傅蘋所謂的中國經歷已經被許多人證明是虛構的,這裡就不多說了。可是現在還有不少人尤其是美國人認為傅蘋是個成功的企業家。真的是這樣嗎?讓我們來先看看一個知情的美國人是怎麼說的。
PW, you are right. You clearly have read Ping Fu's pages 151 to
156, where she says exactly that. As you know, Herbert Edelsbrunner
pioneered computational geometry and alpha shapes, and when he and Ping
Fu, his wife, took their life savings to invest to start their company,
they hired two technical students to turn his algorithms into software
products: Mike Facello and Dmitry Nekhayev, who still work at Geomagic.
You could ask them about her understanding of geometry, but I think that
misses the point. Herbert Edelsbrunner didn't want to deal with raising
money and answering the phone. As Ping Fu says, "He had depth and I had
breadth. He was the mastermind behind the technology and I focused on
developing the applications and markets. ...Although we used Herbert's
mathematical insights and elegant algorithms to build our software at
the beginning, it soon became clear that he wasn't interested in the
business issues."
Thank you for pointing out what the real subject
of Ping Fu's book is--how to weave advanced science and mathematics into
the fabric of a company, and how, often, the science and technology is
the easy part. Believe me, Steve Jobs never understood the fine points
of computer networks or computer languages---we used to tease him that
he couldn't spell TCP/IP---but he was a genius at forming a business
based on products that used the most advanced technology. You'd be
amused: in the very early days, Steve Jobs insisted on using Berkeley's
IEEE standard floating point arithmetic, on the first Macintosh, in
1984, because it was standard....and Cray never did. So the little
Macintosh would get correct answers on complicated physics algorithms,
and Cray would get different answers on the same software.