But that doesn't mean that there isn't something to them. With Internet 1.0 and Web 2.0, it's easy to see in retrospect how powerful base sets of technologies were in allowing people to come up with revolutionary things.This power of base components was brought home by a recent article in the Wall Street Journal by Steven Johnson.The article explores the genius of tinkerers and their abilities to take commodity parts and assemble them to make brilliant and resourceful inventions. A baby incubator for developing countries made from car parts, appliances, and other assorted pieces is the example he uses to open the article.
Web app developers share many of the same traits as these tinkerers, especially these days with widely available open source software, on-demand cloud computing, sophisticated language frameworks, and affordable web services.
The key reason why the terms above – Web 3.0, Internet of Things, and BigData – have real meaning is because behind them are serious technologies that have commodity aspects to them – affordable, widely available, and simple to employ.
The Genius of the Tinkerer
There is a famous moment in the story of the near-catastrophic Apollo 13 mission--wonderfully captured in the Ron Howard film--in which the mission control engineers realize they need to create an improvised carbon dioxide filter, or the astronauts will poison the lunar module atmosphere with their own exhalations before they return to Earth.
The astronauts have plenty of carbon "scrubbers" onboard, but these filters were designed for the original, damaged spacecraft and don't fit the ventilation system of the lunar module they are using as a lifeboat to return home. Mission control quickly assembles a "tiger team" of engineers to hack their way through the problem.
In the movie, Deke Slayton, head of flight crew operations, tosses a jumbled pile of gear on a conference table: hoses, canisters, stowage bags, duct tape and other assorted gadgets. He holds up the carbon scrubbers. "We gotta find a way to make this fit into a hole for this," he says, and then points to the spare parts on the table, "using nothing but that."
The space gear on the table defines the adjacent possible for the problem of building a working carbon scrubber on a lunar module. (The device they eventually concocted, dubbed the "mailbox," performed beautifully.) The canisters and nozzles are like the ammonia and methane molecules of the early Earth, or those Toyota parts heating an incubator: They are the building blocks that create--and limit--the space of possibility for a specific problem.
The trick to having good ideas is not to sit around in glorious isolation and try to think big thoughts. The trick is to get more parts on the table.
