As I mentioned recently, I quite enjoyed David Epstein’s The Sports Gene and Range, so I went ahead and got Inside the Box the day it came out.
He opens with the famous story of Dmitri Mendeleev seeing the periodic table in a dream and contrasts that myth with the reality that Mendeleev had a deadline approaching for the second volume of his textbook, and he needed a way to discuss dozens of elements more sensibly and efficiently.
His primary example though — or counter-example, since it demonstrates what a lack of constraints does — is General Magic, founded by two Apple legends and the guy who coined the term Information Economy, Marc Porat:
One day, Porat took a Sharp Wizard — a new electronic organizer with a calendar and phone book — and duct-taped it to a Motorola analog cell phone. He had his concept.
[…]
He called it the Pocket Crystal.
[…]
The Pocket Crystal schematic depicted a thin glass rectangle with no protruding buttons—just a touch screen. It would be a computer that combined a phone and fax machine; you would use it to send text messages, watch movies, play video games, buy plane tickets, and download new apps. It would fit in your pocket, and it would be beautiful. Following the sketch, Porat wrote in his red book: “It must offer the kind of personal satisfaction that a fine piece of jewelry brings. It will have a perceived value even when it’s not being used. It should offer the comfort of a touchstone, the tactile satisfaction of a seashell, the enchantment of a crystal.”
In 1989, only 15 percent of American households even had a computer, which didn’t fit in anyone’s pocket; zero percent were browsing the web, because it didn’t exist. And yet, there was Marc Porat, essentially sketching the iPhone.
Apple took a board seat, Sculley introduced them to Sony, and soon “General Magic’s partners controlled so much of the world’s communications industry that Alliance meetings had to begin with an antitrust lawyer listing all the topics they were prohibited from discussing.”
Porat raised so much money so quickly to create “heaven for engineers.”
“They were free to imagine and play and invent and write,” he said. “They were inventing one thing after another, after another, after another and for an engineer, what more can you ask for?”
The answer, it turned out: a little less freedom.
The General Magic documentary explains:
That’s the worst imaginable environment for engineers, who invariably need to be held down and whipped with soapful socks like Private Pyle at boot camp.
“The great 20th-century composer Igor Stravinsky wrote, in The Poetics of Music, “You cannot create against a yielding medium.” Stravinsky’s innovations were nothing if not revolutionary, but he knew that he could not have produced them if he had not been constrained by the traditions of music and the mathematical strictures of tone. “Let me have something finite, definite,” he wrote. “My freedom will be so much the greater and more meaningful the more narrowly I limit my field of action and the more I surround myself with obstacles. Whatever diminishes constraint, diminishes strength.”
(Nicholas Carr, from an old copy of Strategy + Business)