[mage by Monoar Rahman Rony from Pixabay (cropped)]
Good morning,
In The Ten Commandments for Business Failure, Donald Keough, the late chairman of investment banking firm Allen & Co, writes, failure to take time to think is one of the surest ways to fail. Often data aids thinking. But sometimes, data comes in the way.
He writes, “the data alone do not get you there. In fact the data are often conflicting because a group consensus is altogether different from an individual decision. In a national poll people will happily say they want a more energy-efficient house, yet they will just as happily go out and build one three times the size they have now. I believe in research, but I don’t expect the research to give me much more than a glimmer, an imperfect snapshot, of a moment in time. Bell-shaped curves won’t really tell me how to design a vision for the future. Surveys won’t reveal how the dreams of tomorrow should be shaped because nobody knows. If the builders of early automobiles had asked people what they wanted in transportation, the probable answer would have been, ‘Faster horses.’
“If you want to fail, don’t take time to think. If you want to succeed, take lots of time to think. Thinking is the best investment you’ll ever make in your company, in your own career, in your life. When Steve Bennett, a bright Jack Welch GE alum, took over as CEO of Intuit, the company had a set of ten operating values. He changed only one word in all ten values. The ninth one was ‘Think Fast, Act Fast.’ He changed it to ‘Think Smart, Act Fast.’ Intuit was doing well. It has done even better under Bennett’s leadership. Taking time to think really matters. As Gandhi noted, ‘There is more to life than increasing its speed.’ Success is not all about moving faster. Failure, though, definitely is.”
In this age of “move fast and break things”, it’s good advice to follow.
In this issue
- A Jio OS?
- How to make the robot dance
- The inevitable future
A Jio laptop?
“We don’t know for sure if the product will launch under that name”
There has been much speculation that Reliance Jio is at work to create the world’s cheapest laptop called the JioBook and on a new operating system called Jio OS. This was first reported by XDA-developers, a website frequented by techies. “According to the documents we reviewed, development on the JioBook began in early September of 2020 and is expected to continue through the first half of 2021. At the EVT, or Engineering Validation Test, stage of the product development cycle, the JioBook had unfinalized hardware, including a recycled keyboard that contained a Windows key, as seen in the live image below obtained by XDA. By mid-April, the product is expected to enter the PVT, or Product Validation Test, stage of the product development cycle, so its current design likely looks closer to the final hardware than what’s shown below. In particular, the Windows key will likely have been swapped with a key more fitting for the product and software, though we don’t know what it will have been swapped with.
“When it does launch, we expect it to retail at an incredibly low price, though we don’t know how low that will be.”
There is much speculation that this machine may be priced in the region of Rs 10,000 and could be the world’s cheapest. But this narrative from Reliance is one we’re familiar with.
Dig deeper
How to make the robot dance
Boston Dynamics’s brilliant video hit our timelines and inboxes again after someone cleverly synced the dance to a hit Tamil film song. The original dance was set to “Do You Love Me” and released earlier this year. Spectrum IEE has a detailed interview with Aaron Saunders, Boston Dynamics’s VP of engineering, that highlights two things. It’s incredibly tough to make the robots dance. But once the basics are done, the progress is incredibly fast.
Here’s an extract from the interview.
“We started by working with dancers and a choreographer to create an initial concept for the dance by composing and assembling a routine. One of the challenges, and probably the core challenge for Atlas in particular, was adjusting human dance moves so that they could be performed on the robot. To do that, we used simulation to rapidly iterate through movement concepts while soliciting feedback from the choreographer to reach behaviours that Atlas had the strength and speed to execute. It was very iterative—they would literally dance out what they wanted us to do, and the engineers would look at the screen and go ‘that would be easy’ or ‘that would be hard’ or ‘that scares me.’ And then we’d have a discussion, try different things in simulation, and make adjustments to find a compatible set of moves that we could execute on Atlas.
“Throughout the project, the time frame for creating those new dance moves got shorter and shorter as we built tools, and as an example, eventually we were able to use that toolchain to create one of Atlas’ ballet moves in just one day, the day before we filmed, and it worked. So it’s not hand-scripted or hand-coded, it’s about having a pipeline that lets you take a diverse set of motions, that you can describe through a variety of different inputs, and push them through and onto the robot.”
Dig deeper
The inevitable future
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Team Founding Fuel
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