I came out of this article with a new respect for John Walker of Autodesk. Here's his take on the collision of architecture astronauts and waterfall project planning:
John Walker, Xanadu's most powerful protector, later wrote that during the Autodesk years, the Xanadu team had "hyper-warped into the techno-hubris zone." Walker marveled at the programmers' apparent belief that they could create "in its entirety, a system that can store all the information in every form, present and future, for quadrillions of individuals over billions of years." Rather than push their product into the marketplace quickly, where it could compete, adapt, or die, the Xanadu programmers intended to produce their revolution ab initio.
"When this process fails," wrote Walker in his collection of documents from and about Autodesk, "and it always does, that doesn't seem to weaken the belief in a design process which, in reality, is as bogus as astrology. It's always a bad manager, problems with tools, etc. - precisely the unpredictable factors which make a priori design impossible in the first place."
Absolutely the only way I know to succeed with an innovative product is to throw something together quickly, push it out the door, persuade some lunatic early-adopters to start using it, and then rapidly evolve it on a quick turnaround cycle based on market acceptance and driven by a wish list from actual users.
The tools that we shape, will in turn shape us. The trouble is that if you release a project early, the people who use it or participate in it could become used to its current state and fight against any change.
You can see this with Microsoft products. Microsoft has to have its updated products compete with its previous products.
This is also true of Project Xanadu. If we consider the Web as an early form of Xanadu, we can see that it was released prematurely. There are lots of design flaws and over the years band-aides have been applied to them. There are still many people who fight against these band-aides (I'm looking at you IE6 users and corps who force the use of that browser). We're stuck using hacks for what should be easy. People are now used to do things the hard way and using hacks and cannot easily envision a system that doesn't suck.
We have held to ideals created long ago, in different times and places, the very best ideals we could find. We have carried these banners unstained to this new place, we now plant them and hope to see them floating in the wind. But it is dark and quiet and lonely here, and not yet dawn.
I worked with Roger Gregory for a few weeks in 1999, 4 years after this article was written. He still hadn't recovered from Xanadu. I got the impression that he never really would.
Heh. I worked for a startup that had three ex-Xanadu refugees. Never, ever work for a company that has more than one; once they reach critical mass you are doomed. Favorite memory from said startup was the PERT charts for "the big picture" used the color purple to denote items that "would make a good Ph.D thesis if you know anyone at Stanford or Berkeley looking for a topic..."
I've worked with Ted and it's a myth that he makes vapour ware. For instance, Gzz is a fully-working program.
Also, I have a 1989 article from Language Technology (Louis Rossetto's first magazine before Wired), and it's a breezy interview with Ted about Zigzag, and other issues, with no malice. I have no idea why Louis turned on Ted later in Wired (this very article). I might post the LT article.
This article is great and I hope to see many more like it on hacker news. I know most people hate the goldfish tendency of most social networks to go through "forgotten" articles, but stuff like this needs to be brought up. Long and interesting articles make this site so much more livable :P.
Why do projects name Xanadu always seems to mean some boondoggle?
Xanadu is a name of a mall in Jersey that was supposed to open in 2007 but got pushed back next summer. Even then, it might not even survive the recession.
I guess the lesson is never call your projects Xanadu or Duke Nukem Forever.
[+] [-] mblakele|16 years ago|reply
John Walker, Xanadu's most powerful protector, later wrote that during the Autodesk years, the Xanadu team had "hyper-warped into the techno-hubris zone." Walker marveled at the programmers' apparent belief that they could create "in its entirety, a system that can store all the information in every form, present and future, for quadrillions of individuals over billions of years." Rather than push their product into the marketplace quickly, where it could compete, adapt, or die, the Xanadu programmers intended to produce their revolution ab initio.
"When this process fails," wrote Walker in his collection of documents from and about Autodesk, "and it always does, that doesn't seem to weaken the belief in a design process which, in reality, is as bogus as astrology. It's always a bad manager, problems with tools, etc. - precisely the unpredictable factors which make a priori design impossible in the first place."
http://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/www/chapter2_108.html continues with:
Absolutely the only way I know to succeed with an innovative product is to throw something together quickly, push it out the door, persuade some lunatic early-adopters to start using it, and then rapidly evolve it on a quick turnaround cycle based on market acceptance and driven by a wish list from actual users.
[+] [-] _csoo|16 years ago|reply
You can see this with Microsoft products. Microsoft has to have its updated products compete with its previous products.
This is also true of Project Xanadu. If we consider the Web as an early form of Xanadu, we can see that it was released prematurely. There are lots of design flaws and over the years band-aides have been applied to them. There are still many people who fight against these band-aides (I'm looking at you IE6 users and corps who force the use of that browser). We're stuck using hacks for what should be easy. People are now used to do things the hard way and using hacks and cannot easily envision a system that doesn't suck.
[+] [-] etherael|16 years ago|reply
I'll drink to that.
[+] [-] davidmathers|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] evgen|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] davidw|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zandorg|16 years ago|reply
Also, I have a 1989 article from Language Technology (Louis Rossetto's first magazine before Wired), and it's a breezy interview with Ted about Zigzag, and other issues, with no malice. I have no idea why Louis turned on Ted later in Wired (this very article). I might post the LT article.
[+] [-] lawfulfalafel|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kyochan|16 years ago|reply
Xanadu is a name of a mall in Jersey that was supposed to open in 2007 but got pushed back next summer. Even then, it might not even survive the recession.
I guess the lesson is never call your projects Xanadu or Duke Nukem Forever.
[+] [-] noaharc|16 years ago|reply
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xanadu
"It became fabled as a metaphor for opulence, most famously in the English Romantic Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem Kubla Khan."
[+] [-] CaptSolo|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jsares|16 years ago|reply