Pointless IT Innovations Considered Harmful

Makarand writes "According to a comment column in the guardian innovations in IT are most often simply more trouble than they are worth. Most innovations in IT today are platform specific and are easy to come up with in the computing fields. Innovating gets easier if the platform sticks around for a long time. These innovations accrue incompatibilities making it difficult for users to switch platforms and absorb the costs of switching to a new platform. Users will not switch to a competitor's product if they believe that their platform will be later updated to deliver the same benefits."

Comments

The article is a big M$ love fest.

[Erris]

The author has cleverly confused "standards" with market lock in in order to push M$.NOT. Standards come from organizations like IEEE, W3C, ISO and what not. Market lock in comes from comercial vendors who corrupt those standards and make it painful for users to do anything but lease their software. Real standards alow for innovation because they don't change. You can add onto and improve real software without losing anything. Market lock in is a product of closed source development which he details very well in the first few paragraphs of the article to create fear. He details some of the wastefull losses suffered because of closed source development further that fear then paradoxially concludes that the answer is the newest closed source monster. Let's look at some of the silly things he says to support dubious chain of thought.

If we could start again from scratch, with hindsight, we might well decide to adopt the MCA bus, or something similar. Since we are not starting from scratch, we have to consider the switching costs.

PCI anyone? MCA failed because IBM made it too expensive relative to the hoads of imported clones that soon swamped the market. Yet CERN made a better bus and it was adopted under reasonable use terms. The more open standard won.

One of the many reasons that Apple lost the desktop wars was the conclusion arrived at by every rational person: that Apple was bound to lose. One day,

Apple is dying, he says. Right. I can't think of a better computer for most people to own. But that pales in comparison to the finishing touch:

One day, Microsoft could face a similar problem [that Apple supposedly suffered] with GNU/Linux. So not only must it maintain Windows' dominance, it has to maintain the perception of future dominance. In this case, of course, the answer is Microsoft.net.

Of course! Now I see the answer, all of the illogical strings above have tied my thoughts into a knot, but M$.NOT will set me free. I am free of fear and confusion knowing that M$ Office will alaways predominate, that my platoform performance and security is much less important than conforming so I don't look foolish. Yes, free from fear, uncertianty and doubt. I am a rational person and now know that market lock in is more important than standards. I'll just sit in my single window manager (AKA Windoze) prison and watch as warring companies smash all the ammenities so that nothing ever works right and what does work won't for long. I'll eat whatever new trash M$ throws into my cage.

What a laugh. It is so obvious that free code with it's transparency and freedom of modification solves all of the problems the author can dream up and that others suffered. Free software is modular, replacable and never dies. MCA runs just fine under linux and a 486 PS/2 makes an OK workstation that can effectively interoperate with more modern hardware. Under propriatory code, PS/2 is simply junk like most any older computer. Free software has been ported out to all maner of hardware and it's users can make use of anything out there, Arm to IA64. Because XFree86 is free and open, I can have any number of window managers, each vasty superior to M$, and they can all interoperate together. Even the silly painful world of M$ Office formats has been made less painful by Open Office, K Office and other free and open codes that can read that crap and extract the information out of it. It's amazing that the article started off with a very perceptive view of the evils of propriatory closed software development but ended up recomending no change except the adoption of some new M$ garbage.