“Moonshot thinking is about making something 10x better. This forces you to throw away the existing assumptions and create something bold and new. Reality will eat into your 10x. At the end of the process it may only be 2x, but that’s still amazing.”
Brian Jansen‘s Book Summary: “Bold: How To Go Big, Create Wealth, and Impact the World,” by Peter Diamandis & Steven Kotler.
I think the biggest moonshot facing OSS today is the design and implementation of an architecture that allows other moonshots to happen.
Take a moment to reflect on that…
As of today, our OSS tend to be complex, entangled beasts, governed by the chess-board analogy. The entanglement is so profound that we tend to only do small, incremental charges. Moving a single piece on the chess-board takes soooo much planning to avoid negative consequences. lt’s the reason that some of our high-profile OSS probably still contain chunks of code that were written in the 1990’s or 2000’s.
In the world of OSS, the 10x moonshot comes with a risk of delivering -5x not just the 2x mentioned in the quote above.
Having said that, I’m all for a good moonshot project. It might take just one disentanglement moonshot to allow 1000 subsequent moonshots to fire! A disentanglement moonshot like the small-grid approach described here.