July
@july
1/ About "Lateral Thinking Withered Technology" 「枯れた技術の水平思考」 Gunpei Yokoi, one of the main architects of Nintendo's original Game Boy, and many other hits like Donkey Kong, Mario Bros, etc -- I think this used to be one of his mottos. An interesting thing that Nintendo did was they meticulously understood that their way of competing with the market was not latest state of the art technology -- but rather to utilize mature (used to be cutting edge but now is now) technology - to do something fun, exciting and give an experience to the customer There's a story about How Yokoi and his team was about to release the Game Boy, and some Nintendo engineer got concerned about a competitors product. Yokoi asked them, is the screen color? and they said yes (the original gameboy was monochrome) and he was like phew, that's great. They constrained themselves to use a "reliable" technology like monochrome displays at the time which cost significantly less - and had longer battery life
7 replies
27 recasts
129 reactions
July
@july
2/ I think about this a lot - technology when it is adapted for humans (I think some people call it consumer) is so often requires that leap, to make the technology delightful and wonderful. It's a very different muscle to flex compared to coming up with a technology itself. More often than not, coming up with a new technology, an invention, requires tremendous amount of R&D. Often the company or institution that invests time and resources into said R&D don't often even benefit significantly from it (see Bell Labs, Xerox PARC etc.) Another way this happens often in my opinion is look at the graveyard of startups (esp in Silicon Valley) where VC funded startups have tried different things, and if anything it becomes another stab at a different path in the idea maze
1 reply
1 recast
32 reactions
Tony D’Addeo
@deodad
there are substacks I subscribe to that don't delivery content this good
2 replies
0 recast
4 reactions
anco🐑
@anco
私は彼と出身地も同じで白黒のゲームボーイ世代です。 横井軍平ゲーム館を読みたくなりました。
1 reply
0 recast
1 reaction
Kieran Daniels 🎩
@kdaniels.eth
Creative restraints!
0 reply
0 recast
1 reaction
DV (insert a lot of emojis)
@degenveteran.eth
SEGA game gear? That was fun but... The ONLY one that beat all was the PSP
0 reply
0 recast
1 reaction
Deescuss
@deescuss
Your cast has been curated by @alvesjtiago.eth It was added to "Essays" collection - https://deescuss.com/profile/alvesjtiago.eth/collections/09fb369a-6a2f-4fb1-8288-6b3f4772aec0
0 reply
0 recast
0 reaction
Shahrukh
@ahsansrk
1 $Degen
1 reply
0 recast
0 reaction