovative products fail. Badly done?
> No, simply ahead of their time. For example, from 1992 to 1994 Apple
> developed one of the first commercial digital cameras, the Apple QuickTake
> 100, one of the very first smart pen-based computers (the Newton), and
> innovative software applications (e.g., CyberDog, Activity Based Computing,
> OpenDoc). In my consulting practice I helped develop the first digital
> picture frame and an extremely high quality distance education system for
> MBA courses. All failed. Were they bad ideas? No. Were they badly
> implemented? No. All were excellent concepts: they were ahead of their time.
> The first company to make automobiles in the United States failed. The first
> commercially sold computer that used a graphical user interface and that
> helped develop many of the ideas now central to today's world of computing,
> the Xerox Star, failed. The second commercial attempt to use a similar
> philosophy, the Apple Lisa, failed. The third attempt, the Apple Macintosh,
> almost failed, saved only by the fortuitous arrival of Adobe's development
> of Postscript and Canon's introduction of low-cost laser printing.

This can't be understated. The Mac Was 10 years too early. As was the NeXT
cube. The CPUs and RAM quotas were too anemic. Too expensive and slow. Windows
95 was right on time. Likewise, the idea of the smartphone was firmly in place
by the early 90s. There were thinkpieces in the New Yorker talking about the
essential idea. The technology had not caught up. General Magic, Newton, too
early.

The whole piece is a good read and often mirrors personal thoughts I've been
having recently.

~~~
menzoic
I think it's fair to say if something is before its time then it's poorly
implemented because it doesn't address any audience. Sometimes newer tech
compliments older tech but "before it's time" almost feels like a euphemism in
that case since it's all hindsight, it could have well turned out differently.

~~~
doomlaser
It could be excellently implemented, but if it's too expensive for the market,
the market won't buy it. Look at NeXTSTEP. Today it's powering a billion
iPhones and millions upon millions of Macintoshes, but for its first 15 years,
it was sitting in a box that was too expensive for the market to bear. Carmack
and Romero loved them and they built Doom on them, but the market went for
commodity x86, MS-DOS and Windows 95.

The components simply weren't commoditized to a level of being cheap enough to
address a large enough market to thrive.

