Super Volatile

How simple ideas – applied – have breathtaking consequences.

EARLIER this year a Federal Reserve official tried to tamp down worries about inflation by noting that, while food and petrol were getting more expensive, you could now buy an iPad that was twice as powerful for the same price as the previous model. The remark, soon lampooned as “Let them eat iPads”, predictably drew derision. But it typified a tactic to which American leaders frequently turn when they need a rejoinder to economic doomsaying: cite an Apple product.

Not much is left to cite now for America.

Bringing the concepts of a $100,000 networked workstation to a $2500 standalone mass market personal computer is, I say, radically innovative. The Macintosh was no “tweak”. Pixar was no “tweak”. The iPod is maybe the closest thing among Jobs’s career highlights that one could call a “tweak” of that which preceded it — but it’s hard to separate the iPod, the device, from the entire iTunes ecosystem in terms of measuring its effect on our culture and the way everyone today listens to music. Does anyone really think Apple’s entry into the music industry was a “tweak”? A “large-scale visionary” is precisely what Steve Jobs was.

Gruber rebukes Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs and the conclusions that Malcolm Gladwell drew from the book in his article portraying Jobs as a “tweaker”.

This utopianism is almost nowhere to be found today. Stephenson and Thiel point out that science fiction is moribund; the new work is dystopian, not inspiring. Thiel argues that the environmentalist ethos has undermined the faith in gee-whiz technological wizardry. Legal institutions and the cable TV culture dampen enthusiasm by punishing failure so remorselessly. NASA’s early failures were seen as steps along the way to a glorious future. Deepwater Horizon’s failure demoralized the whole nation.

More on the crisis of Big Innovation.

Most people who work in corporations or academia have witnessed something like the following: A number of engineers are sitting together in a room, bouncing ideas off each other. Out of the discussion emerges a new concept that seems promising. Then some laptop-wielding person in the corner, having performed a quick Google search, announces that this “new” idea is, in fact, an old one—or at least vaguely similar—and has already been tried. Either it failed, or it succeeded. If it failed, then no manager who wants to keep his or her job will approve spending money trying to revive it. If it succeeded, then it’s patented and entry to the market is presumed to be unattainable, since the first people who thought of it will have “first-mover advantage” and will have created “barriers to entry.” The number of seemingly promising ideas that have been crushed in this way must number in the millions.

Neal Stephenson on the crisis of big innovation and the role science fiction writing plays in it. It's excellent read, but the naysayer inside me craves to ask: “Who is willing to pay for it today?”

What makes the internet special is that it is a magical enabler of what the Stanford scholar Barbara van Schewick calls "permissionless innovation". If you're bright and have a good idea that can be implemented via software, then the internet will run it for you, with no questions asked and with very low entry barriers. At the moment, there are no gatekeepers who can keep out an innovator, no incumbents who can impose a swingeing tax on an innovative idea. But an internet accessed mainly via smartphones would be a very different kind of space – dominated by giant companies determined to repel newcomers, to protect obsolete business models and ensure that innovation happens at a pace determined by them rather than by the possibilities of technology and human ingenuity.

How smarter devices put innovation inherent to the internet in danger. However, computers still enable creativity that's not possible on smartphones or tablets. As long as that's the case, internet innovation will thrive.

Link via @helen_off_troy.

The problem I have with both these groups is that they are all extremely intelligent, clever, and skilled people who are spending their time and energy on projects that are more or less meaningless. We have a whole generation of entrepreneurs who dedicated themselves to figuring out how to get you to click ads. Jeff Hammerbacher put it best when he said, “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks.

While the web startup culture that has emerged in the last 10 years is something wonderful, it's indeed disappointing that the efforts on non-web (or mobile apps) innovation are so disproportionally smaller. A good read.

Specifically, what got me thinking about this notion was Yahoo’s response to Google Instant last week. In a post titled: “Back to the Future: Innovation is Alive in Search,” Yahoo passive-aggressively notes how they beat Google to the innovation of realtime search results. And as a bonus, they even throw in a few veiled hints that they could sue Google for copying their idea if they wanted to thanks to their “filed patent applications” and “first developed” “intellectual property.”

I couldn’t come up with a good angle at the time beyond simply writing two words:

Shut. Up.

Why it doesn't really matter who introduce a new technology first.

This approach is intended to offer enormous latitude for creativity that breaks past restrictions. But it also means they inherently plan to throw away 90% of the work they do. I don’t know many organizations for which this would be an acceptable ratio. Your CFO would probably declare, “All I see is money going down the drain.” This is a major reason why I say you can’t innovate like Apple.

Great analysis of Apple's design process. Also explains why Apple's approach can't be copied by a random Fortune 500 company.