30-ish years ago at my first design firm, Robert X. Cringely’s “Accidental Empires: How the Boys of Silicon Valley Make Their Millions, Battle Foreign Competition, and Still Can’t Get a Date” was required reading. Cringely covers how the modern desktop computer came into being. Jobs, Wozniak, Gates, and the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center are the focus, as is the culture that allowed them to do what they did.
My partner and I imagined ourselves possessing some of the same characteristics of the book’s leading characters, just in a different industry. It was the the early 90s, the era of Reaganomics, “Greed is Good,” GWAR, and we thought we could do anything if those guys could. What we took from our understanding of the book was that being first was great, being best was better, and being both is better still.
We were working on our Mac clones (yes, they were a thing) and envisioning a world where we dominated our own market (we were the first into a very tiny but growing niche). Graphic design started having the word “computer” added to it, and as early adopters we had a bit of a head start since freelance computer graphic designers weren’t really a thing then. Temp agencies were having designers take typing tests, as if spell check hadn’t been invented. Old paradigms where being shattered and replaced by even more paradigms. For a time, we weren’t at the front of the pack…we were the only ones running.
This was a time when “go fast and break things” hadn’t yet come into vogue, but you can see in Accidental Empires there the genus of that idea was born.
Fast forward to today, and the graphic design industry has dropped “computer” from the name, since everything is related to the computers first built by Cringely’s subjects. Computing power has been democratized, leading to many chances to be first into brand new design markets: computer animation, computer-generated imagery, 3d modeling, user interface, user experience, design thinking, and dozens more.
If you are the type of person who is into tech nostalgia, Accidental Empires is a good read of how it all got started, one that might give you some ideas of how to be first at some new niche. Even as much as our world has changed, there are lessons to be learned.
-AL