A Better Mousetrap
Alex Randall is a teacher and an entrepreneur. He sent me a link to an article he wrote for Computerworld in February 2006 about ENIAC co-inventor J. Presper Eckert. The article is inspiring and funny and debunks some of the more persistent urban legends about the ENIAC.
But there was one detail that kept me excited all day. Mr. Eckert tells about a mice problem they had at the laboratory. The mice were eating through the insulation of the wires. They needed to get rid of the problem. So what Better Mousetrap did these geniuses come up with? Did they come up with a solution at all? What if they would have asked a consultant to get rid of the problem? Or a lawyer?
Lets take a look at a few possibilities:
The Consultant
“I’m going to do research, for three months, into all the mousetrap solutions currently available and prepare a detailed report for you so you can make an informed decision on what Mousetraps to deploy. Then we will integrate the mousetrap into your company in an 8 week process, keep you up-to-date on our progress in 2 weekly meetings and written daily status reports. We will also train your people to set-up and use the Mousetrap in a few seminars.”
The Lawyer
“The owner of this laboratory should have made the whole building mouse proof. I suggest we sue him for damages. Lets go for 10 million.”
The Manager
“I know you want to work on that Mousetrap Issue but we don’t have any resources for that right now. But I’ll tell you what: give me a businesscase on monday and I promise I will show it to the board next quarter.”
(he ends up hiring the consultant, taking all credit if it works out, sacrificing you if it fails)
Your Mother
“I told you to clean up after yourself! Why did you eat those sandwiches at your desk? Get away from that computer and go play outside!!!”
The Developer
“All current Mousetraps suck. Which is logical because they are built with the wrong tools. I’ll built you a new Mousetrap, in one day, from scratch.”
(This takes 3 months and the result is a Mousetrap that is extremely fast but doesn’t actually catch mice.)
The Entrepreneur
“I need 1 million seed funding to start Mousetrapster.com (yes, still available), get a team of developers in place and quickly expand into the Chinese market. There are NO competitors and just imagine what would happen if we are able to sell our Mousetraps to only 1% of China!”
The CEO
“Thank you for bringing the mice problem to our attention. I have given it some thought and decided that the Peromyscus maniculatus is an important and strategic enemy of this company. I have decided to set up a task force to investigate how we will deal with this new threat. Unfortunately we will also be forced to cut costs drastically because of these changes. Your manager will speak with you today to explain to you the consequences of this executive decision. This is George, our security guard, he will accompany you to your office. This is just a formality.”
And I’m sure we could come up with hundreds of these. Go knock yourself out in the comments or mail me your suggestions and I’ll add them. Don’t forget the obvious ‘iMouseTrap’ and ‘MS Mousetrap 1.0 server edition’ jokes.
But back to those geniuses who built the first computer.
So who did they ask for advice?
None of the above.
They asked the mice:
“…we got samples of all the wires that were available and put them in a cage with a bunch of mice to see which insulation they did not like. We only used wire that passed the mouse test…”
That is why they are geniuses.
They didn’t consider the mice the real problem.
They found out that the fact that those mice ate their insulation was the real problem.
And that problem turned out to be easy to fix.
The real challenge isn’t building a better mousetrap but finding out what the problem is.
Filed under Business, Business Theory, Developing, Fun, Innovation, Inspiration, Personal, Programming |
One Response to “A Better Mousetrap”
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Pres was a very wise man and he zeroed in on the real problem. What does he care if there are mice in the room as long as it does not hurt the computer.
He was so proud that their machine actually worked, and kept working and actually had a useful lifetime of over a decade when it did real math… not some breadboard demo thing.
A lot of people claimed credit for inventing the computer but Pres built the first one that worked and the next dozen of them too and continued to work in the field until his death in 1997. Amazing. from ENIAC to EVERYONE.
Wonderful man, he was my father’s best friend from High school and my Godfather.
He developed the dot matrix printer a decade ahead of anyone else, but management at Sperry Univac couldn’t see the use. (besides the mock up was pretty ugly. ) This is a classic about selling out. Pres and John Mauchley could not afford to develop their second computer and sold majority interest in the Eckert Mauchley Computer Company to Sperry - from that point on they had managers and suits who would approve or disapprove funding for variousprojects they dreamed up. So the dot matrix printer died of managers.
It is not about making one invention, it is about creating a while
constellation of inventions that constitute a whole system. The whole system
has to work and every day you are creating pieces to make the whole thing
work.
I tell people all the time DO NOT WRITE A BUSINESS PLAN - because you will
not have the mental flexibility to incorporate new technologies and new
developments that you could not foresee when you first invented your core
concept.
When we were inventing the Boston Computer Exchange. we started with a paper and pencil concept. matching buyers and sellers off index cards We had to
adapt our idea to a computerized database and adapt it again when the first “on-line” service came into being and we could copy our database to a community data service Delphi (late to CompuServe) we had thousands of customers all over the world using CompuServe and Delphi cause there was no internet. We could not close deals with a click on credit card tool.
we had a data base on 5.25 inch floppies and we uploaded data on dial up to a 300 BPS modem. We had to adapt to the evolution of PC hard disks, and a million developments in the evolution of the online environment. We got cheated a few times when people sold PC’s that were trash and we had to invent a whole system to protect buyers from bad sellers.. Precursor to PayPal.
We sold the business just as the Internet was starting to show life and the new owners were into selling boxes and had no idea what we were doing “uploading data to servers” and they axed the whole idea of the on-line
trading system we had invented. Had they pursued our business idea they would have invented eBay - alas it did not happen.
In the beginning we could not afford any advertising, so we created a weekly report - The Closing Prices on the Boston Computer exchange - like Dow Jones reporting on Wall Street. One PC magazine picked it up and ran it
as a news item. Then a second, then a third. They ran our report as a NEWS item. For over ten years, PC Week magazine ran my report on page two in a
small box with out 800 phone number. That would have cost about $10,000 per week, we got it for the cost of one phone call per week. Because we made NEWS.
BCE never made a cold call and never placed an ad in its entire history. Customers saw our report and that created the image of a much larger enterprise that obviously had thousands of computers for sale… and the
phone rang constantly.
Alex Randall