The mystery of the garage
strangeloopcanon.com
strangeloopcanon.com
It had been converted by the owner of the house (Bezos was renting) or the previous owner. It was a normal livable space with windows, wall treatment etc.
Yes, once upon a time it had been a garage, but the only thing "special" about the space that has any relationship to its original purpose is that it formed the only space in a typical US residence large enough for 3 people to work in without totally disrupting normal domestic life. If there's mystery or magic to a "garage", that's it.
I know this because I worked in that garage until we moved to the so-called Color Tile Building in Seattle.
Ultimately part of making room for innovation means allowing people to take risks, and that mechanism has in recent years shifted from wide availability of low-cost resources to wide availability of speculative capital to obtain high-cost resources.
> But despite all the talent, clear obsession, technical prowess, and a lot of money, the infrastructure just wasn’t there to make it work.
Almost everyone was trying to make a handheld device then, and by the time Palm came along, the category was cursed as far as VC's were concerned.
The infrastructure WAS there, as Palm proved. You just had to scale down your expectations and find a set of functionality people actually wanted. You also needed to give up on cursive recognition and trust that the users would learn a simpler method of entering text.
The monster egos in General Magic just refused to do that, as did their big corporate partners, and all the other failed startups.
The first Palm had only a sync cradle with the PC. It did not have any wireless, and it was a huge success. The sync cradle gave users what they wanted.
We could quibble whether all those users were "early adopters." Whatever you call them, there were plenty.
The market was desktop computer users.
But people didn't want 100MB floppy disks, they wanted a way to transfer data. Flash wasn't cheap enough to sell in bulk, and as soon as it was, the Zip drive fell off a cliff, replaced with the still-ubiquitous thumb drive and SD card. You can argue that the Zip was a success, or mainstream, but you can't argue that it was equally successful and mainstream as thumb drives or SD cards, not honestly.
Same deal with the Palm Pilot. For a couple years, I had a flip phone, a Palm Pilot, and an iPod, all three of which I would pack to go to classes at university. Of those three, the only one that felt clunky and overly limited was the Palm Pilot. I liked it, I used it, real boon to an ADD-brained kid trying to get through higher education, but it was notably limited and I wanted something better. Even tried programming it, got the O'Reilly "pigeon book", never got that far with it though.
It wasn't until 2007 that those three items were successfully combined into one mass-market gadget, although there were preludes like the Danger Hiptop. Palm even tried to get into the smartphone game, in the first generation. But the original device category PDA was obsolete, whether or not (as it turned out, not) the company made the jump to the new one.
Iomega made a bunch of people a lot of money and provided multi years employment to others.
But they were an evolutionary dead-end.
Whether because Zip drives (or other forms of higher-density non-harddrive storage) ultimately weren't very interesting or because networked storage ended up as something of a niche (although some companies play int that space).
You can certainly make the case that they were a "successful" company for their time but they also ultimately failed.
> But despite all the talent, clear obsession, technical prowess, and a lot of money, the infrastructure just wasn’t there to make it work.
and all of the ensuing discussion was what "it" was.
If you're an engineer, "it" can reduce to "will I make money from the stock?" In fact, that was my approach. So ZipDrive? Great, those people probably made money. Palm? They got $5 a share from US Robotics, plus some USR shares, which in turn made money from 3Com.
You can demand more out of life, of course. Nothing wrong with that.
I guess you have a different definition.
You just need the ability to make things that work. And by "work" I mean actually work, and in a way that others want to use it (an intuitive interface that needs almost no training/explanation helps a lot here). It doesn't have to be polished, pretty, or anywhere near feature complete (see: Apple 1). It just has to pass the "will people actually use this beyond the novelty phase" test. I can't stress enough how important intuitive function is above form at this stage.
That's step 1.
Step 2 is to have a management team that can effectively monetize that thing and manage the risks (financial/legal/market) that all businesses have to deal with. Engineers are usually not good at these things.
I've succeeded at step 1 many times but I'm personally not good at Step 2.
Somewhere not in that city, because (despite whatever amenities it might have) your city has been taken over by barbarians.
Added bonus: the rent for the garage will be way cheaper.
Everything is networked together, a lot of tech is very important to people's lives, and there are fewer repair people. There's a strong incentive to use stuff that's made by the billions and can be replaced tomorrow with Amazon Prime if needed, especially if it comes with lots of cloud value adds.
It's hard to find a project that isn't done by 40 people on AliExpress.
There's still highly specialized stuff, and things that require breakthroughs in basic science or cost engineering (Someone please make mass spectrometry and XRF a consumer grade thing so we can see what has lead in it!), but for the most part... people who can afford startup products pretty much have everything they need.
No amount of passion would have got the right brothers of 1850 flying - there was too much about making an airplane that wasn't invented (the ICE engine needed to be developed to enough efficiency, and metals light enough to work needed to exist) However when the metal industry developed eventually metals that can work were available to anyone. Better metals are available to me today, all I'm lacking is an idea/passion for something that is not possible. (though metals of today are not that much better)
The opportunities are always going to be in new areas where the low hanging fruit hasn't all been picked yet.
Because the more general the rule is the easier it will be to enforce it. To stay with the example if there is a rule against auto shops, and you run what in effect is an auto shop but you say you are not taking money for it can we shut you down? Will we need to go to court where expensive lawyers battle it out what it means to be running an autoshop? That is a lot of cost and even more uncertainty.
If the rule is about not being allowed to work on cars at all, then all they need to show is that you worked on a car. They don’t have to care who owns the car, they don’t have to show if it was commercial work, they don’t have to show if it was a regular activity or not.
(Plus, just like you usually don’t get pulled over for 75 on the highway, most everyone will be able to do occasional work on their adult kid’s car anyway.)
But neighbors can be both difficult, and ever-present.
I had a busy-body neighbor once that would go out of his way to make sure that everyone was following the rules.
For instance: It'd been snowing, quite a lot, and the roads were officially closed. But I had to get my wife to work at 5:30AM anyway: Those road closures don't apply to people in her line of work in the medical field.
So we went out early and started digging. We thought we had made a good path but got the car stuck in the middle of our boring little side street anyway. Fun times.
And the nosy neighbor dude waddles up from his house. He doesn't offer to help, like many normal neighbors might have done, or a great neighbor would feel compelled to do.
His compulsion was different.
He just takes a series of photos our clearly-evident (to him) lawbreaking activities and smugly waddles back inside.
This is the kind of neighbor who absolutely would make sure I would be reported for working on a non-resident's vehicle in my own garage.
I've only had one such neighbor in my decades of adulthood, but he cannot be the only one who is this way.
Sacramento County, this is the one that made the news a while ago and people got upset - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34081331
I couldn't find more through Kagi. I could do a search through LexisNexis or another tool that indexes a bunch (_not all_) of the ordinances but it's more time than I want to spend right now.
You'd be surprised what is allowed and not allowed by ordinances, it's very locale specific too. I tried living in a tiny home and it very much broke many ordinances.
It's the one reason I am so nervous about who my neighbors are when doing anything "weird" on a property. The township, city, county, state, whatever jurisdiction it falls under _will_ handle it.
I explained to her that it could be very valuable someday or used as a museum piece once my system is widely adopted and changes the world. I don't think she bought that argument.
This one had been given to my son to play games on, and then we did a few upgrades: a 256gb SSD I had laying around, a $15 half-height R5 340X GPU off ebay, and a $5 E8500 CPU upgrade (replacing a Pentium Dual Core E5200.)
I gave it a clean install of Windows 10, and someone bought it for his mom to browse facebook on.
Sure, without those upgrades, it probably wouldn't have fetched as much, but the SSD made the most significant difference, and you can get those for $15 these days.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jul/17/first-gen...
How many things were permanently lost because inventors threw away their early prototypes or first working copy?
https://predictabledesigns.com/how-to-develop-and-prototype-...
Note however that the post-design prototyping stage is all done with off-the-shelf boards and similar components, there are no recommendations for developing surface mount soldering skills [1] or home semiconductor fabs[2], which are indeed cool but more in the hobby/art space. (look up 'surface mount assembly' on YT for why, e.g. Bittele)
[1] https://www.eevblog.com/forum/beginners/a-beginners-guide-to...
[2] https://www.wired.com/story/22-year-old-builds-chips-parents...
> Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak says that the notion the great company started in a garage is "a bit of a myth."
[0] https://www.cnet.com/culture/woz-no-apple-was-not-started-in...
No, a "patent troll" is an entity that doesn't produce anything. Not one that actually developed things.
They did exploit their patents, but that was hardly unusual at the time. Henry Ford, in fact, was a victim of that, too, although obviously he overcame it.
As a "noun" -- no. The polite term is "Non-Practicing Entity" (not that I want to be polite) but it shows that we still need to distinguish between companies that, at least once, practiced the patent; and shell companies which have never done anything but sue.
A pair of Kevlar gloves is $20 or so.
"Garage band" to me says an outfit so far from being successful that they can't afford rehearsal space, transport to get to one, etc
Of course funnily enough 'the house band' could also be a thing, but neither is related to the genre of that name.
Edit: oh, seems it's a UK thing, so perhaps you weren't to know - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/UK_garage. Though also older 'garage rock' (60s) on the disambiguation page.
> Of course funnily enough 'the house band' could also be a thing, but neither [that nor 'a garage band'] is related to the genre of that name.
Not true in Europe and other parts of the world, where excess space can be a rarity or is improved to be living area.
As I read the OP, all or nearly all the successes had two things in common but not mentioned: (1) There was a market or nearly so; i.e., there was a nascent market. Plenty of people wanted the product or soon would after seeing it. (2) Not only was there at least a nascent market, due to various external circumstances, that market was growing quickly.
Exercise:
Ford cars? NYC had lots of horses and, thus, some very dirty streets. Cars didn't poop. Out in the country, a Model T was a better way to get to the retail stores in the nearest town than horse power.
"External circumstances:" The oil industry was ready to supply gasoline and lubrication. The oil industry? The steamship Titanic was powered by oil. Wars, which wanted motor powered vehicles.
Google? The Internet was exploding in bytes per second, users, uses, revenue, .... For many parts, especially social media, and as a whole, the Internet had a gravitational effect, i.e., the bigger it became, the faster it grew in, e.g., number of new users, revenue, ..., per month. So, quickly there became a need for Internet (Web) search, and Google grew.
Facebook? As in the movie The Social Network, the small start of Hot or Not at Harvard spread quickly among universities and then, as it became social with the gravitational effect, had explosively rapid growth and, thus, both contributed to and benefited from the gravitational effect in general of the Web, Internet, microprocessor based computing, etc.
Boeing? From cars, gasoline engine technology to power the airplanes. Wars for a market. Planes that could take off and land on water -- the planes didn't need airports and provided a faster way to cross oceans.
So, in general: The economy moves along and creates a new need, i.e., a nascent market. Some likely new circumstances make it possible to meet this need, make the nascent market real. Then more circumstances make the market grow quickly. Timed just right, not too early, not too late, sometimes even a garage sized startup can meet the need and grow quickly.
When in fact many starts are without capital, outside of it, in cheap spaces and without any permission. There is a bootstrapping that happens to develop the idea or product.
Capital can be then dragged in to finance the growth necessary to reach the goal of the organization. Capital is shy, a risk averse creature that must be coaxed into supporting the next important boom.
“The garage is a bit of a myth,” Wozniak told Businessweek. “We did no designs there, no breadboarding, no prototyping, no planning of products. We did no manufacturing there.”
Today a "garage startup" just really means they're just starting out, self-funding, or under-funded.
It's somewhat normal for the average American, but not anywhere else in the world.
The world of the 1800s was a world of hereditary title. There was never a promise of mobility and this is what made America and its legends different for all its failings. Going back to this world will not improve things for the better.
what book did you read that in?
"titles" never existed in the US. And AFAIK, there weren't any "garage startups" in countries that still had them in the 1800s.
Being a slave was not a "hereditary title" in any common sense of the word, which was "duke" or "earl" or "lord." As in Europe.
I have lived in plenty of houses with garages or garage-like structures and I have never parked a car in there
Why waste all that beautiful storage space on something you can leave out on the street?
In the Midwest the garage protects the car from ice and snow. In the south it’s not necessary as such, but still built.
Just wanted to point out that there are probably places to go to get that itch scratched just under a different name - I think my examples actually sort of underline that it isn't exactly a booming industry.
The advantage of a Hackerspace is access to tooling.
There are drawbacks too, but it is not like you are going to commute, so one of the biggest one is out. For internet and utilities, some remote places are remarkably well served.
Now, if you are doing software, you don't need any of that, all you need is a computer and you can do it from your bedroom.
So realistically: cannot move to a cheap house on some land.