Amelie and Alchemy from Konstantin Brazhnik on Vimeo.

This week I found the write up about Joseph Gavin fascinating. He managed about 7,500 people at Grumman Aircraft building the Apollo lunar landers. Most of us take it for granted that these space craft landed men safely on the Moon and returned them to their command modules orbiting the Moon. What they did was incredibly impressive. Imagine never being able to test what you build in real conditions. In every project I’ve ever led, there were ton’s of bugs that emerged only after starting serious testing (web browsers, web servers, devices like the iPhone). Of course, I never had human life relying on my software projects to launch bug free. Even harder! I can’t even image having to manage a project like this.

It was a tricky task. The module had to be light, to reduce energy consumption and battery size. Because there is no air resistance on the moon, reverse acceleration was needed to stop forward progress. Everything had to be tested and tested again: some 14,000 imperfections were corrected over almost a decade. And because there could no testing in actual lunar conditions, an extensive array of backup systems had to be installed while still minimizing weight.

Preparations for the moon landing were inherently uncertain. Imagined possibilities included a layer of dust more than 30 feet thick, a slippery surface like ice, and potholes.

“So we developed a computer program, based on tests of a quarter-scale model of the lunar module, and we ran the program through some 400 different landing conditions,” Mr. Gavin said in an interview with Technology Review, published by M.I.T., in 1994.

The margins for error were so tiny that Commander Armstrong had only 20 seconds of fuel left after changing landing sites because of rocks. Mr. Gavin was “literally” holding his breath, he recalled.

An even more tense moment followed. If the blastoff from the moon’s surface failed — a critical step that could not be simulated in terrestrial tests — Commander Armstrong and Col. Edwin E. Aldrin Jr., the lunar module pilot, would be stranded forever.

Amazing stuff. The article ends with an interesting quote from him on innovation. Working for a big corporation, I see lots of talk about predictability in building technology products. It’s super hard even for the most experienced program managers. Cool to see how some of the best think about these things. Can’t say I disagree with him…

“If a project is truly innovative, you cannot possibly know its exact cost and exact schedule at the beginning,” Mr. Gavin told Technology Review. “And if you do know the exact cost and the exact schedule, chances are that the technology is obsolete.”

An anecdotal story, a friend of mine was at meetings at Apple and Microsoft on the same day and this was in the last year, so this was recently. He went into the Apple meeting (he’s a vendor for Apple) and when he went into the meeting at Apple as soon as the designers walked in the room, everyone stopped talking because the designers are the most respected people in the organization. Everyone knows the designers speak for Steve because they have direct reporting to him. It is only at Apple where design reports directly to the CEO.

Later in the day he was at Microsoft. When he went into the Microsoft meeting, everybody was talking and then the meeting starts and no designers ever walk into the room. All the technical people are sitting there trying to add their ideas of what ought to be in the design. That’s a recipe for disaster.

While not surprising for anyone that knows Apple well, still notable in the industry. The other note I thought was interesting was around developers…

Engineers are far more important than managers at Apple — and designers are at the top of the hierarchy. Even when you look at software, the best designers like Bill Atkinson, Andy Hertzfeld, Steve Capps, were called software designers, not software engineers because they were designing in software. It wasn’t just that their code worked. It had to be beautiful code. People would go in and admire it. It’s like a writer. People would look at someone’s style. They would look at their code writing style and they were considered just beautiful geniuses at the way they wrote code or the way they designed hardware.

Again, even with engineering driven companies, I rarely hear a focus on writing beautiful code. I think that’s as cool as building great customer facing product.

The whole interview is definitely worth a read for those interested in management and product development.

“Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistency. Remember that our sons and grandsons are going to do things that would stagger us. Let your watchword be order and your beacon beauty. Think big.”
—DANIEL BURNHAM, CHICAGO ARCHITECT. (1846-1912)

“On demand” is definitely the wave of the future. Forget TiVo which pulls down content and stores it locally in you home. Content will live in the “cloud.” Eventually, every movie or TV show will be available this way. Still probably 10 years away from this happening. But there will be huge movement over the next few years.

On my last blog, I experimented a bit with displaying current books I’m reading, latest albums, Twitter posts, etc. But I found it too much trouble to keep updated. So, for my new blog I selected a clean WordPress template and put just the bare essentials in the sidebar: search, categories, top posts and links to me other places on the Web. The nice thing about a hosted solution is dealing with spam. I had to turn off comments on my old blog. I figure constant attention from WordPress should help deal with comment spam for the most part. Finally, with a hosted solution you get constant goodies released (like widgets) and don’t have to worry about updating your own instance to get them (or pestering Bob in my case)! So, I’m looking forward to the new location for this blog.

Another change in this rev of my blog, I will be no longer be creating posts around pointing readers to interesting links. I do that now through my Twitter feed. Microblogging is a much better vehicle for short bursts of interesting facts to followers. This blog will be focused more on narrative — hopefully original narrative. I’m going to try for a once a week post. Posts will center around technology, the film industry (for those that don’t know, I now work at IMDb), photography and any other topics that fit my fancy.

I have other ideas for blogs but I’m not going to launch those until I actually start blogging again. Stay tuned and hopefully find some of my thoughts interesting and perhaps share a few of your own.

If I were buying a new laptop these days, I’d probably pick up one of the MacBook Airs. I think that’s Apple’s nicest machine. Beautiful display, light and portable. And then I’d likely connect it to an external display for home use. The new 24″ display is pretty cool.

The big problem with the new MacBook Pro is the screen. As soon as I saw the specs I knew their would be a firestorm over the lack of a matte option. Photographers and designers don’t generally like the glossy screens. I predict in the short run, the last rev of MacBook Pros will actually see a slight bump in their used value. And it will delay current Pro users from upgrading for awhile until the community figures out how to deal with it. Also somewhat worrying is the glass screen. If it cracks easier, that will be a disaster for sales. It almost seems to me that you now are required to get Applecare if you buy one of the new machines to protect yourself from a screen failure. Other than that, the track pad looks cool. I like the chicklet style keyboard better than the old one. And the asethics are great (though somewhat conservative in comparison to the Air).

As it’s a v1.0, I’d hold off on buying unless you’re really in need for a new machine.

In this YouTube video, you’ll see how Job’s brain works. The video is really an internal training piece for NeXT. So, it reveals a lot more details about his thinking than one would usually see in a keynote. But if you watch closely, you’ll see how he takes a very abstract and complex marketplace, the workstation market, and tries to simplify it and turn into easily identifiable segments. From this simplification, he is able to plot a strategy and communicate it to others in a very understandable way. As you watch the piece, compare his breakdown of the workstation market to how he breaks down the consumer and pro market for Apple products. It’s very similar and most importantly, simple. MacBook Pro/MacBook. iPod/iPod Nano. Pro Tower/iMac.

In my opinion, Jobs’ brilliance is not in making us lust to buy something. Though he has great aesthetic sense. His real ability is at taking a 10,000 ft level perspective of a market, breaking into a few basic segments and then targeting those segments with simple and straight forward products.

Oh, and hindsight being 20/20, his strategy was wrong in his presentation. He should have focused on bringing workstations to the masses. His real competitor was Microsoft not Sun. This would have meant a big price cut on NeXT boxes. That many have not been feasible at the time. But it was the only way they could have won big. IMO.