relentless focus

Patrick Copeland, Google Director of Engineering, gave the keynote at QCon in London this morning (topic innovation) and is reported to have called gmail innovative. Really? 

Hotmail (a free email service) was founded by Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith, and was one of the first webmail services on the Internet. It was commercially launched on July 4, 1996 (Wikipedia)

gmail was launched in 2004.

The word innovation is used so loosely at times that the word becomes meaningless. Some people use it liberally (and inappropriately) to mean refinement or incremental change in how things are done. 

Copeland is reported to have said:  

building the right “it” is more important than building “it” right. If what you build is the wrong thing, it will not succeed, whereas the right idea will sometimes succeed despite poor implementation.

Was Microsoft more innovative than Apple in regards to tablet design?

To me, innovation is about large scale disruptive change in how we do things. Speeding up the Chrome web browser to be incrementally faster than its competition is an incremental refinement, its not innovative. Desireable? Yes. Innovative? No.

Figuring out and implementing a strategy in which you give away cool stuff that others are selling in order to disrupt their business model and attract large numbers of their customers to your free version of their services in order to quietly collect mountains of personal data on your rapidly growing number of users for the purpose of monitising that data through the selling of targeted advertising leading to a massively profitable corporation within a very short time is innovative.

Google strategies on running server farms are innovative. Google Search was a refinement over Yahoo but Google’s strategy for monitising search was innovative. 

Buzz and Wave were interesting experiments but they didn’t catch on, they didn’t disrupt old patterns or change people’s behaviour. They were failed experiments. After Picasso how we saw the world and thought about Art was changed forever. Picasso didn’t invent painting, he didn’t invent modernism. But what he did influenced a century of thinking about Art. Wave and Buzz were more like New Coke, an asterisk in cultural history.

Many people point out that Microsoft “invented” tablet computers. They had some of the notes but they didn’t quite write the song that people would sing. It took Apple to figure that out.

If a picture replaces a thousand words, here’s the rest of my essay (courtesy of Counternotions)