Disapearing tech
Salesforce.com's Director of Platform Research, Peter Coffee, explains how to make better tools.
Today, a Dell Adamo or a MacBook Air competes for the distinctions of being thin, light, and long-lived on battery power: in short, for making its technology as nearly invisible as the world's best technologists can manage.I remember talking to Peter Coffee, at some CASE conference years ago, when he was reviving Aristotlian taxonomy as a basis for Object-Oriented Analysis.
As Martin Heidegger said in The Origin of the Work of Art, the proper tool is one that disappears into its function; as Alfredo Ruibal further observed, "The less one notices the tool, the better it fulfils its function as a tool."