phases of technology...
phases of technology evolution, you find there are certain things that are in
vogue that attract very bright people. Certainly through my tenure at SGI, the
big thing was UNIX. All the best people wanted to work on UNIX. UNIX was
the sandbox that they could be creative in and solve difficult problems. That’s
where they wanted to be. So companies that did that, like Sun and SGI and
others, attracted very bright people, and therefore you got great work done.
I thought, “I’m going to start a consumer company. It’s going to be a little
box that can’t cost more than $200 or $300. It’s going to do a very simple function.
It’s got to work with a remote control. Is that going to be challenging
enough for us to attract the brightest people? Because I don’t want to run a
company that has a second-rate engineering organization. I want to run a company
that has a top-rate engineering organization.” So I was worried about that.
Then Jim hired a guy that he had known from SGI who was really bright.
That was kind of the first key hire. We’d begun to realize that inside this thing it
was very difficult, and, as we identified these great engineers and they came in,
we sort of explained a little bit about it to them, and they said, “It sounds like a
very difficult problem. Sign me up.”
I think TiVo became the first company, certainly in this area, that created a
new playground for those really great people. It was nothing to do with UNIX,
although it was a Linux-based system. It was to do with creating an integrated
system that really worked well and was inexpensive. Hide the technology from
people—that was the challenge. When you used it, you never thought of it as
anything. You thought of it as a remote control.
That, I think, really got people’s imaginations going. They said, “Yeah, I’d
love to work on that. That sounds interesting.”
Livingston: Can you tell me about some of the biggest technical challenges?
Mike Ramsay 195
Ramsay: While people had talked about storing video data on a disk before,
actually creating a consumer product that used a disk to store video was pretty
radical because, at the time, it was really expensive. We had to make a bet on
whether the price was going to come down fast enough to make this any kind of
consumer product. Originally, this thing had 14 hours of recording time and we
were going to have to charge $1,000 for it. We better be on a pretty steep curve,
right?
But once we had decided that, the big deal was, “How do you use the disk?”
A disk has got fast seek. It’s not like a VCR, where you have to record something
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