On a Segway at 108mph, no helmet: Woz and 700+ Waterloo Region techies
by Thom Ryan on August 18th, 2009 
He didn’t ride in on a Segway, and he didn’t break out in dance.
Couldn’t have said it better myself… “melle@twitter: Given who’s all here, wonder who’s running Waterloo Region’s tech companies this morning? Good time for a geek heist! #communitech” … so many in fact, that the Woz says he’s coming back. (!)
A lot of people showed up to the event – one of Communitech’s biggest ever. What was impressive was the audience mix – hardcore geeks, mac minions, business people, and a lot of techies. The usual folks, plus a whole lot of new faces.
Woz is a visionary. His passion and his excitement come across loud and clear. He didn’t talk a lot about the Apple days; he talked about how exploring electronics is a lifelong vision, about how curiosity drives his learning. Of particular note, he emphasized design and user experience as the crux to making good hardware and software. Design and usability make or break the product. Totally in-line with the success of Mac and the iPod, as examples. Design has always been central to Woz’ mantra: even if you can’t see it, he’s interested in efficient, strong, intuitive design. His message: pay attention to how people use the product, and keep it as simple as possible.
And the same philosophy bleeds over into Woz’ latest venture at Fusion-io, a nextgen solid-state memory manufacturer with ridiculous capacity (100K+ iops ftw), making it some of the most efficient possible in the world today.
It doesn’t end there – during Q&A an audience participant asked what Woz would be involved with, if he wasn’t working on super-efficient storage; he suggested the next piece is making an OS efficient enough to capitalize on new speeds and storage capacities (the kind Fusion-io makes possible). The next competitive advantage? A challenge from Woz? A slight dig on less efficient OS designers? All of the above?
Woz quotables:
“How do I solve a real need? It almost always comes down to interaction.”
“Design products the way users think – user interface rules”
“Try to be so perfect that no other human can exceed it.”
“The user is more important than the tech”
We’ll have some video and audio up soon on the event. For now, lots of media coverage of the event… a few samples:
http://www.financialpost.com/story.html?id=1903077
http://news.therecord.com/News/Local/article/585868
http://www.itworldcanada.com/a/Daily-News/97beab9e-b0cb-45a9-b0e2-f356e0a0a059.html
http://blogs.itworldcanada.com/shane/2009/08/17/wozniak-waterloo-and-a-little-wisdom/
http://www.570news.com/news/local/more.jsp?content=20090817_123102_1580
For the record, Woz revealed he was in a car on the Segway going108mph – not driving the vehicle himself. A brief net search reveals 20mph is the general max speed of a Segway.
August 20th, 2009 at 2:09 pm
Congratulations Lisa, Iain and the rest of the mighty Communitech team for putting on an incredible event at the last minute. It’s a testimony to your expertise and commitment. Thank you for making it possible! And thank you to RIM for stepping up.
August 20th, 2009 at 11:53 pm
I attended the Kitchener seminar and found Woz’s optimism overflowing and infectious. Kudos for inviting him and David Flynn to Waterloo Region.
BTW, I was intrigued with their PCIe-based SSD which connects to a system’s north-bridge bus (replacing PCI-based hard disk systems connected to a system’s south-bridge bus) and believe this will change the way we do data mining and data warehousing. As an aside, I have always thought it amusing that computers and storage have become ubiquitous just at the time we need them the most (annotating the human genome while embarking on new investigations of the human proteome).
August 21st, 2009 at 8:20 am
[...] Communitech’s blog post. (I was amused to see one of my tweets got quoted there. Also, at the bottom there is a link to a number of other places the visit was covered.) [...]
August 21st, 2009 at 8:01 pm
[...] Monday morning though, the Woz was in town and Communitech hosted a breakfast at which he was the keynote speaker. It was as one would expect: some rambly, sometimes funny anecdotes and then a blast of passion about why the interface and design are so important in whatever you are engineering–even if that’s the number of holes in a motherboard that not many will notice and even fewer will appreciate. It was quite amusing to realize that most of the brain power in K-W were in one area, as Melle pointed out. [...]