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Not sure of the source for this. Nevertheless, this is ridiculously high percentage of projects that ever see an industrial angle, at least in basic sciences. Perhaps, this is restricted to engineering.
> The biggest commercial success is not the best technical design: Nokia N95 versus the first generation iPhone That’s not a good example. Neither is Beta vs VHS. The most they illustrate is a different law I am coining right here: Canyon’s Law of Design Optimization: you will inevitably choose to optimize for different metrics than your customers would wish. Don’t try to convince them they are wrong.
I had to look up the N95. Yeah, Wikipedia goes to pains to rattle off things that made it better than the iPhone, but then I looked at a photo of the device and it was clear why the iPhone "won".
If anything, some of these early smartphones were pushing a lot of limits considering the hardware restraints. Its just by the time the iphone came out, these restraints were lessened and Apple did a good job using these technologies.
Law 20 seems to express the state of most startups these days: > "A bad design with a good presentation is doomed eventually. A good design with a bad presentation is doomed immediately."
That's what happens when the likely success scenario is selling out to an existing company rather than growing to be a genuinely large and long lived company.
(Most VC funding is used to quickly produce a beefy market share, and sell it to those who think they can milk it, or to profitably butcher it.)
> The schedule you develop will seem like a complete work of fiction up until the time your customer fires you for not meeting it. (Law 23) So will Musk finally be fired in 2026?
He promises 10, gives the world 4, but everybody else has 1, and he's hated for it.
So he gives 4, which but 1 are all terrible, and is rightly criticized. Then he inserts hateful regressive politics into our collective culture as the secondary price of using/buying/supporting his brand and products. If anything, he's under-criticized and keeps failing up.
> The schedule you develop will seem like a complete work of fiction up until the time your customer fires you for not meeting it. (Law 23) So will Musk finally be fired in 2026?
He promises 10, gives the world 4, but everybody else has 1, and he's hated for it.
> The biggest commercial success is not the best technical design: Nokia N95 versus the first generation iPhone That’s not a good example. Neither is Beta vs VHS. The most they illustrate is a different law I am coining right here: Canyon’s Law of Design Optimization: you will inevitably choose to optimize for different metrics than your customers would wish. Don’t try to convince them they are wrong.
The original iPhone was a promising proof of concept. It got the form factor and the interface right, but the actual device was underwhelming. It had no 3G, no GPS, no third-party apps, and a weak camera. iPhone 3G added all the features competitors already had (apart from a good camera) and became a much bigger commercial success.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
He promises 10, gives the world 4, but everybody else has 1, and he's hated for it.
I'm not seeing that. The truck is a mess of a product. The self-driving is terrible compared to things like waymo, and the robot seems to be entirely fraud. Tesla cars was a good product but now lost the early lead and 2025 sales were unimpressive and certainly not remotely enough to justify the stock price. So he gives 4, which but 1 are all terrible, and is rightly criticized. Then he inserts hateful regressive pol…
And no I'm not a fan of the Musk personna.
Not quite, and an interesting story that fits these engineering maxims better than you might think.
An analog channel with the bandwidth and SNR characteristics of a landline phone line has (IIRC) a Shannon capacity of 30-something kbit/s, which was closely approached with V.34, which used trellis coded modulation plus basically every other coding and equalization mechanism they knew of at the time to get to 33.6kb/s on a good day.
But... by the 80s or so the phone system was only analog for the "last mile" to the home - the rest of the system was digital, sending 8-bit samples (using logarithmic mu-law encoding) at a sampling rate of 8000 samples/s, and if you had a bunch of phone lines coming into a facility you could get those lines delivered over a digital T1 link.
Eventually someone realized that if your ISP-side modem directly outputs digital audio, the downstream channel capacity is significantly higher - in theory the limit is probably 64000 bit/s, i.e. the bit rate of the digital link, although V.90 could only achieve about 56000 b/s in theory, and more like 53kb/s in practice. (in particular, the FCC limited the total signal power, which means not all 64000 combinations of bits in a second of audio would be allowable)
I worked with modem modulation folks when I was a co-op student in the mid-80s. They had spent their lives thinking about the world in terms of analog channels, and it took some serious out-of-the-box thinking on someone's part to realize that the channel was no longer analog, and that you could take advantage of that.
A few years later those same folks all ended up working on cable modems, and it was back to the purely analog world again.