The real innovation comes from small businesses and projects trying to meet a need and make a name for themselves.
They are unencumbered by massive PR and marketing departments trying to throw in everything but the stuff that is needed in order to appease some marketing survey.
Microsoft has been using the technique for decades now. See a hot technology, buy it up and take it over. IBM, RedHat, Oracle, Sun and Novell have been playing the game too.
They don't create anything anymore. They refine it and mass produce it. Then they let the PR and marketing people in and ruin a good thing. (Except for Novell, they can't seem to hire marketing people at all, because thankfully, they can put out a solid product, they just never actually sell the darn thing.)
Cannonical is innovating in that it is sort of trying to innovate. Sure, they are using concepts that already exist and then try to refit them to work with their primary product (Ubuntu, for the unaware.) but hey, at least they aren't just sittting around doing nothing.
Novell needs to quit being it's own OS/distro and focus on innovating and developing tools. When they do just that, they usually hit a home run. Let someone else market it for them. Maybe Cannonical can do the marketing for Novell, they have shown they can market successfully.
OpenSource especially needs some innovation now.
Wouldn't it be nice if IBM or someone asembled a crack team of coders and let them loose on their own. Give them a list of "top ten type of apps that would really be good to have in OpenSOurce" and let them go. No one else talks to them except in providing information they ask for in terms of research.
We need you "little guys' to keep innovating so we can keep improving the base for sofware in the future.
Friday, May 22, 2009
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Also see a similar point (but more optimistic) here: http://blog.cosmix.org/2009/05/23/moblin-proof-that-corporate-support-needed/
I've made a comment there and I'll post it here too:
But hasn’t always innovation come from small companies or individual contributors? Isn’t that how the GNU project started? In almost any aspect of the technical field innovation has come from a small startup/individual whose idea and technology was adopted by the mainstream. As they grew to make a big company and the fruits of their idea ripe, they lost capacity to innovate further. And that makes room for the next startup.
So in my opinion, the fact that innovation in technology fields comes from the small startup/individual contributors is actually the rule and not the exception.
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