When you think about the decade of the 2000s you may think of major events that happened like 9/11 or Hurricane Katrina. Another thing that changed during the decade was how we communicate.
As the decade of the 2000’s progressed, so did technology and we became more connected than ever before.
Andy Grignon used to work for Apple, and worked on a small team that helped created the first iPhone. He is also one of the people interviewed for a two-part series about the 2000s set to air on National Geographic Channel.
Grignon says that his team had no idea they would be creating something big with the iPhone.
“We just set out to make a phone. In fact, Steve Jobs gave us this edict which was we were not going to allow anybody else in our little playground. No developers, people who write the apps in the app store; things like that, because the phones number one job was to be a phone."
Grignon says that people have this misconception about what goes into making a product due to all of the movies and television shows about Silicon Valley. He says that there is a little bit of time where you are throwing out ideas and possibilities but most of the work is about execution.
“It’s a grind. It’s not sexy at all. You’re just day-in-day out typing, looking at problems, trying to fix them, you know, steering the ship in that respect, but that takes a tremendous amount of effort.”
Grignon says that the competitive nature in developing technology is such that you really are never happy with the result, because you are always looking for ways to make it better.
“There really isn’t a time to just sit back and be happy about the thing you just made. You’re happy that it shipped, but you know that the next thing is going to be just a little bit better…Oh, and the one that’s like a year out; that’s going to be the best of all, and so you’re just on this hamster wheel of creating new technology constantly.”
Today, Grignon is a Partner at Siberia, a global design and engineering firm. He shares his thoughts as he looks back at the decade of the 2000s.
“We had some major events happen in that decade which were unthinkable in the 90s. So it’s actually kind of a powerful decade. When looking back you see a lot of the negative, but there are a lot of positives.”
Those negatives and positives of the decade will be highlighted in The 2000s: A New Reality, which premieres on National Geographic Channel Sunday at 7 p.m.