Thursday, February 26, 2009

Who said we shall not reinvent the wheel ?

I keep hearing this.

Don't do that. You are reinventing the wheel. Just use what is already there. Don't waste more time on something that is already created.

If you want to be the best in the world, sometimes, you need to break the wheel, burn it, and create a new one.

It sounds crazy.

Here are some guys who broke that wheel:

John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley
They did NOT say: "Hey, we have vacuum tubes and we have built a lot of computers using them, they work fine."

That's why they invented the transistor, thousand times smaller than vacuum tube and does the same job.

Thanks to these guys you can hold your laptop now. If it weren't for them, perhaps you will need an entire room to fit you computer in. (And your entire salary to buy one).

Henry Ford
Ford did not say: "No, horses are great and fast, lets keep using them"
That is why he invented the automobile.

Larry Page And Sergey Brin
They did not say: "we do not want to re-invent Yahoo! It works fine"

That's why they created Google

Jawed Karim
Jawad did not say: "We have TV why bother?"

So he invented YouTube

And there are a lot of other examples as well. In this world, we lack creatively because of the wheel. Take Huffman for instance. It was
 the first compression algorithm in the whole world.

Winzip said: am gonna use it.
Winrar said, so do I.
7-Zip said, so do I.
Power-Archive said, so do I.

Which one is the best? There are not much differences between them. Why no one tried re-inventing Huffman?

My point being, You can always say "so do I", b
ut you won't be remarkable.


  1. This comment has been removed by the author.

  2. Although winrar is much superior to the rest of the applications you mentioned :P

  3. Anders
    Thanks for your comment

    Personally I prefer winrar, I love it,
    but generally they use the same concept even though they differ so much.

    I wrote that example because I have an idea of my own that I will write about it enshalla..

    Yes I want to reinvent huffman I don't want to compress a file. I want to regenerate it.

    Think of DNA vs Cell

    An idea that will change this world.

    Thanks guys :D
    you are so supportive.

  4. That's very exciting, I'm looking forward to read about it, it sounds innovative.

  5. Done.

  6. Aristotle was the first to reflect on basic contradiction in our thoughts and lives (called aporias). One of them is between tradition and innovation.
    In every endeavour we have to find a balance between them.
    Perfect tradition meens only doing what your ancestors did.
    Perfect innovation meens not using anything what your ancestors did.
    So in the former case we would still be sitting in caves with a little fire, as this is what our ancestors did.
    And in the latter we would still sit in caves and reinventing the fire everytime.
    Good inventions get the right balance between those two extremes.
    Turbines are a reinvention of the wheel: Taking a bit of tradition from the existing wheel and putting a lot of innovation to it.

  7. @Chris,

    I loved that comment!
    The balance between tradition and innovation ..
    you are totally rights, somethings we need to take as elementary and core and use them to jump further .

    Thanks Dr.

  8. The motto of inventors; thinking out of the box.
    Like your post .. keep it up bro.

  9. Correct!
    Thanks for dropping by aloy

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