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Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.
— Edward Abbey, The Second Rape of the West, p. 183 (via ilnapolitano)
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and in each of those decades (the 1950’s and 1960’s) more oil was consumed than in all of mankind’s previous history
— President Jimmy Carter, 18 April 1977
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Nobody should start to undertake a large project. You start with a small trivial project, and you should never expect it to get large. If you do, you’ll just overdesign and generally think it is more important than it likely is at that stage. Or worse, you might be scared away by the sheer size of the work you envision. So start small, and think about the details. Don’t think about some big picture and fancy design. If it doesn’t solve some fairly immediate need, it’s almost certainly over-designed. And don’t expect people to jump in and help you. That’s not how these things work. You need to get something half-way useful first, and then others will say “hey, that almost works for me”, and they’ll get involved in the project.
— Linus Torvalds @ Linux Times (2004-10-25).
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But we did that in 1994 and 1995. What we did from 1996 through 1999 was coast along, riding the wave caused by what we did before.
Why? Because the company stopped innovating. The company got big, and big companies just aren’t creative. There exist counterexamples to this, but in general, great things are accomplished by small groups of people who are driven, who have unity of purpose. The more people involved, the slower and stupider their union is.
And there’s another factor involved, which is that you can divide our industry into two kinds of people: those who want to go work for a company to make it successful, and those who want to go work for a successful company. Netscape’s early success and rapid growth caused us to stop getting the former and start getting the latter.
— resignation and postmortem.
© 1999 Jamie Zawinski <jwz@jwz.org>
