on GUIs and such things

[Norman Hardy]

At 22:17 -0400 00/07/01, Kragen Sitaker wrote:
>I just discovered that I had this quote, which expresses what I was
>trying to express on eros-arch this week much better and in far fewer
>words:
>
>  When you go to achieve some new great thing, it is really helpful to
>    only try to achieve *one* amazing thing at a time.  If you try to
>    do two or three, then the product of narrow probabilities bites you
>    in the ass, and your chances of success dwindle to insignificance.
>
>        -- Crispin Cowan, in <384B5F32.10FDAD89@cse.ogi.edu>, around
>           1999-12-09, on the Free Software Business list
>
>-

I can not argue with wisdom of the quote. On the other hand there are some
places that you can't get to in smaller steps. "Two leaps per chasm" etc.

A newish book, "The Innovators Dilemma" notes that innovations usually
succeed in some narrow niche, gain strength there, and then spread. This
would argue for finding a niche where some of the benefits of capabilities
show thru clearly even if the resulting system is not a universal
replacement for Unix or Windows. My intuition, however, is  that mere
persistence, or confinement are not enough benefit to gain a foothold.
Norman Hardy  <http://www.mediacity.com/~norm>