Memorandum
Date: Thu, 2 Mar 2000 01:33:35 -0800 (PST)
From: |
Eugene Kim |
Reply-To: unrev-II@onelist.com |
To: |
unrev-II@onelist.com |
Subject: | How DKR Penetration Will Be Achieved |
Interesting post, Eric. Couple of comments below.
On Sat, 26 Feb 2000, Eric Armstrong wrote:
I'm not sure I agree. When a company tries to facilitate communication among its employees by building centralized cafeterias, intranet communities, or even rearranging cubicle arrangements, are they improving their productive capacities, or are they improving their capability to improve? I would argue the latter. Building a centralized cafeteria, in and of itself, is not going to improve a company's productive capacities.
Another thing to keep in mind is Jeff Rulifson's point, which was that having A, B, and C activity in an organization does not in and of itself make that organization a bootstrapping organization. I think this distinction is central to Jeff's bootstrapping the bootstrapping proposal, where he drew distinctions between Type I and Type II organizations. In some ways, Eric's post reminded me of Jeff's proposal.
[Quoting again from Eric's letter...]
Here's an example from the world of free software. A few years into the Linux project, Linus Torvalds (the creator of the Linux kernel) decided that he would port the kernel to C++. That never happened for a number of reasons, one of which was compile-time. At the time (around 1993), C++ compilers were considerably slower than C compilers. Now a 10 minute differential doesn't seem like a big deal for software that takes an hour to compile, but for kernel developers who are constantly recompiling, it makes a huge amount of difference. This problem, in fact, is one of the driving factors behind research on incremental compilers, much of which is happening at IBM. The difference between recompiling a file and all of its dependencies versus incremental compilation may be a matter of seconds for a single instance, but compounded, it makes a big difference in productivity.
How does this apply to DKR penetration? I think this was the very basis of Adam Cheyer's proposal. Start small with what's available, achieve small but measurable improvements, and build on that.
Notice that there's a large amount of overlap between my points above and most of Eric's points. What I'm suggesting is that maybe Eric's proposal isn't as orthogonal to Doug's ideas as one might think.
[Quoting again from Eric's letter...]
This is somewhat irrelevant to the broader issues, but just for the record: Perhaps executives have been slow to adopt computers simply because computers do not make them more productive.
Sincerely,
-Eugene
Eugene Kim
eekim@eekim.com
http://www.eekim.com/