Great piece in the Times on a fellow who made his name hacking the wii remote and talking about it on YouTube. Now he’s at Microsoft, after being wooed by nearly everyone.
Contrast this with what might have followed from other options Mr. Lee considered for communicating his ideas. He might have published a paper that only a few dozen specialists would have read. A talk at a conference would have brought a slightly larger audience. In either case, it would have taken months for his ideas to reach others.
Small wonder, then, that he maintains that posting to YouTube has been an essential part of his success as an inventor. “Sharing an idea the right way is just as important as doing the work itself,” he says. “If you create something but nobody knows, it’s as if it never happened.”
But it made me wonder if he’s going to be happy there. A very long time ago, I read a ton of search papers (as part of prep for the book) and noticed they were all pretty old, and that once academics got hired by Google or competitors to Google, they sort of stopped innovating out loud.
Just a thought.