Frantically False Innovation
In my quietest moments, rare in my job, I ponder the state of innovation in our world. I follow hundreds of the leading innovators and analysts to understand what is being created in the technology space these days. I have only one conclusion, not much, but its all being hyped frantically.
The premium example is Google, a company I have great respect for from a business standpoint. Google has mastered the art of being a fast follower, and in many cases just a ripoff artist of other technologies. Sound familiar? Yes, they are executing from the Microsoft, and particularly Bill Gates, playbook flawlessly. You have Office? We have office. You have a better search? We can say we do that. You have an iPhone? We have a phone. You have a cloud? We have a cloud.
I don’t mean to pick on Google, they are just an easy example. But really look, I mean really look, at what passes for innovation today and it looks like open source trying to unseat a whole bunch of existing products by trying to provide free stuff that is almost as good. Just trying I might add. Is that what we consider innovation today?
Social media is texting on a computer and family and friend websites (Facebook is really feature poor, Twitter is less still from a technology standpoint, MySpace is dying, YouTube can’t make money). Enterprise 2.0 offers promise for business implementation of old concepts in a new way, at least its business innovation. This is the future I am sure, real new use cases for existing technology but lets admit it.
Next generation search is a mathematical exercise that is cool, I’ll give some points to the companies focused on true semantic search, but this is not a technology innovation.
Where is new technology? Not on the internet. Maybe in new battery designs for cars, better strip mining equipment of tar sands, perhaps hydrogen fuel conversion, maybe modular small scale electricity generators in millions of streams (green panic intended), but not in computer systems. We have started recycling ideas to sell, VMWare is something we had on mainframes 25 years ago, virtual machines were the basis for the initial ASP craze that we now call cloud computing or SAAS or any of a number of things.
I am just saying.
I don’t even know why I felt the need to say it, maybe it is the constant drone of Open Source guys talking about how innovation is in distribution and free software. Free, I promise, doesn’t pay for innovation. Maybe its Apple reselling the same stuff to the same people and calling it new, the Blackberry is a much more useful form and function business phone than the iPhone could aspire to, and the Mac is just people paying more because they want to be in the club, the same reason snowboarders drink Mountain Dew, no Red Bull, aww whatever is “this week”. Netbooks are new? Not really. Now we’re going to have Google ninjas? Whatever.
Does anyone else worry that we may have too much expectation and not enough innovation to jump start the economy? All of our hopes are built on being able to market the next recycled idea, maybe people will keep buying, but we better figure out how to do all this without spending billions copying existing technology that really doesn’t add value. Maybe then the VC’s would have a little money for a really new idea.
Anyone got one?
Just take a look at wolfarm alpha.
People and companies can’t innovate because they are trying to pull the people’s mindset on reusing things with beautiful wrappers. And then they have marketers to sell. Companies just want profit (short term or long term). If they could sell stones in 21 century, they would happily do it. Innovation is just a curtain behind which profit hides.
Thanks for the input, I agree with all of this (including the occasional Wolfram) but perhaps profit is the end result of real innovation and capital should work to pull back the curtain….
Right! Capital should work. Checking your other posts. Will review soon.
If you think that virtualization ala VMWare is just like what mainframes were offering 25 years ago, then I suggest you compare prices: mainframes might be the best thing ever, but if VMWare can give you the same benefits at 1% of the cost, well, that’s innovation.
If you’re looking for something genuinely novel, take a look at Vertica, a commercially successful column store relational database.
I doubt any technology will be sufficient to convince you: anything new will depend on and be related to technology that came before it so you’ll always be able to claim that it is not very innovative.
Turbulence,
The key to this, from my standpoin,t is the hyping of minor steps forward at the expense of potential real innovation. I see many things get cheaper and faster. I think VMWare is great, it is just not a new idea. I think an understanding of the history of these technologies is a good thing to have. Most important, to me, is that we aggressively search for new things rather than new ways to package old things.
I have only browsed through the Vertica website, but like Wolfram Alpha, I do find it intriguing.
i’m generally in agreement with the idea that real value, and the growth and economic health that comes from it, is rarely the result of just packaging old stuff in a shiny new wrapper.
that said, a couple of comments.
for the record, google made their fortune through a simple but important insight about searching documents for relevance to a query, and by finding pragmatic, effective solutions to a variety of problems having to do with scale.
they are in a kind of “hey, me too” mode now but that’s not what made them what they are.
really game-changing innovation happens when it happens, and is hard to predict. most times, innovations happen as solutions to specific problems that exist in the here-and-now.
because it’s driven by issues presented by, and occurs in the context of, existing technologies and practices, innovations are by nature most often incremental. and quite often, there’s real value to be found there.
“for the record, google made their fortune through a simple but important insight about searching documents for relevance to a query, and by finding pragmatic, effective solutions to a variety of problems having to do with scale.”
I agree on Google. They created an important step forwrad in search, I use them as a reference only to point out how hard it is to maintain that innovation process.
I also agree that incremental improvements provide value.
I clearly believe that much of what is hyped as innovation is not, it is me too or recycled ideas. It is a broad brush, I admit, the exceptions, as pointed out by others, seem to me to support the point.