WTF?: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us
Tim O'Reilly is the founder of O'Reilly Media. If you are in technology you have read several of their books. O'Reilly is plugged into all things technology and this book is a great perspective on how technology evolves from revolutionary to every day.
I have 58 highlights from reading this book for things that I needed to research more about.
Including the quote from William Gibson
“The future is already here. It’s just not evenly distributed yet.”
Technology should be an aid not a replacement.
"Your map should be an aid to seeing, not a replacement for it. If you know a turn is coming up, you can be on the lookout for it. If it doesn’t come when you expect, perhaps you are on the wrong road."
"If you want a human-centered future, support companies that demonstrate human-centered values."
Tim also notes the "working backward" process from Amazon. It is an approach that I try to incorporate into every project. We can't always go through this entire process in fine detail but taking time on each step at the start of a project is extremely valuable.
That is, the company, famous for its focus on the customer, starts with a press release that describes what the finished product does and why. (If it’s an internal-only service or product, the “customer” might be another internal team.) Then they write a “Frequently Asked Questions” document. They create mock-ups and other ways of defining the customer experience. They go so far as to write an actual user manual, describing how to use the product. Only then is the actual product green-lighted. Development is still iterative, informed by additional data from actual users as the product is built and tested, but the promise of the final product.
There is the simple model approach from Google.
Google’s core search service. Its insight, that “simple models and a lot of data trump more elaborate models based on less data,” has been fundamental to progress in field after field, and is at the heart of many Silicon Valley companies.
This book was also the first time I had heard of the OODA loop.
Air Force Colonel John Boyd, “the father of the F-16,” introduced the term OODA loop (“Observe-Orient-Decide-Act”) to describe why agility is more important in combat than pure firepower. Both fighters are trying to understand the situation, decide what to do, and then act. If you can think more quickly, you can “get inside the OODA loop of your enemy” and disrupt his decision making
