Comments on: Artists Ship, or the Best is the Enemy of the Good http://lingpipe-blog.com/2008/12/02/artists-ship-or-the-best-is-the-enemy-of-the-good/ Natural Language Processing and Text Analytics Wed, 08 Feb 2012 17:47:08 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.com/ By: lingpipe http://lingpipe-blog.com/2008/12/02/artists-ship-or-the-best-is-the-enemy-of-the-good/#comment-3154 Tue, 02 Dec 2008 22:14:52 +0000 http://lingpipe.wordpress.com/?p=301#comment-3154 Peter’s parsing of the first three analogies is how I read Steve Jobs’s use of “ship”: “artist/industrialist, ademic/commercial, publish/ship.” I took his point to be that you’re not an artist (industrialist) until you publish (ship). And that requires one to satisfice rather than optimize (assuming we can never reach perfection).

Re-reading the industrialist or auteur post, I’m wondering if I misquoted. My takeaway from the New Yorker article was that Disney thought of himself as a perfectionist, and that made him an “artist”, to be contrasted with the “industrialist”, who released any old thing. Of course, Disney shipped a lot of product, so I don’t know where that leaves him.

I should’ve looked before quoting. I didn’t know who Douglas Engelbart is, but now I see he’s the inventor of the (computer) mouse, so I see where the confusion arises. As an academic, your product is your papers, so he shipped as an academic. SRI simply failed to build a mouse into computers. I spent four years at Bell Labs and know the scientists don’t control the releases! Not that I ever built anything as cool as the mouse, the photo of 1967 version of which on Englebart’s Wikipedia page is like something out of Make magazine. So shame on the author for taking him to task (and on me for quoting blindly).

]]> By: Peter Turney http://lingpipe-blog.com/2008/12/02/artists-ship-or-the-best-is-the-enemy-of-the-good/#comment-3153 Tue, 02 Dec 2008 21:42:06 +0000 http://lingpipe.wordpress.com/?p=301#comment-3153 There is some ambiguity in your use of the word “ship”. In the first paragraph, it seems to mean “shipping a product to a client”, but in the second paragraph, it seems to include publishing a book. A quick search on Google Scholar shows that Douglas Engelbart did indeed publish a respectable amount. I followed the link to Industrialist or Auteur? and I’m still not sure what the message is. I think there is a latent message that the artist/industrialist, academic/commercial, publish/ship, and optimizing/satisficing dimensions are parallel, but I don’t agree.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satisficing

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