Which half? One day when I was a junior medical student, a very important Boston surgeon visited the school and delivered a great treatise on a large number of patients who had undergone successful operations for vascular reconstruction. At the end of the lecture, a young student at the back of the room timidly asked, "Do you have any controls?" Well the great surgeon drew himself up to his full height, hit the desk, and said, "Do you mean did I not operate on half of the patients?" The hall grew very quiet then. The voice at the back of the room hesitantly replied, "Yes, that's what I had in mind." Then the visitor's fist really came down as he thundered, "Of course not. That would have doomed half of them to their death!" God, it was quiet then, and one could scarcely hear the small voice ask, "Which half?" E.E. Peacock Jr., Seeing With Fresh Eyes science
What's love got to do with it? Slack embodied the belief, so common in Silicon Valley, that the best product would win in the end. “Building a product that allows for significant improvements in how people communicate requires a degree of thoughtfulness and craftsmanship that is not common in the development of enterprise software,” the company wrote in its open letter to Microsoft. “How far you go in helping companies truly transform to take advantage of this shift in working is even more important than the individual software features you are duplicating.” And yet, if there’s a lesson of the past four years, it’s that thoughtfulness and craftsmanship only got the company about 10 percent as far as Microsoft did by copy-pasting Slack’s basic design. In its open letter, Slack famously told Microsoft: “You’ve got to do this with love.” In 2020, looking at Slack’s size, the idea seems laughable. What’s love got to do with it? How Microsoft crushed Slack www.theverge.com Copying (is the way design works)Dear Microsoft craft