The Amazon "garage" in Bellevue WA was not a garage.
It had been converted by the owner of the house (Bezos was renting) or the previous owner. It was a normal livable space with windows, wall treatment etc.
Yes, once upon a time it had been a garage, but the only thing "special" about the space that has any relationship to its original purpose is that it formed the only space in a typical US residence large enough for 3 people to work in without totally disrupting normal domestic life. If there's mystery or magic to a "garage", that's it.
I know this because I worked in that garage until we moved to the so-called Color Tile Building in Seattle.
In certain neighborhoods these are very common, and you can usually start to recognize them - a window a bit closer to the ground, a door at ground level instead of at the top of a short stairs, etc.
The 2nd episode of Stewart Brand’s BBC series “How Buildings Learn” is called “The Low Road” and also addresses the use of inexpensive or undesirable space.
Ultimately part of making room for innovation means allowing people to take risks, and that mechanism has in recent years shifted from wide availability of low-cost resources to wide availability of speculative capital to obtain high-cost resources.
> But despite all the talent, clear obsession, technical prowess, and a lot of money, the infrastructure just wasn’t there to make it work.
Almost everyone was trying to make a handheld device then, and by the time Palm came along, the category was cursed as far as VC's were concerned.
The infrastructure WAS there, as Palm proved. You just had to scale down your expectations and find a set of functionality people actually wanted. You also needed to give up on cursive recognition and trust that the users would learn a simpler method of entering text.
The monster egos in General Magic just refused to do that, as did their big corporate partners, and all the other failed startups.
Arguably, a lot of pieces were still missing at the time. Yes, Palm had a large enough early adopter market. But I also remember the Palm Pilot being the cool device all the engineers wanted but a lot of people stopped using it because keeping it synced in near-realtime was such a pain. It really took cellular betworks with relatively cheap data (and app stores) to bring the vision to fruition.
No, it didn't. Read Piloting Palm (you have to get a used copy, since it's not on Kindle and print is expensive).
The first Palm had only a sync cradle with the PC. It did not have any wireless, and it was a huge success. The sync cradle gave users what they wanted.
We could quibble whether all those users were "early adopters." Whatever you call them, there were plenty.
Yes, there were a lot of us. Graffiti was an interesting thing, but after that came the FITALY keyboard, and infrared external keyboards. Some of us got serious writing done on our Pilots.
Compared to smartphone users, they were very much early adopters. No wireless sync, graffiti input, etc. They were not really mainstream devices even if they were pretty successful by the standards of the time.
And my point is that, as a Palm Pilot owner, it just wasn't really a very satisfactory solution at least for me and a lot of other buyers. It really took cellular networks and various other innovations before it was satisfactory for a mainstream audience. Sometimes technologies just aren't baked enough to be interesting even if there aren't any real alternatives.
The Palm Pilot reminds me of the Zip drive, another product from the same rough era. It met a felt need: floppy disks had pathetic storage, now you can buy a 100MB floppy disk! They sold very well for awhile.
But people didn't want 100MB floppy disks, they wanted a way to transfer data. Flash wasn't cheap enough to sell in bulk, and as soon as it was, the Zip drive fell off a cliff, replaced with the still-ubiquitous thumb drive and SD card. You can argue that the Zip was a success, or mainstream, but you can't argue that it was equally successful and mainstream as thumb drives or SD cards, not honestly.
Same deal with the Palm Pilot. For a couple years, I had a flip phone, a Palm Pilot, and an iPod, all three of which I would pack to go to classes at university. Of those three, the only one that felt clunky and overly limited was the Palm Pilot. I liked it, I used it, real boon to an ADD-brained kid trying to get through higher education, but it was notably limited and I wanted something better. Even tried programming it, got the O'Reilly "pigeon book", never got that far with it though.
It wasn't until 2007 that those three items were successfully combined into one mass-market gadget, although there were preludes like the Danger Hiptop. Palm even tried to get into the smartphone game, in the first generation. But the original device category PDA was obsolete, whether or not (as it turned out, not) the company made the jump to the new one.
Iomega made a bunch of people a lot of money and provided multi years employment to others.
But they were an evolutionary dead-end.
Whether because Zip drives (or other forms of higher-density non-harddrive storage) ultimately weren't very interesting or because networked storage ended up as something of a niche (although some companies play int that space).
You can certainly make the case that they were a "successful" company for their time but they also ultimately failed.
> But despite all the talent, clear obsession, technical prowess, and a lot of money, the infrastructure just wasn’t there to make it work.
and all of the ensuing discussion was what "it" was.
If you're an engineer, "it" can reduce to "will I make money from the stock?" In fact, that was my approach. So ZipDrive? Great, those people probably made money. Palm? They got $5 a share from US Robotics, plus some USR shares, which in turn made money from 3Com.
You can demand more out of life, of course. Nothing wrong with that.
I won't seriously argue. They had a good enough run. I even upgraded the one I got for free at a tradeshow at one point. But the synchronization and input was always enough of an issue that I can't say I ever found it all that useful in retrospect. And it always seemed to be in the "cool gadget" but not anything that was really critical.
You just need the ability to make things that work. And by "work" I mean actually work, and in a way that others want to use it (an intuitive interface that needs almost no training/explanation helps a lot here). It doesn't have to be polished, pretty, or anywhere near feature complete (see: Apple 1). It just has to pass the "will people actually use this beyond the novelty phase" test. I can't stress enough how important intuitive function is above form at this stage.
That's step 1.
Step 2 is to have a management team that can effectively monetize that thing and manage the risks (financial/legal/market) that all businesses have to deal with. Engineers are usually not good at these things.
I've succeeded at step 1 many times but I'm personally not good at Step 2.
Oh? Where do I put my car so the nightly thugs who see any car on the street tests to see if they’re locked? And if locked but salacious enough, they break the glass. So far for when not garaged, three break ins. $50k equipment lost, plus costs to repair. Garaged? Zero break ins
.
I think it's a lot harder to find projects worth doing. You're (probably?) not gonna make the next ASML in a garage.
Everything is networked together, a lot of tech is very important to people's lives, and there are fewer repair people. There's a strong incentive to use stuff that's made by the billions and can be replaced tomorrow with Amazon Prime if needed, especially if it comes with lots of cloud value adds.
It's hard to find a project that isn't done by 40 people on AliExpress.
There's still highly specialized stuff, and things that require breakthroughs in basic science or cost engineering (Someone please make mass spectrometry and XRF a consumer grade thing so we can see what has lead in it!), but for the most part... people who can afford startup products pretty much have everything they need.
Everything builds on everything else. If you want to make a new GPU - you cannot be competitive without a large team and large backing. However there is an ecosystem of GPUs to choose from so if you want to make something that uses a GPU you can just buy one and build it in your garage. 30 years ago you could not have made something that needed a GPU - they didn't exist yet (the forerunners existed at SGI and the like - but they were not affordable)
No amount of passion would have got the right brothers of 1850 flying - there was too much about making an airplane that wasn't invented (the ICE engine needed to be developed to enough efficiency, and metals light enough to work needed to exist) However when the metal industry developed eventually metals that can work were available to anyone. Better metals are available to me today, all I'm lacking is an idea/passion for something that is not possible. (though metals of today are not that much better)
If only city ordinances weren't getting more restrictive with time. Would be hard to do some of this stuff today when some cities ban working on your car in your garage.
I don't know cities, but I have seen plenty of HOAs ban it. Usually because there will be one bad apple that makes their home garage into a makeshift auto shop (and it will effect neighbors).
It is explicit in my deed that I cannot run an auto shop on my property. When people make rules and say it is to stop X, I always ask why don't they just make a rule to stop X. I walked away from a rental once because they refused so I lost trust in them.
> When people make rules and say it is to stop X, I always ask why don't they just make a rule to stop X.
Because the more general the rule is the easier it will be to enforce it. To stay with the example if there is a rule against auto shops, and you run what in effect is an auto shop but you say you are not taking money for it can we shut you down? Will we need to go to court where expensive lawyers battle it out what it means to be running an autoshop? That is a lot of cost and even more uncertainty.
If the rule is about not being allowed to work on cars at all, then all they need to show is that you worked on a car. They don’t have to care who owns the car, they don’t have to show if it was commercial work, they don’t have to show if it was a regular activity or not.
“You can only work on cars owned by people living at that property” solves most of the problems, still preserves the resident’s reasonable freedom, and is still easy to administer.
It does seem to preserve freedom, until I can't work on my daughter's car in my own garage, and I also can't work on it at her place because she rents an apartment where working on cars in the parking lot is verboten.
Contrast it with an alternate proposed policy “not allowed to work on cars at all” not to a fully sensible except difficult to administer policy of “don’t create a nuisance that reasonable neighbors would reasonably object to”.
(Plus, just like you usually don’t get pulled over for 75 on the highway, most everyone will be able to do occasional work on their adult kid’s car anyway.)
Yeah, I mean: Realistically, I'm going to do what I need to do and treat the rules more like guidelines: We all do this in our own ways.
But neighbors can be both difficult, and ever-present.
I had a busy-body neighbor once that would go out of his way to make sure that everyone was following the rules.
For instance: It'd been snowing, quite a lot, and the roads were officially closed. But I had to get my wife to work at 5:30AM anyway: Those road closures don't apply to people in her line of work in the medical field.
So we went out early and started digging. We thought we had made a good path but got the car stuck in the middle of our boring little side street anyway. Fun times.
And the nosy neighbor dude waddles up from his house. He doesn't offer to help, like many normal neighbors might have done, or a great neighbor would feel compelled to do.
His compulsion was different.
He just takes a series of photos our clearly-evident (to him) lawbreaking activities and smugly waddles back inside.
This is the kind of neighbor who absolutely would make sure I would be reported for working on a non-resident's vehicle in my own garage.
I've only had one such neighbor in my decades of adulthood, but he cannot be the only one who is this way.
I couldn't find more through Kagi. I could do a search through LexisNexis or another tool that indexes a bunch (_not all_) of the ordinances but it's more time than I want to spend right now.
You'd be surprised what is allowed and not allowed by ordinances, it's very locale specific too. I tried living in a tiny home and it very much broke many ordinances.
If it's an ordinance and someone complains (or it's one of those narc-y townships using satellite imagery and drone enforcement) then you get an inspection. If you're found in violation you'll get an enforcement notice.
It's the one reason I am so nervous about who my neighbors are when doing anything "weird" on a property. The township, city, county, state, whatever jurisdiction it falls under _will_ handle it.
My wife asked me why I didn't throw out my old computer that I started coding my hobby project on years ago (a new kind of data management system). The computer is hopelessly outdated (a core2 duo) so I never use it anymore and the thrift store won't even take stuff like that as a donation.
I explained to her that it could be very valuable someday or used as a museum piece once my system is widely adopted and changes the world. I don't think she bought that argument.
I've thrown out or recycled many hundreds of pounds of computer equipment over the years. Even if I were able to pass it on to someone who briefly appreciated it, it's not worth it.
I just sold an old C2D machine on Facebook marketplace for $80.
This one had been given to my son to play games on, and then we did a few upgrades: a 256gb SSD I had laying around, a $15 half-height R5 340X GPU off ebay, and a $5 E8500 CPU upgrade (replacing a Pentium Dual Core E5200.)
I gave it a clean install of Windows 10, and someone bought it for his mom to browse facebook on.
Sure, without those upgrades, it probably wouldn't have fetched as much, but the SSD made the most significant difference, and you can get those for $15 these days.
You can always buy stuff back on eBay when it starts to become not junk but before it's super valuable. I have a KIM-1, AIM-65, HP-85, PDP-11/23 bought in the last couple of years on that basis. We're a few decades away from a Core 2 Duo being not junk.
I guess my joke about this vanilla computer being the one used to start developing my yet to be discovered 'Earth shattering' software system didn't go over like I planned.
Equipment used to invent or create something that becomes widely adopted; can be collector's items. The first Apple computer. The original phone used by Alexander Graham Bell. The very first television set.
How many things were permanently lost because inventors threw away their early prototypes or first working copy?
Note however that the post-design prototyping stage is all done with off-the-shelf boards and similar components, there are no recommendations for developing surface mount soldering skills [1] or home semiconductor fabs[2], which are indeed cool but more in the hobby/art space. (look up 'surface mount assembly' on YT for why, e.g. Bittele)
The Wrights are a bad example, being classical patent trolls - they held back US aviation so severely that the UK and Europe were able to leave the USA in the dust. Wright would not allow use or experimentation before an agreement was signed and this blocked all but military(with their mandated exemption re: Patents) who imported European/UK planes were able to progress, but commercial aviation was dead in the water. Once the patents expired the USA soared ahead...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_brothers_patent_war
No, a "patent troll" is an entity that doesn't produce anything. Not one that actually developed things.
They did exploit their patents, but that was hardly unusual at the time. Henry Ford, in fact, was a victim of that, too, although obviously he overcame it.
Once they started trolling, they stopped making planes, it was only after the patents expired and the founders left the business and they merged with curtis and a rational patent pooling system emerged that US aviation surged ahead. Radio was much the same, and they eventually used pools in the same way.
I am not sure if the USA can repair their system, as it feeds and sustains a huge swarm of parasites, much like the US medical system
I guess "troll" as a verb is pretty common usage now.
As a "noun" -- no. The polite term is "Non-Practicing Entity" (not that I want to be polite) but it shows that we still need to distinguish between companies that, at least once, practiced the patent; and shell companies which have never done anything but sue.
I see, they are trying to force a lot of shops/schools to buy them - they are $500-800 more than comparable risky saws. I wonder if they will try for it on hand held rotary saws?
Hopefully an alternate method will emerge. Even if I had one, I would never use it as I practice great care anyway.
What stands out to me among the examples is that amazing things can be achieved when a small number of highly motivated (obsessed) people get together in a space with few distractions and plenty of freedom to experiment.
And before they started turning into luxury "loft" apartments disused factories/warehouses were perfect environments to set up micro "practice spaces."
No 'garage' is also a music genre. I'm not into music really (certainly not that kind) but I think it's in some way related to but to mark distinction from 'house'.
Of course funnily enough 'the house band' could also be a thing, but neither is related to the genre of that name.
Edit: oh, seems it's a UK thing, so perhaps you weren't to know - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/UK_garage. Though also older 'garage rock' (60s) on the disambiguation page.
In the US “house” usually refers to the venue - house wine, house band, etc means that supplied by the hotel. You rent a ballroom, you want a band, the hotel can provide the house version, kind of generic.
This might contribute in a big way to the economic dynamism and entrepreneurship culture of the United States (and not just in tech/silicon valley). The garage (and excess/sub-standard space generally) is a big component of American housing and explicitly included in houses and touted as a selling point.
Not true in Europe and other parts of the world, where excess space can be a rarity or is improved to be living area.
For the original post (OP): Didn't see
any mention of market. Hard work,
youth, talent, dreams, obsession,
dedication, novelty, risk taking, and an
available empty garage -- these don't mean
that there is or will be a market. No
market, no successful company.
As I read the OP, all or nearly all the
successes had two things in common but not
mentioned: (1) There was a market or
nearly so; i.e., there was a nascent
market. Plenty of people wanted the
product or soon would after seeing it.
(2) Not only was there at least a nascent
market, due to various external
circumstances, that market was growing
quickly.
Exercise:
Ford cars? NYC had lots of horses and,
thus, some very dirty streets. Cars
didn't poop. Out in the country, a Model
T was a better way to get to the retail
stores in the nearest town than horse
power.
"External circumstances:" The oil
industry was ready to supply gasoline and
lubrication. The oil industry? The
steamship Titanic was powered by oil.
Wars, which wanted motor powered vehicles.
Google? The Internet was exploding in
bytes per second, users, uses, revenue,
.... For many parts, especially social
media, and as a whole, the Internet had a
gravitational effect, i.e., the bigger
it became, the faster it grew in, e.g.,
number of new users, revenue, ..., per
month. So, quickly there became a need
for Internet (Web) search, and Google
grew.
Facebook? As in the movie The Social
Network, the small start of Hot or Not
at Harvard spread quickly among
universities and then, as it became
social with the gravitational effect,
had explosively rapid growth and, thus,
both contributed to and benefited from the
gravitational effect in general of the
Web, Internet, microprocessor based
computing, etc.
Boeing? From cars, gasoline engine
technology to power the airplanes. Wars
for a market. Planes that could take off
and land on water -- the planes didn't
need airports and provided a faster way to
cross oceans.
So, in general: The economy moves along
and creates a new need, i.e., a nascent
market. Some likely new circumstances
make it possible to meet this need, make
the nascent market real. Then more
circumstances make the market grow
quickly. Timed just right, not too early,
not too late, sometimes even a garage
sized startup can meet the need and grow
quickly.
It’s mysterious only if you subscribe to some myth of capitalist supremacy, that is that nothing starts without capital. Everyone is powerless because they lack the levers of capital.
When in fact many starts are without capital, outside of it, in cheap spaces and without any permission. There is a bootstrapping that happens to develop the idea or product.
Capital can be then dragged in to finance the growth necessary to reach the goal of the organization. Capital is shy, a risk averse creature that must be coaxed into supporting the next important boom.
The actual 'garage startup' is bit of a myth, played up as a rags to riches story. Most startups happen in personal spaces like bedrooms or home offices or rented offices and are often better funded than you might think. Or the 'garage' was just a very temporary thing and mostly for storage/laziness/clutter. Even Woz debunks this:
“The garage is a bit of a myth,” Wozniak told Businessweek. “We did no designs there, no breadboarding, no prototyping, no planning of products. We did no manufacturing there.”
Today a "garage startup" just really means they're just starting out, self-funding, or under-funded.
Also, having a garage is to be in a privileged position, not exactly rags. It means you can afford a car (first barrier), you can afford a covered structure to park your car (second barrier), you can afford to use your garage as a hobby space (third barrier).
It's somewhat normal for the average American, but not anywhere else in the world.
The garage was a story of economic mobility for the middle class. It was never aimed at people in abject poverty. There were stories about going from troubled neighborhoods to college as well during the time when America still believed in class mobility.
The world of the 1800s was a world of hereditary title. There was never a promise of mobility and this is what made America and its legends different for all its failings. Going back to this world will not improve things for the better.
The US was one of the rare exceptions to the hereditary title thing. Most countries still had them in some form, though the big players today were throwing them off. (the English monarchs never used their power of veto, though they still have a lot of influence on the text of laws)
The US of the 1800s was a world in which you could legally own another human being, right up until December 6, 1865. Those born into bondage were condemned to live as such and had no legal way to change their personal status. This is kind of the ultimate form of a hereditary title.
Taken literally, in the US, it tends to imply a house in the suburbs in an environment where an uninsulated attached garage can more or less be used year-round. Which, as you say, is far more common in many areas of the US than elsewhere.
Many had hopes for the TechShop / Hackerspace paradigm to help with this, but it appears it didn't end up too viable as a business and Hackerspaces were problematic in their own ways.
Hackerspaces and non-corporate coworking sort of spaces probably suffer from the fact that people want to have a space in a cool/dense place but don't actually have the means/desire to pay for it which is a big part of why they want the space in the first place.
There are some spaces like that in Seattle that seem to be getting on fine, a Makerspace with a monthly fee (appropriate for access to wood and metal shops as well as various printing and cutting options, but too expensive for me when I was working in the restaurant industry) and some tool libraries with work spaces (free, volunteer run) are the ones I'm familiar with.
Just wanted to point out that there are probably places to go to get that itch scratched just under a different name - I think my examples actually sort of underline that it isn't exactly a booming industry.
I'm not saying that such spaces don't/can't exist. Just that the market for individuals plopping down cash for desks/workbenches outside of where they live is fairly limited. I know someone who tried running such in London for a number of years and it was apparently always a difficult business. Of course some areas are much cheaper but the demand is less too.
There is a hacker space near me - but near isn't good enough to join. By the time I get the kids to bed I couldn't even get there and back before my own bedtime. I can go to my basement/garage and work in that time and do something. I have a nice shed full of tools, but by the time I get out there (it is only 10 meters from the door, but that means shoes, coat...) I can't really find time to get anything done so I end up with a separate workshop with much less tools, but at least it is easy to get to.
For someone working full-time, especially with family, absent a hobby with a lot of specialized equipment needs like photography back in the day, it's a bit hard to imagine the justification for spending the time the time in a hacker space you pay for more than occasionally. The random Meetup--sure. but somewhere you go to on a regular weekly cadence? Harder to imagine.
If the goal is to have cheap, dedicated space where you can build stuff, it probably makes a lot more sense to buy an old but sizable house, with land, in a remote place. These are cheaper than garages, and no one will be there to complain about the noise, or how bad your activity looks to the neighborhood. The cost of living tends to be cheaper than in metro areas too.
There are drawbacks too, but it is not like you are going to commute, so one of the biggest one is out. For internet and utilities, some remote places are remarkably well served.
Now, if you are doing software, you don't need any of that, all you need is a computer and you can do it from your bedroom.
You need to live, for most of us that means more than whatever hacking we are doing in our garage/shed. If you have independent wealth and no family moving to a cheap area might be a good option. However if you need a job to support yourself where you live must be in range of that job (though many reading this are able to work from home, most of the world cannot). Family means your spouse - where does she/he need to be for work - this limits where you can live just as much (and if both of you have to go to work what jobs both of you can take) . You can force move your kids to a rural area but they will not be happy about losing all their friends (many do this anyway, but it should be a consideration even if you do it to them. Family also means extended family - where does your sister, parents, in-laws live - moving away from them is hard. Likewise everything about family and your kids friends applies to your friends - do you really want to move away from them? There is also safety - the cheap side of town is often cheap for a reason, do you want to wear a bulletproof vest around all the time?
So realistically: cannot move to a cheap house on some land.
You don't even need to live in the mountains of Wyoming or wherever. I live about an hour west of Boston and have a 2-car garage and plenty of space for hobbies in a location that is not particularly expensive.
An article about successful start-ups started in garages is going to mention billionaires. That's hardly worshiping. The focus is on garages' role in founding.
The opening reads more like factual statements to me, I don't really see anything that I would consider "nonsense billionaire-worship propaganda" (and I say this as someone who is generally pretty "eat the rich"). Would you care to quote a passage or two that you think reflects that statement?
It had been converted by the owner of the house (Bezos was renting) or the previous owner. It was a normal livable space with windows, wall treatment etc.
Yes, once upon a time it had been a garage, but the only thing "special" about the space that has any relationship to its original purpose is that it formed the only space in a typical US residence large enough for 3 people to work in without totally disrupting normal domestic life. If there's mystery or magic to a "garage", that's it.
I know this because I worked in that garage until we moved to the so-called Color Tile Building in Seattle.