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"When we were learning about manufacturing at Mac, we hired a Stanford Business School Professor at the time named Steven Wheelwright, and he did a neat thing. He drew on the board a little chart, first time I met him. He said, you can view all companies from a manufacturing perspective this way. "You can say there's five stages-- one, two, three, four, five. They have all these things. And stage one is companies that view manufacturing as a necessary evil. They wish they didn't have to do it, but damn it, they do. And all the way up through stage five, which is companies that view manufacturing as a competitive opportunity for competitive advantage. We can get better time to market, and get new products out faster. We get lower costs. We get higher quality. "And in general, you know, you can put the American flag here [puts it under 1], and put the Japanese flag here [puts it under 5] [Laughter] [Applause]. And that's changing, however. "By the way, just going back to software for a minute, I often apply this scale to computer companies, and how they look at software. See, I think most computer companies are stage one. They wish software had never been invented. I put Compaq in that category. And IBM is maybe stage two, and things like that. And I think there's only three companies in here [pointing at 5] and that's us, Apple and Microsoft, in stage five. We start everything with the software and work back." Wow. I think this is a great way to look at how companies look at ML/AI: You have Facebook, Google, MS, Amazon trying to use it as a competitive advantage, whereas I'm sure there are some companies (medical?) that wish these systems were never invented. This also shows why you would want to be at companies that look at software as a competitive advantage: as an engineer you are the profit centre and not the cost centre. |