I continued to think about what I wrote in last Wednesday’s post, The Minimalist March to Success, and did some more research on the internet. While doing so, I came across two interesting posts one by Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror fame, and the other one by Prof. John Maeda, associate director of MIT’s Media Lab, on his blog simplicity.
Jeff Hawkins, the guy behind Palm Computing and mobiles such as PalmPilot and Treo, argues in his book, On Intelligence, that the current way of thinking about intelligence and how the brain works is flawed and therefore we cannot create intelligent machines based on this knowledge. He is so convinced of this that he founded his own research institute, the Redwood Neuroscience Institute (RNI), now permanently relocated to the UC Berkeley campus as Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience.
In his book, Jeff Hawkins states that we currently have a lot of data about the brain but not much as regards theories of how it really works. In fact, the Redwood institute task is to ”to use mathematical and physical principles to understand the nature of coding, dynamics, circuitry and plasticity in nervous systems.”
In this post I want to focus on what I feel is a recurring pattern adopted by all of today’s successful technology companies, minimalism.
Let me take the following companies as an example to support this argument: Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo. You’ve all heard about them and most probably you either hate them or love them. With all probability you either witnessed or have been part of a flame war involving a combination of these companies. If not, just head to slashdot and go through some of the posts. I am confident you will find evidence of endless conversations in the line of my platform is better than yours, Bill Gates is evil, Google rocks, Yahoo sucks and so on and so forth.
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