Not so fast. None of you did, despite the fact that mobile devices aren't new.
When I first saw tetris, I said "wow, I could have invented that, I was just looking at asymmetric block figures". However, I didn't.
Almost everything is trivial in hindsight.
>Especially in a group environment (dev listserv, public forums, etc.) we expect to have users that can identify problems and others that can solve them.
Are you claiming that Apple execs can't invent anything because they have too many indirect subordinates? Or that groups only produce improvements that are too trivial to warrant protection?
I wasn't in industry when that issue came up, and I wasn't employed by Apple. So, it really isn't fair to hold me responsible for a problem I didn't have. I've only recently begun carrying a mobile device of any sort, furthermore.
There are infinitely many problems that I haven't solved nor, I reckon, have you. I will not argue, though, that we automatically are not capable of solving them, as we have not encountered them and have no reason to solve them.
Given the constraints, given the hardware, given the opportunity and incentive, we certainly could come up with something similar. Just because we did not does not mean we could not.
This logic puts us in the unfortunate opportunity of saying "Well, the first person to run into the problem, to them goes the spoils!"
That's rubbish, and heavily encourages either wasteful flailing about in the problem space wasting resources, or worse, explicitly avoiding exploring even the same areas as others because you'd hate to be a few minutes late.
We need to be free to attempt solutions to problems regardless of who else has worked on them and to what success.
Second, the point I was making was not that Apple execs can't invent anything (indeed, I believe I set the bar fairly low for novelty!) or that groups only find trivial progress.
The point was that in a community we expect some users to find problems and others to find solutions--and these may be different folks, spread far in time and space. You made some statement seeming to imply that one must both discover and solve a problem, and that is what I took issue with.
Not so fast. None of you did, despite the fact that mobile devices aren't new.
When I first saw tetris, I said "wow, I could have invented that, I was just looking at asymmetric block figures". However, I didn't.
Almost everything is trivial in hindsight.
>Especially in a group environment (dev listserv, public forums, etc.) we expect to have users that can identify problems and others that can solve them.
Are you claiming that Apple execs can't invent anything because they have too many indirect subordinates? Or that groups only produce improvements that are too trivial to warrant protection?