Pre-press. Where in under a decade I figured out from scratch how to automate packaging artwork production successfully: by building the automation for, and putting it into the hands of, the artworkers themselves. i.e. The folks on the ground who do the actual work, and understand what that work entails.

Alas (for me), scaling that success to a $1Tn global packaging industry has proved way harder, in significant part due to the penny-pinching bean counters and talentless middle-management hacks: useless people who won’t spend a penny or commit to change when they can pay themselves the same salary for never taking a single risk or decision at all.

So what are the chances that Cook’s Apple filled a room with highly-educated experts and told them to invent a grand impressive automation solution without ever sitting with all those “little people” who make the stuff by hand in order to learn their jobs from them? From what I’ve seen of “real” applications development, and the gall of major industry vendors who rake in millions selling big-iron “solutions” that simply don’t work out on the shop floor beyond their glossy canned C-suite demos, I’d wager that’s the norm.

Ah well, now I know how Papert must’ve felt. Back t’drawing board…