19 Sep
1998
19 Sep
'98
8:02 a.m.
< One of the goals of the Apple I was to create a low cost machine.
<
< Basically I just wanted to give an apple example that not all engineers
< all of the time, want to built the biggest, and most expensive things.
< That is a bad generalization.
It indeed is a bad generalization. As an engiener myself I found it
annoying but let it pass.
Actually the rules are simple. Good, Fast, Cheap... Pick any two.
Enginering is about compromize, tradeoff and innovation. For a given
product there are often many ways to implement but more often than not
considerations at higher levels may dictate which are the best ways to
go. They are not always bad either. If your corperate strategy is
fault tolerence the hardware is likely not have extra bits, redundancy
and other things needed to make that happen. That can and is more costly.
On the other hand if you making really low cost means something else takes
precedent.
Some thins are a surprize to the uninitiated. For example fewer chips
fewer interconnections and connectors often means lower cost and to most
people surprize higher realiability. So the idea of Good, Fast and Cheap
is not as obvious as first stated.
Allison
19 Sep
19 Sep
8:22 a.m.
On Sat, 19 Sep 1998, Allison J Parent wrote:
It indeed is a bad generalization. As an engiener
myself I found it
annoying but let it pass.
Well, my point was this: if you had free reign and an unlimited budget,
you'd probably do all sorts of wild things with a product you were
designing. All sorts of wacky features would creep in. That's a good
thing. It's called "creativity".
However, as an engineer you seldom have free reign, and certainly the
budget is not unlimited. You're basically following mandates from higher
up in the food chain. These mandates come from the corporate strategists,
with input from the marketing demons as to what the market wants.
The comment wasn't meant as a jab at engineers at all! I am an engineer
too!
Enginering is about compromize, tradeoff and
innovation. For a given
product there are often many ways to implement but more often than not
considerations at higher levels may dictate which are the best ways to
<...>
Me too.
Sam Alternate e-mail: dastar(a)siconic.com
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11:23 a.m.
Sam wrote:
Engineers didn't decide this. If engineers had
their way your computer
you'd be able to stick your dirty dishes inside your computer and have it
wash them while you surf the web. Engineers aren't mindful of cost (and
therefore price). However, marketers are.
Dominique Cormann wrote:
That is a terrible and false generalization. Engineers
can go in any
direction cost wise.
and in a later message:
Basically I just wanted to give an apple example that
not all engineers,
all of the time, want to built the biggest, and most expensive things.
That is a bad generalization.
Allison J Parent wrote:
It indeed is a bad generalization. As an engiener
myself I found it
annoying but let it pass.
Same here.
Sam replied:
Well, my point was this: if you had free reign and an
unlimited budget,
you'd probably do all sorts of wild things with a product you were
designing. All sorts of wacky features would creep in. That's a good
thing. It's called "creativity".
If you have free reign and unlimited budget, what you're doing is *NOT*
engineering.
Good engineers want to ship a product that customers will actually use;
the greatest satisfaction an engineer ever has is seeing or hearing
customers use the product. While it is an ego boost to hear customers
praise the product, most of the best engineering goes completely unnoticed.
When was the last time you drove across a bridge and thought "Wow, the
engineers did an awesome job on this bridge."? (At most, people might think
"Wow, this is a pretty bridge.")
While it is tempting to keep improving the design forever, a good engineer
realizes that at some point the design has to be "done". There may or
may not be an opportunity to revise the design later.
To refute Sam's original point, at one of my previous jobs, the engineers had
to fight marketing tooth-and-nail to KEEP FEATURES OUT of the product, because
otherwise the product would have cost far too much. As it turned out, we
(engineers) weren't sufficiently successful at reigning in the marketing
bozos, and our competition came out with a product with 1/10 the features at
1/3 the cost. Guess which product was more successful?
A good engineer DOES NOT try to design the kitchen sink into everything.
Customers don't want a computer that doubles as a dishwasher, and engineers
know it.
Henry Ford said "The most beautiful things in the world are those from
which all excess weight has been removed." While at first glance this
might seem to apply only to automobiles, airplanes, and the like, in
reality it applies to all fields of engineering, including computer
hardware and software.
Any bozo with a EE degree could have built a computer roughly comparable
in capabilities to the Apple II using many hundreds of chips and costing
thousands of dollars. A good engineer could have done it with few enough
chips to make it affordable. An excellent engineer did it with almost
no chips, and made it not just affordable but also elegant. Ford would
have been proud to see it.
For more information on what engineering is really about (which is NOT
"feature creep"), I'd recommend the book _The_Existential_Pleasures_of_
_Engineering_ by Samuel Florman (although I disgraee with Florman's claims
about the necessity of government regulation).
There's also a good Engineering-related bibliography at
http://g250.grainger.uiuc.edu/eng199/biblio.html
Eric
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allisonp＠world.std.com -
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eric＠brouhaha.com