Editor’s Note: This guest post is written by Kwindla Hultman
Kramer, who is the CEO of Oblong Industries — the company known
for developing the gestural interfaces in the film Minority
Report. The company’s current customers and partners include
Boeing, SAP, GE, and others. Computers have been getting
steadily “better” — faster, smaller, cheaper — for sixty years.
But they get “smarter” — more capable and more broadly useful —
in discrete leaps, the biggest of which don’t happen very often.
We’re overdue for our next big leap. Working with computers is
intoxicating. The price/performance curve is always moving to
the right. Every year one can do more: Design new user
experiences, write new kinds of programs, and develop new
hardware. In this context of constant change, it’s easy to focus
on the trees rather than the forest. Good engineering is often
about incremental improvement. Good business is often about
finding product/market fit, while good design is often about
giving users an interface that is easy to