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America Lacks Meaningful Innovation

greaterseas.com

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Re: America Lacks Meaningful Innovation

#61

Post by scott_s »

david927 wrote: post #27
shadowsun7 wrote: post #22

I don't get this meme. Innovation can happen anywhere - and in fact it often does regardless of how seemingly 'useless' the application is. Livejournal is 'boring', but out of it we got Memcached; Facebook is a 'PHP doodad' (actual news article called it that, I kid you not!); out of it we got HipHop and Cassandra and Thrift. Friendfeed is a 'frivolous social app', and out of it we got Tornado. “The best minds of my…

All of these are hacks. Interesting and useful, but hacks. None of these will be around in ten years. It's not the kind of future-inspiring innovation the author was referring to. Web applications don't seem trivial -- they are trivial. Scaling them means being creative, but don't confuse that with true innovation.

I say this without irony: I think that Facebook changes everything. If Facebook is not around in 10 years, then at least one social networking site will be. People want to be able to easily communicate online with the people they know in a global way. Facebook is becoming the global human database.

Re: America Lacks Meaningful Innovation

#63

Post by Detrus »

It would be great to have a comparison of fluff to meaningful innovation today vs. decades ago. How many man hours were spent on silly military ventures? Manned surveillance satellites, nuclear artillery, boomer subs, ICBMs, MIRV, the Orion project etc. These particular projects led nowhere and had few useful side effects. It would be interesting to add up the man hours and compare it to the web economy.

Rhetoric is enjoyable to read, fun to write but in-depth analysis of our economic and technological progress is a hard problem.

As far as the web goes, more can be done on it even before we resort to poorly served enterprise/medicine/energy markets for new ideas. It's the same problem desktop software once had when that market was over-saturated with word processor or email client clones. It's only today that there are word processors with new features, like the no-distraction theme. That could have been done then, but there was a bad environment for new ideas.

Web people are chasing clone ideas because there's a bad environment for ideas again. There's too much feature overlap between various social network and communication tool attempts like conversate, qonversation, twitter, reddit, HN etc. Focus on execution over ideas might matter more for your personal success, but it's horrible for technological progress.

Also I don't expect the web culture of young hipsters and hackers getting excited about enterprise/medicine/energy. Such markets could be served indirectly, through some generic CMS/communication/portal/DB thing.

Re: America Lacks Meaningful Innovation

#65

Post by william42 »

thorwed123 wrote: post #37
shadowsun7 wrote: post #22

I don't get this meme. Innovation can happen anywhere - and in fact it often does regardless of how seemingly 'useless' the application is. Livejournal is 'boring', but out of it we got Memcached; Facebook is a 'PHP doodad' (actual news article called it that, I kid you not!); out of it we got HipHop and Cassandra and Thrift. Friendfeed is a 'frivolous social app', and out of it we got Tornado. “The best minds of my…

Hadoop rather mapreduce came from Google which is a great innovation. Cassandra came from Dynamo; And Dynamo is from Amazons R and D efforts. Btw Amazon is an innovation as it leads to large amount of savings in energy. Thrift,Tornado,HipHop -> not innovations useful programming tools but not gonna change anything. Rarely any innovations have come out of Web Applications. In fact the best innovation in data mining [T…

Are you seriously saying that Google and Amazon aren't web application companies?

Re: America Lacks Meaningful Innovation

#66

Post by dvse »

There might be more to selling ads than initially meets the eye - the ability to connect specialized products and services with interested audience can help drive all sorts of innovation quite unrelated to social media. Many of these projects may never take off without advances in targeted advertising.

Indeed better segmentation and the abiolity to get real time feedback could bring about some rather fundamental changes to the very nature of the consumer economy and the way demand is estimated and prices are set on a very broad range of products - full consequences are not easy to appreciate.

Re: America Lacks Meaningful Innovation

#67

Post by BenSS »

shadowsun7 wrote: post #22

I don't get this meme. Innovation can happen anywhere - and in fact it often does regardless of how seemingly 'useless' the application is. Livejournal is 'boring', but out of it we got Memcached; Facebook is a 'PHP doodad' (actual news article called it that, I kid you not!); out of it we got HipHop and Cassandra and Thrift. Friendfeed is a 'frivolous social app', and out of it we got Tornado. “The best minds of my…

When I think 'innovation' I'm generally not even thinking about web applications - but you've got some great examples!

I think of more physical projects like RepRap (reprap.org) OpenFarmTech and SpaceX that are really pushing things in a new way. I'm sure there's plenty more if people look for them outside the software space.

Re: America Lacks Meaningful Innovation

#69

Post by nkassis »

The author mentions healthcare as an area of innovation but until something happens to the massive regulation hurdles that are in place, healthcare is hard to revolutionize. I'm working on a research project that could be used for clinical stuff but it would be the process of going through FDA approval for the software and all is a major deterrent.
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