From E-Cigs to Elphel: The Age of the Heroic Inventor is Not Over

From the article...

Here's something that's both sad and wrong by a "Robert W. Lucky..."

The Age of the Heroic Inventor Is Over
https://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/innovation/the-age-of-the-heroic-inventor-is-over

The gist here is that no longer are there any heroic individuals sitting in their basements creating disruptive technologies - it's all high-end, committee drive stuff like GPS or the Internet.

This is just plain wrong.

Today's "disruptor" business world is focused on hype and drivel, not on anything real in terms of tech.

As an example, pdfExpress was created from a flash of insight in six weeks.  The "innovation" was to treat the content of the PDF file as a data stream instead of a sequence of graphic arts operations.  The result was a product that did things three (yes '3') orders of magnitude faster than anything else.  It generated literally billions of US dollars (yes 'billions') in revenue for its customers.  It's still in use today, twenty years later.

It was extremely disruptive.  What's been around longer that anyone might recognize? Linux, some GNU stuff, other similar things...

pdfExpress was conceived one evening while sitting in front of the TV thumbing through a PDF book.

Sure, this was software, but there are many cases of hardware as well.  Consider Elphel as an example: a couple of guys doing what NVIDIA does with twelve thousand.

And what about e-cigarettes?  Hon Lik created them in 2003, he was a pharmacist.  This will most likely be the greatest improvement to public health (fewer "combustion tobacco" deaths by far) of the last seventy five years.  Literally something you can build at home with minimal technology skill.

What's true today is there is a much stronger "herd" mentality.  Even during the creation of pdfExpress twenty years ago the "inertia" of the market couldn't really digest the concept much less the reality.  It was too foreign.  They simply didn't believe it.

Hon Lik's invention faces active regulatory attack from governments world wide.  Why?  Because it takes revenue away from existing products and it's frightening to people associated with those products - even though those products are less effective (and more will die if only they are used).

Great products are still developed and will continue to be developed.