"What" normally is what management is paid for. "How" is what engineers are paid for. The idea part marketing plays a fairly big part, engineers are the dream crusher, quite often agree reluctantly after lots of pressure to do anything out of the ordinary. An architect or a architecture team help to merge dream and reality and is often the one working with marketing and convincing/pushing the engineers to agree to stretched goals. A small percentage of the people involved have some passion about the final product and may push for their pet idea. Patent filing is another process that may or may not tied to projects. Design patents are regularly tied to projects but they are mostly mechanical in nature. Utility patents are tied to KPI and depends on pressure to meet the KPI the technical community is pressured/incentivized to present ideas for patent filing. Management set the themes and goals for patents, anything outside of it has very low chance of getting filed.
Some company have research for research sake group. Some are driven by demand and some are not. The not driven by demand group are the ones that give the world most of the innovations but seldom benefit the company that foot the bill.
Engineers only have a limited influence on what they are tasked to do. Management don't always assign the best person to the job ( actually most of the time they don't ). Any technical spec having a chance to come into the mind of management depends on whether it comes to them from the people they spoke to and they are the one who choose where and if any technical input were to come to them.
It’s almost as if this was some kind of nuanced discussion and a typical corporation had multiple departments responsible for very different things. For every demand made by management that cannot be fulfilled by engineering staff because it’s infeasible to implement there’s an engineer’s dream that gets rejected by management because it’s not marketable or profitable enough. In all honesty, the conversation has become pretty stale.
The Commodore anecdote is especially funny considering the VIC-20, and its follow-up the Commodore 64 were extremely successful computers that effectively ruled the computing landscape. Things *started* going sideways when management got involved - I recently listened to an interesting interview with Bil Herd where he explained why the Commodore 128’s display modes are such a hodgepodge. The initial prototype worked brilliantly on a standard Motorola 6848, but since Commodore liked making their own silicon, he was approached by management. They proposed a chip made in-house, and Bil asked one question - is it compatible with the 6848. He was told that it was. It was not. More specifically, it did not include an interrupt to inform the rest of the system when it was done doing its job, so instead, the system had to be set up to predict when the screen was ready by periodically asking the chip if its operations were complete. This led to an inside joke in the department - whenever that person entered the room, the engineers would randomly pick up their phones even though they weren’t ringing. Eventually the guy got really annoyed and asked why they’re doing that. They were quick to explain.
“Well sir, we can always pick up the receiver to check if there’s an inbound call, so why wait for it to ring?”
Hearty chuckle, if you know how a Commodore 128 works. There’s a myriad of reasons why Apple survived and Commodore did not. Two big ones are a generous cash injection from Microsoft, as they were on the verge of bankruptcy at one point, the second was a little global sensation called the iPod. The design was spearheaded by Tony Fadell, who was recruited primarily based on his vision of “a better MP3 player”. The rest is history, that one product turned the company around. Apple wanted to get into the audio business and Fadell had an idea, it’s as simple as that sometimes. The company would not exist in the same capacity as it does right now if not for the iPod - there wouldn’t be an iTunes, there probably wouldn’t be an iPhone, which is a direct evolution of the iPod, no iPad, no Apple Silicon. In fact, more likely than not, they’d be out of business by now.
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