by Flemming Funch
I think the tools worth making are the ones that inspire people to use them in ways that are surprising to the tool makers. There's not much fun in making something that is being used exactly as intended. Much more exciting is when people take an invention or tool or system or software program, or whatever, and go and do something with it that the inventors couldn't have imagined. But it is not necessarily trivial to invent something that people can then go and create further innovation with. Only some inventions manage to take on a life of their own in this way.
Now the reason I was thinking about that was because somebody had used a program I made in ways I didn't expect. I had made this system for creating websites online through one's browser without having to know HTML or anything. Quite clever, but it isn't finished, and I really only considered it a buggy prototype and I wasn't really very happy with it. Various people have been playing around with it, to test it, but I haven't had time to work on it for a while. And then I realized yesterday to my horror that one of the beta testers had set up the online version of a prominent Beverly Hills newspaper with it, and not only did it look really professional, it was also already in production use, and the staff of the newspaper were updating articles and columns there every day. And they were all apparently quite happy with it. So, after getting over my discomfort with that, I realized that it was kind of cool that somebody used a tool I made in ways that I had not at all imagined would work.
And I decided that it is a good thing to aspire to: to make things that others can freely use in ways that I could not imagine.
And I wish that such a philosophy would be more prevalent in more products or services that are being created. When you create something new it is something to set free, something to empower its users to go off and do new things with it. That is opposed to the philosophy of trying to control everything you create, and control those people who would use it. E.g. patents, trademarks, copy protection, trade secrets, Return-on-Investment, keeping the shareholders happy, planned obsolescence, suicide seeds. What arrogance.
No, make things that smarter people can come along and use as building blocks to make things better.
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