Accessibility is the compass

The source is Guillermo Rauch, Vercel’s CEO, whose interview he mined the way he mines the good ones, “donde hay muchas ideas que yo digo que no”, versus an hour of hearing himself ▸ 40:55. The frame that organizes the notes is accessibility as a compass for whether technology is good: the fewer instructions it needs, the better ▸ 52:01. His worked example is the violin, an inventory of barriers, bow tension, rosin, no fret markings, a shoulder rest, tuning by ear ▸ 49:46, against the Otamatone you press and it sings ▸ 53:19, with his father’s Suno songs as accessibility at max, two a day by voice ▸ 50:50.

The second quote is the destination of the first: “el propósito de la tecnología es hacerse tan fácil y tan obvio que no lo pensamos más como tecnología” ▸ 56:41, the pencil once radical for letting you erase, now invisible ▸ 52:55, evidenced by his own observation that nobody in his university class carries a notebook anymore ▸ 55:58.

si necesita manual, todavía es tecnología; cuando desaparece, ya ganó →

The third reframes creation as assembly, and it’s the one he has to correct Julia on: “a veces no tienes que inventar la rueda desde cero, sino encontrar la forma de empaquetarla” ▸ 56:36. Not packaging as a box or a brand community, but welding: the computer, keyboard, mouse, and speaker already existed; Steve Jobs fused them into one ▸ 58:28, the camera, iPod, and phone into another ▸ 59:20. Which is also Rauch’s own product thesis, Next.js as the thing that lets you know the least programming to ship to the cloud ▸ 47:23, before which a good website needed five specialists ▸ 46:19. Accessibility isn’t a feature you add for the disabled; it’s the axis the whole industry moves along, and it points at the interface disappearing entirely…