

Spolsky on innovation - sanj
http://www.inc.com/magazine/20080201/how-hard-could-it-be-inspired-misfires_Printer_Friendly.html

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skmurphy
The naval gunfire story is recounted in more detail in "Gunfire at Sea" and is
available here <http://cs.gmu.edu/cne/pjd/TT/Sims/Sims.pdf> it makes for
fascinating reading. It's a chapter from "Men, Machines, and Modern Times" by
Elting Morrison [http://www.amazon.com/Machines-Modern-Times-Elting-
Morison/d...](http://www.amazon.com/Machines-Modern-Times-Elting-
Morison/dp/0262630184/) which also makes great reading.

Elting Morrison makes the point that the modern naval gunnery was enabled by
the intersection of metallurgy advances that could build longer strong gun
barrels giving improved range, improved optics so that you could see and range
find what you were aiming at since it was a mile or more away, an elevating
gear to compensate for the rolling motion of the deck.

Together these three inventions enabled a continuous aim firing method that
saw 175x increase in the rate of effective fire in 6 years: "After twenty-five
minutes of banging away, two hits had been made on the sails of the elderly
vessel. Six years later one naval gunner made fifteen hits in one minute at a
target 75 by 25 feet at the same range–1600 yards; half of them hit in a
bull’s eye 50 inches square."

I had included it in a longer blog entry about Paul Saffo speaking on
forecasting technology [http://www.skmurphy.com/blog/2007/08/28/paul-saffo-on-
foreca...](http://www.skmurphy.com/blog/2007/08/28/paul-saffo-on-forecasting-
innovation-in-silicon-valley/)

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henning
In terms of where Joel is willing to put his money where his mouth is, he's
said again and again that he doesn't believe in building a better mouse trap.

The operating principle is to hire turbogenius ninja SWAT team superduper
geniuses who, for some reason, will work for you instead of earning 3-5x more
by being independent consultants.

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umjames
or possibly even higher than 3-5x by starting a startup.

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sanj
I really like this line

"The combination of "seems impossible" and "strong network effects" is about
as close as you can get to the magic formula for incredible, sustainable
success, as with eBay, Wikipedia, and Google."

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davidw
Hrm...

Hal Varian says that Google _doesn't_ have strong network effects working for
it, and he might know a thing or two about it:

<http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/02/our-secret-sauce.html>

eBay certainly does, though.

~~~
sanj
I half agree. Classic network effect doesn't apply. But there is a sense of
"that's where I can reach the most users".

Further, Varian's argument about knitting websites is a little off, since
Adwords/Adsense effectively allows you to reach those customers via Google.

