Why Experts Reject Creativity (2014) | Hacker News Reader

Why Experts Reject Creativity (2014)

theatlantic.com

32 pointsnoobermin13 comments

The responses to the iPhone were interesting. This article makes me wonder how many people like Ballmer and Balsillie had already been presented with similar ideas and had rejected them.

When the iPhone came out, I felt that the clones weren't so much people copying Apple but creative engineers being unshackled and being allowed to make what they wanted.

In a way the experts were right, my recollection is that the first iPhones were not amazingly good at being phones. Where the experts got it wrong is the assumption that people wanted phones.

What it turned out that people really wanted was a small portable computer that had a camera, Web browser, music and video player built in. And that could make phone calls and send sms messages. But they didn't know that is what they wanted until Apple punted it out...

The first iPhones were actually not that great comparatively. They were pretty slow and they didn't even have 3g. But, Apple got a lot right, they had an intuitive multi-touch interface that anyone and everyone could use, they had a simplified ui, etc. Then they came out with the app store. And with the 2nd gen with 3g support they had a very solid product that had mass appeal.

It didn't hurt that they had the Apple cult following driving adoption, but still they pushed things forward a lot.

Nokia put a web browser in phone back in 1996. Phones already had all those features you listed. They were just slow and clunky to use.

But they were always phones, first.

You turn it on / open it, and it's at the phone screen. You could just dial using the dedicated hardware numeric keypad, and it would place a call. To get to the web browser, calendar, and other functions you had to go into a sub-menu, because they were secondary, not-that-important functions of the device.

If it's a phone, this is a fine design. If it's a device who only happens to have a phone feature (and personally, I barely use the "phone" part of my phone anymore), then it's actually a very annoying design. It's about as useful as if someone decided that upon startup or pressing the "home" button, it should go to Angry Birds, and all other apps/features could be accessed via a menu button after that.

It's a subtle, but important, difference in the mindset that goes into designing both the hardware and software.

I would hardly call a Blackberry or a Sidekick or any of a number of Windows Mobile devices of that era "phones, first."

The difference in mindset is that Apple thought about how they were going to sell the product first and built the hardware and software around that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_9000_Communicator

When you opened Nokia Communicator, it was more like PDA or a computer than a phone. Home screen, calendar, message, etc. widgets, very much like Android phones are nowadays.

It was like a phone only when closed. Made sense that way.

http://www.gsmarena.com/nokia_9000_communicator-16.php

Note web browser and telnet client, that was pretty cool in 1996. gsmarena mistakenly says it was introduced in 1998.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_E90_Communicator

In 2007, Nokia E90 had a display that was almost like "retina", 219 DPI. The web browser was also usable at the time. It had even Flash player.

The big difference between Jobs/Apple and the rest was that Jobs was able to think of products as interlocking markets and systems, with a fine design gloss.

Most companies and engineers think of products as functional units differentiated by technical specs.

The answer to "What does this do for the user?" is never "16GB of RAM and a quad-core processor."

Blackberry and Nokia half understood this, but never quite got it to work reliably as a product pipeline.

That creative ability to design markets rather than selling widgets is immensely valuable in business, and correspondingly hard to find.

Corporate hierarchies typically select against it, which is why so many large corps can only hold onto customers by bullying them, browbeating them with ad spend or sales visits, trying to lock them in technically, or cultivating middle management spending decision inertia.

At the time of the iPhone announcement I had the HTC TyTN and was about 13-14 I believe. My reaction was very similar to Ballmer's. Windows mobile users had all these features and more for a long time already. It seemed like the only new thing about the iPhone was the UI and UX. Purely technically it had much less features. Thus most windows mobile power users just couldn't get excited about it. What we all underestimated is how much of a game changer the iOS UX was for market adoption. No average person wanted a "PDA", most people probably didn't even know much about these devices. It was something used by tech-savy business people. That irrelevancy of WM PDAs made it seem like iPhone was the very first to have all these features. And it indeed was the first device to bring that to the mainstream and led the whole mobile revolution. In retrospect it's so painfully obvious, but at the time it did really seem like a nice toy to most smart people. And one has to remember at the time UX wasn't as appreciated. iPhone pretty much started the UX revolution as well.

I don't think it's as simple as making the wrong assumptions. It's more about being unable to see the future and how much a few simple things can change the industry.

Like lol, even a few years in I still got the HTC TyTN II and couldn't care less about iPhones or the new Android at the time. As iPhone didn't yet dominate the market, you could still get some popular apps for WM.

Only now after so many years I picked up that old TyTN II and can tell how horrible it all was.

In my view, there are two sides of the coin.

Experts (people who have the experience) should always explain, we tried this and this and that is why it have failed.

On the other hand, creative people should be able to justify why the situation or their solution is now different compared to what was tried before.

The rejection seems to happen if this kind of communication doesn't happen. And it cuts both ways - just like there are experts who reject creativity there are creative people who reject expertise. (Typically this is a generational conflict.)

I disagree with the conclusion of this article. The author conflates familiarity with lack of creativity. In order for an idea to be sold, its presentation must resonate with its audience. That means it must latch onto their beliefs as well as those facts that have been proven to them, and it must leverage those conceptual building blocks to bring them up to date with this new logical composition. With no frame of reference, how should anyone know where a product fits in? No one other than the innovator can be expected to have such a vision—after all, how often is the next trend predicted? In retrospect, analogies to past breakouts become apparent. Being analogous to pre-existing innovations is not mutually exclusive with being novel and creative; in this new age, we will soon find that all new developments are built solely at a higher level, on the foundation comprising progress thus far. We therefore cannot present this as a disrespect for knowledge, but rather an impatience for those who create things before deciding their place in this unfair, pragmatic world.

This reminds me a bit of Lee Smolin's book "The Trouble with Physics". In it he defines a concept about how innovation happens. He defines revolutionaries into two categories: craftsmen, and seers. Craftsmen take current constructs and raise the bar (his example: Newton), where seers create completely new constructs that involve more imagination (his example: Einstein).

Jumping of his idea, I would say large institutions (business, academia) have a bias toward creating craftsman, and thus the point in this article that while it takes all kinds to innovate, sometimes it takes seers to really stir the pot up.

This is in science the same: You can adjust a common accepted theory a bit, but putting everything upside down, even if it's logical and makes sense, will not get accepted. Really sad :(

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