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Copying is the way design works (2020)

matthewstrom.com

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Re: Copying is the way design works (2020)

#181

Post by adolph »

> But at $145 (the equivalent of $12.78 in 1947) it’s more affordable than the LCW was when it was first manufactured and sold.

The article isn’t explicitly dated (afaict). Using an inflation calculator leads me to believe it was written in 2019 [0]. The same calculator indicates a material deviation from the quoted number: “$145 in 2024 equals $10.16 in 1947.”

Amazingly, the chair is listed on Amazon now at $118.53 [1] (at least for my login/cookies/tracking; price includes shipping estimated at 6 days), the equivalent of $8.31 in 1947, a 60% off sale.

The cost probably has some externality tradeoffs however. Was the wood clear cut by children from thousand year old forests? Was the chair manufactured by prisoners using chemicals known by the state of California to cause cancer?

0. https://www.saving.org/inflation/inflation.php?amount=145&ye...

1. https://www.amazon.com/Modway-EEI-510-WEN-Fathom-Mid-Century...

Re: Copying is the way design works (2020)

#182

Post by kragen »

karmakaze wrote: post #15
manav wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Copying from Xerox, some irony there.

It's also a lesson that always seems to fail to be learned. Xerox had the capital to set up a research arm, then failed to convert on any ideas because they were too focused on their current cash-cow. They eventually transitioned to "document company" where a document wasn't only paper, but it was too little/late.

you're talking about xerox parc in the 70s

xerox parc in the 70s invented the laser printer. the laser printer has been almost all of xerox's business since last millennium. their current revenues are 7 billion dollars a year, almost entirely from laser printers (mostly in disguise.) so i'm not sure it was 'too little, too late' or even 'failing to convert'

(right now i think xerox is unprofitable, but that's an issue of profit margins and management, not an issue of not having revenue)

this article https://spectrum.ieee.org/xerox-parc has this pullquote:

> From a purely economic standpoint, Xerox’s investment in PARC for its first decade was returned with interest by the profits from the laser printer.

and that was in 01985

you could posit an alternative history where xerox wasn't just making billions of dollars a year, for generations, out of laser printers, but also owned the entire market of laser printers, semiconductor foundries, guis with overlapping windows, ethernet, wysiwyg document editing, page description languages, and object-oriented programming, because all of those were indeed invented at parc

the article does in fact implicitly posit that alternative history. but it isn't clear that it was ever a possible history. centrally planned economies are not good at innovation; decentralized ones are. the most significant invention on that list, the semiconductor foundry, isn't even technical; it's a business structure that decentralizes chip design

very possibly they've made more money from their early stock in apple than they ever could have made by trying to exclude everyone else from the overlapping-window-gui market

Re: Copying is the way design works (2020)

#183

Post by jmdots »

This all great but for small time programmers trying to get a company off the ground, acting defensively is justifiable. It’s not always a question of a guy like Carmack having a good time cloning the big corp thing. Sometimes, and even many times lately it’s big corp obliterating inventive small business by releasing their own copy, or they simply use their monopolistic power to drive them into an inequitable sale.

If you’re small time and have a great idea, you’re better off going stealth and this is its own mitigation against destructive copying.

Re: Copying is the way design works (2020)

#184

Post by JKCalhoun »

turnsout wrote: post #43
karmakaze wrote: post #2

This is a great quote: > In the middle of Apple’s case against Microsoft, Xerox sued Apple, hoping to establish its rights as the inventor of the desktop interface. The court threw out this case, too, and questioned why Xerox took so long to raise the issue. Bill Gates later reflected on these cases: “we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox ... I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that [Jobs] h…

This is such a frustrating misunderstanding of the history, and the history is fascinating. Xerox invited Apple to tour PARC in exchange for $1M worth of pre-IPO Apple stock, which today would be worth [checks notes] more than that. There was no theft. Apple engineers got to see the Alto, not the Star (the screenshot in the article is wrong, the chronology is wrong). The visit was so fast that Apple engineers thought…

Thank you for that. I was going to post something similar.

What the Apple engineers did was take obvious inspiration from what they saw at PARC but then ended up going in a different direction when they actually had to both implement it and make it workable as an OS. The overlapping windows is the most oft-cited innovation they came up with but there were many other perhaps more subtle ones.

The impression I have though is then that Gates basically copied Apple engineering, not PARC.

Re: Copying is the way design works (2020)

#185

Post by JKCalhoun »

raptorpark wrote: post #180

Self taught artist, and I learned by copying my favorite comic books and painters. Went to art school and a significant part of my art history class dealt in remembering the name of art "movements" which is a veiled way of saying a period when everyone was copying each other. Then of course you learn about the influential artists who heavily borrowed from xyz. Another funny one is "revival" which just means "straight…

I think it is how every artist learns. Later an artist's "style" then comes to be the bits and pieces they preferred from various artists they copied as they were learning — a kind of Stone Soup style.

Re: Copying is the way design works (2020)

#186

Post by bluGill »

phpnode wrote: post #176
jrflowers wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most DJs do not make their livings at techno clubs. The majority are hired to play bars and events that do not cater to particularly discerning audiences.

Exactly. The DJs that are innovative, crate digging, slightly pretentious music nerds are almost exclusively hobbyists, with a vanishingly tiny percentage of them being able to eek out a meagre living from it. The majority of full time DJs cater to mainstream audiences who absolutely do want to hear the same 50 - 100 tracks on rotation every time they go out. They want to dance and sing along to music that they're fa…

A typical DJ is allowed one weird song nobody has heard before. If it is a long show maybe one per hour. The rest better be songs the majority of people know and sign along with.

Re: Copying is the way design works (2020)

#187

Post by bluGill »

chefandy wrote: post #119
burningChrome wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. I was a UI/UX guy for about 5 years and worked for a company that pumped out thousands of sites a year. A bunch of their designs won awards and I saw their model and thought I could do that, it seemed easy. The hitch was that I was going to design really cool sites, with all kinds of animations, huge text, have really cool navigation menus, etc. In short, I had a very romantic idea that I would dictate some inc…

> The hitch was that I was going to design really cool sites, with all kinds of animations, huge text, have really cool navigation menus, etc. In short, I had a very romantic idea that I would dictate some incredible design to my clients. I thought I was like the Frank Lloyd Wright of design and whatever I showed people they would swoon and then go with whatever uber cool thing I showed them. hmmm... That approach is…

UI and UX designers had their heyday in the 1990s. Every UI I see today shows that UX designers were not invited to have input.

Re: Copying is the way design works (2020)

#188

Post by turnsout »

iczero wrote: post #47
turnsout wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is such a frustrating misunderstanding of the history, and the history is fascinating. Xerox invited Apple to tour PARC in exchange for $1M worth of pre-IPO Apple stock, which today would be worth [checks notes] more than that. There was no theft. Apple engineers got to see the Alto, not the Star (the screenshot in the article is wrong, the chronology is wrong). The visit was so fast that Apple engineers thought…

> There was no theft. I didn't know that touring somewhere meant you could copy all their designs. Was that explicitly stated?

If you read a bit about it, you'll understand that Apple did not copy the Alto—they did something that was actually way harder. They created a better version of what the Alto was attempting to do, and got it to run on lower-grade hardware they could sell for 1/10th the cost.

But yes, Xerox knew exactly what they were doing when they invited Steve and his team in.

Re: Copying is the way design works (2020)

#189

Post by trentnix »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #71
rogerclark wrote: post #49

Carmack is a great programmer to be sure. Commander Keen, however, was not a better version of Mario. It was worse than Mario in every way -- art, music, and gameplay are all inferior. Nobody outside of Gen X PC gamers know what Commander Keen is. Everyone knows what Mario is. While copying may be the way design works, copying only gets you so far.

Disagree. Commander Keen 4-6 are better than Mario, imo.

Even if that were true (and I don't think it is), Commander Keen should be compared to Mario 3 (which still came out over a year earlier than the first Keen), not Mario. And 4-6 are most appropriately compared to Super Mario World, which was released the same year.

Keen was/is great, but Mario 3 and Mario World are on the shortlist for best game ever.

Re: Copying is the way design works (2020)

#190

Post by turnsout »

lolinder wrote: post #90
cortesoft wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would they give away 1m in stock just to look?

OP misrepresented what happened (intentionally or otherwise). They didn't give away $1M in stock, they granted Xerox the right to buy $1M in stock.

You're right of course—another way to put it is that Xerox got the chance to make a $1M investment in pre-IPO Apple.
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