Nick Bilton, the Times’s “Bits” blogger, has a nice long post up about the reasons big companies lose their ability to invent, and investigates the reasons Polaroid and Kodak didn’t go on to create Instagram. He leaves a few things out of the analysis–like the huge infrastructure investments the two companies had in film, which were hard to get out from under–but he’s basically right. Read it here.
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Dr Land spoke of “the intersection of art and science,” but sometimes the lifecycle seems to begin with a collision. Dan Bricklin & Bob Frankston at Harvard B School cooked up the 1st killer app, VisiCalc, to avoid the tedium of recalculating every cell in a manual spreadsheet. In 1979 it was JATO for the Apple II, but the lifecycle came full circle about 12 years later. It got re-culturated, not acculturated.