It’s easy to fall into the trap of only wanting to do the new and sexy thing and giving up as soon as something requires the dirty work. That’s rarely a strategy for success and jumping from one idea to another idea and only focusing on the interesting parts is a sure fire way to not get anything done.

Last week I had a brief conversation with Twitter that got me looking for Apple’s S-1. Apple filed this in 1980 as part of their IPO process and on one hand it’s remarkable that you can find a 40 year old document online and yet on the other hand it’s disappointing that it came as a PDF. I imagine every year there are thousands (tens of thousands?) of people that want to take a look at the IPO docs of one of the most impressive tech companies and yet end up with a poorly rendered version. What if someone took the time to modernize it and convert it to a modern S-1? A massive amount of people would benefit and they would get the credit.

I tried searching for a non-PDF version and wasn’t able to find one. Why not? It’s incredibly menial work. There are tools that do a light conversion but you’d spend dozens of hours polishing and making sure the non-textual data was properly converted.

Does this mean that I’m going to convert Apple’s S-1 from a PDF to HTML? No. I understand the hypocrisy but who has the time?