I’m thankful for… productization.

While it has its downsides, it is pretty amazingly cool that a company can package up a set of concepts/technologies like light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation, polymer-encapsulated pigment microparticles, multimegabit-per-second data transmission, parsing and execution of a doman-specific language, etc., into a thingie that you just plug in and it prints. If I had to know how to build those pieces myself, or even understand most of them beyond the first layer of jargon, I’d be stuck with a pencil and paper. Wait, make that a rock and a patch of dirt.

‘course, ask me how much I like it when I’m in the midst of a productization phase myself, and I might have a different answer…