What happened to Pippin / Rent the Backyard

Ok, not The Pippin:

The Apple Pippin is a defunct open multimedia technology platform, designed by Apple Computer, and marketed as PiPP!N.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Pippin

I’d love to know more about what drove the mismatch of hiring unskilled labour for the unproven production line. Or rather, what went into the belief that the production line concept would cover for a lack of technical skill.

If lesson 2 was, “we should have taken the short-term more painful and expensive path of hiring experienced leaders for each trade or station” then that seems to suggest there were no experts.

So then how was the line designed and tested? Who were the people who built the first few houses before the unskilled workers were brought in? Who was training them? Where did those trainers go? How were the founders so confident in the absence of any expert authority?

I suspect I am misunderstanding the situation, and that there were skilled experts who know how to build houses, but they weren’t appropriate to be actual builders?

But that leads (and I recognize I’m layering a lot of assumptions to get to here) to the issue that you’re not building a house, you’re designing and tuning a production line. That already exists: construction crews. Ever see them build like 20 houses at the same time in a new subdivision? A big part of their value is not just that they know the details of their trade, but that they have honed the production line aspect. (tangent: I once watched, from my workshop, roofers across the street redo an entire roof in an afternoon in what I would describe as a ballet set to the score of nailguns)

I think lesson 2 actually feeds lesson 1: hire a pre-existing team of experts and give them the blueprint. Then watch how they design the production line.

Gosh this is fascinating. So many questions. I wish the post was longer.