Slashdot Mirror
No More Next Big Thing?
CthuluOverlord writes "CNET News.com is reporting that Nicholas Donofrio, Big Blue's executive vice president of innovation and technology, made a declaration on Tuesday in an interview with ZDNet Asia. 'The fact is that innovation was a little different in the 20th century. It's not easy (now) to come up with greater and different things. If you're looking for the next big thing, stop looking. There's no such thing as the next big thing.'" Donofrio goes on to explain that he sees innovation as being services or social changes nowadays, rather than simply a better moustrap. What's the verdict? Is tech innovation dead?
The idea that tech innovation is dead implies that we will now recycle the same tech in slightly modified form, because we have discovered every useful thing. I THINK NOT. What is more likely is that Mr. Donofrio suffers from failure of the imagination. Usually, when someone make a claim this outsized and this ludicrous, the next big thing is literally right around the corner. Mr. Donofrio can't see it - maybe none of us can. But it will come, and its implications may be good or may be bad - tech is like that, but it won't stop until we can control matter directly with our minds :-D
I have nothing to hide. So, why are you spying on me?
Sounds like the "Everything that can be invented has already been invented" myth.
Around the turn of the last century, people used to say basically this same thing. I think this is going to be one of those quotes that people laugh about in a hundred years.
From the sound of this article, they should add another one to the list.
This is just like Albert Abraham Michelson announcing (in 1896) that physics is dead and complete with nothing left to discover. Since then, I think there have been some shocking advancements.
I tire of articles that basically say, "Look, look, we found a person who holds an important position in the corporate world and they said something without thinking (possibly just to make shock value news)! Let's all point and laugh."
My work here is dung.
Nicholas sounds rather like the legendary Charles H. Duell, former Commissioner of the U.S. House of Patents in 1899, who was reported to have urged then-President McKinley to close down the Office, saying, "everything that can be invented has been invented".
Now, I know this particular story is apocryphal, but it's interesting that we're hearing basically the same line a little over a century later. Odds are real good it will be wrong this time, too.
Nick ought to know better...but he seems to be suffering from a serious lack of imagination. Not a good thing for the 'executive vice president of innovation and technology' at IBM...
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
Let just wait till macworld 2007 shall we? ;p
Jonathanjk.com
Is tech innovation dead?
Let's examine that.
The World Wide Web was hailed as a big innovation in the late 90's. Initially Bill "The Genius" Gates (III) didn't give it much thought in his ground-breaking (if you dropped it from a great enough height it could break some very brittle flooring) book, but the bandwagon was suddenly moving like a conestoga wagon with a super charged 426 hemi under the hood. Problem was start-ups and pundits alike predicted a massive and sudden revolution. A shame the infrastructure it would depend upon was like those old wooden wagon wheels when 500 ft-lbs of torque hit them, so the whole thing flopped. Now, it's actually gaining traction and moving because infrastructure is better and even old infrastructure was found to support high bandwidth with better technology to support it (this was actually a BIG THING, but most people didn't even notice it. Boy, I knew people working all over the place on ways to up the bandwidth of last-mile copper.)
So, you see, sometimes the NEXT BIG THING isn't so obvious. It's also, IMHO, heavily dependent upon social change, like Cell Phone adoption and use (once only for the elite, now any idiot can have one.)
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Everything that can be invented has been invented.
In 1899, then Patent Commissioner, Charles H. Duell reportedly announced that "everything that can be invented has been invented."
Hajo Monogamy: Belief so strong that millions of people end perfectly good relationships in order to start a new one.
yeah, it's certainly true that without the incredible newness of the intarwebmotron things are gonna slow down for a little while, but still, come on.
.... To Wall Street. Then they won't have anything to throw money at.
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
then renovate.
They called me mad, and I called them mad, and damn them, they outvoted me. -Nathaniel Lee
I have a patent on The Next Big Thing, whatever it might turn out to be, so whoever invents it can expect to hear from my attorney upon producing said invention.
This sig, aah-ah, is comin' like a ghost-sig...
::cough::
BIOTECH!?!?!
What about the up and coming functional genomics?!?
E = m * c^(Hammer)
...Poppycock!
...Considering the number of rediculous patents being filed, it looks like he's mostly right. The only thing left is for Netcraft to confirm it. :)
Innovation may be stifled but it's not for lack of ideas. The coporate influence in copyright and patent laws are the choke point.
UNIX/Linux Consulting
More generally biomimetics and innovation from molecular biology will eclipse the innovation that has followed upon the IT revolution.
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
Oh come on... how can he claim innovation is dead? There are tons of innovative products that have flooded the marketplace.
Cold Fusion could happen by 2099 no? We could also cure cancer, AIDS, and a whole host of other things. Yes, alot of "invention" right now is actually synergy more than anything else, but there still is progress out there. Biotech, human genome project, robotics, etc. Now with current leadership in place, we might be enjoying these things on beach front property in Topeka, Kansas, but all the same, invention will continue.
---
When you come to a fork in the road, take it! --Yogi Berra--
"Research ! A mere excuse for idleness; it has never achieved, and will never achieve any results of the slightest value."
-- Benjamin Jowett (1817-93), British theologian.
1f u c4n r34d th1s u r34lly n33d t0 g37 l41d
As one of my college instructor told me, the next the big thing has already been around for at least ten years before anyone bother to take notice. The Internet been around since the 1970s but no one noticed until the web browser and general access became available in 1995. The concepts for a lot of late 20th century technology (i.e., TV, radio, radar and microwave ovens) that we take for granted today was developed in the 1900s through 1940s. The next big thing may already exist right now, we just don't know about it until it appears on Slashdot. ;)
i really think he needs to rephrase "If you're looking for the next big thing, stop looking. There's no such thing as the next big thing," to "If you're looking at IBM for the next big thing, stop looking. There's no such thing as the next big thing at IBM". than it would make sense. otherwise this man has the ability to see into the future and read the minds of all engineers worldwide, which i doubt. this sounds more like an excuse for not having results than anything else. i can't believe he said that, was he drunk? maybe not, but it certainly doesn't sound like anything is going to come out of his department.
A lack of creativity on his part does not imply a lack of possibilities.
I think in many ways his commentary is right on the money. We will continue to have technological advances, such as our lack of development in battery technology improving, but they will be for social reasons (no more petroleum and less pollution). The focus from now on will be on how we live and what technologies we incorporate, not new technologies to replace aspects of our life. People are starting to find ways to live like a human being again, thanks in no small part to the irony of ironies: technology demonstrating and, in many ways, striving to overcome the alienation created in industrial living.
If he the foresight to state that "innovation is alive" he would be inventing the next big thing now.
His statement is simplistic and is a cop-out. If anyone could foresee the-next-big-thing, they'd be making it. All others just throw their hands up, say it can't be done, and move along.
--Jim http://www.runfatboy.net/
Greets! I ran a panel on this in 2003 at the Hyertext conference [http://www.ht03.org/panels.html#panel1 ] I think Pete came closest to getting it right - predicting a 'hot or not' for the general web - now see Digg [http://www.digg.com/ ]. We also ran a special issue linked to the panel in JoDI [http://jodi.tamu.edu/?vol=5&iss=1 ]
The problem with the rat race is, even if you win, you're still a rat!
its mousetrap, not moustrap damnit!
As others have already pointed out, the guy's statement has been made before. Perhaps he wants to leave a legacy, and as he is saying that IBM has pretty much collapsed as an entity for innovation, perhaps he wants to get into a book of stupid quotes from the early 21rst century. By recycling idiotic comments others have made in the past, he only proves he can't even come up with an original saying. If he was my head of tech innovation, he would be looking for a new job tomorrow.
As long as innovation is crushed at the patent level, then yes, the NBT is never going to happen.
Things like planes, computers, cars and phones all happened because someone took something, and made it better. Now we have scum sucking lawyers fighting over simple lines of code, and even now our own DNA.
That's not necessarily a bad thing. If we keep up the pointing and laughing, perhaps they'll stop doing it.
Got it exactly wrong. The curve, whether or not you like Kurzweil, is headed up. The interesting part is the next 'fracturing of the equilibrium' will, as usual, be military. It took from 1905 to 1944 for the last one to reach the common man. Now we're at the mercy of Moores' law so instead of 39 years ... 39 minutes?
(please excuse the mixed buzzwords)
Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.
Considering anyone with access to a computer is capable of innovating new things (langauges/programs/software driven services).
I wouldn't be suprised if the 'next best thing' is a very clever piece of software, or service provided by one.
Everyone thinks that progress is going to come to an end, because they can't imagine what the next big thing could be, but that's their failing, not progresses.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
A while back the head of the US patent office declare it closed because according to him all possible inventions had been thought of, there was no room for any more innovation. The office was re-opened shortly after that moron had been removed. We're millions of patents past that now. It's an attitude of small-minded people, I'm looking forward to the future.
Nicholas Donofrio, Big Blue's executive vice president of innovation and technology WHAT?!?! V.P. of Innovation and Technology?!?!!! Holy Shit what moron, good choice for your innovative thought leader IBM.
That's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard. What kind of ego must the guy have if he thinks humans have already "discovered everything important" and "invented everything?"
At the beginning of the 20th century, most physicists thought physics was "nearly complete" and just the finer details just had to be tended to. And then quantum mechanics turned the entire field on its head. Nobody expected such a development, and it completely changed the way we look at everything. I realize that's not explicitly "innovation," but quantum theory yields a ton of innovation every day. (Price check, aisle 3!)
I'd love to see his face when virtual reality becomes real reality, and innovation becomes anything that can be envisioned. Or when (if) we discover a multiverse, or interstellar space travel. The computer revolution -just- happened, and it was completely that: a REVOLUTION. Don't be so asinine as to assume it can't happen again, Mr. Donofrio. I, like, totally wouldn't be friends with you.
We haven't even invented faster than light travel, time travel, teleportation or cloaking devices.
We haven't even invented a self repleneshing beer can.
The Internet is full. Go Away!!!
... that there won't be a Next Big Thing (tm). There, I said it. This comment is stupid. Why is inovation so slow? Because we've been trained as consumers. We consume products, ideas, jobs, social changes. People are beign force fed ideas by a few entities (the government, some large companies, some influential individuals). This is not the age of informacion, this is the age of consumism. Get off your couch, log off the latest online game. Go write something, go paint a picture, go create something. One of those things is going be a Next Big Thing (tm). Leveling up in WoW is not going to be it. Playing DnD improves your imagination, playing a computer game most of the times kills your imagination.
please excuse my apathy
It would seem to me that there are still a bunch of stuff to be invented or discovered. However I understand where he is coming from. He looks at the industry and thinks that we have a basis for everything that we will ever need and it is now just a matter of pushing it to its limits. More than likely we will need to "re-invent the wheel" to get where we want to be however.
And I'll even go so far as to say the reason why there will be no next big thing - it's our broken-ass patent system.
Someone, somewhere out there has part of your brilliant idea buried in a vaguely worded submarine patent. Soon as you hit the big time - wham. Some greedy patent grubbing jerk will sue you for daring to make use of "his idea" that he's been sitting on not using for the last half a dozen years or so.
Only big business has enough lawyers these days to explore uncharted waters. Which means that business will be in charge of innovation. Which means that no product/idea/whatever will get the green light without a financial analysis conducted by a committee of people who will 99.9% of the time tend to be conservative, or maybe even just plain clueless as to the new idea's implications.
The days of the solo guy in the garage coming up with the thing that changes the world are over.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
has been invented what else is left?
if vegetarians eat vegetables why are cannibals not humanitarians.
CNET got the 'next big thing' in News by reporting this :)
If there really is no next big thing then IBM wouldn't need a Vice President of Innovation anymore, would they?
He goes on to say, "we are looking for more IP lawyers, though."
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
There is no such thing as the next, big, unpatented thing.
Large multinationals are the only organizations left with resources to make and market anything.
The only left open to innovation is making money...
"The advancement of the arts, from year to year, taxes our credulity and seems to presage the arrival of that period when human improvement must end."
Henry L. Ellsworth, Commissioner of the Patent Office, 1843
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
This man will lose his job within a week. Pretend you're IBM, a tech company that just got done telling everyone it could in the last decade that it's not a dinosaur. Then this guy opens his big fat yap and undoes three years of work in Asia.
(Yes, I'm also an IBM stockholder. Don't laugh; I've made money.)
Well, then if there is no point in looking for The Next Big Thing(TM), then maybe we should start looking for The Next Big Thing After The Next Big Thing(TM).
www.wavefront-av.com
This is the kind of thing that will probably be proven wrong next week when the next next big thing will be announced.
.
[1] Actually an urban legend, but close enough to the feeling at the time.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
Either flying cars or water powered cars will be the next big thing, but until then, nothing.
It's like Michael Jordan - the Chicago Bulls did not know they were drafting the greatest NBA player in history, who would create massive revenue for the business and revolutionize endorsements and salaries for players.
The Next Big Thing will happen in part because nobody really knows it's going to catch lightning in a bottle. If everyone knows about it, speculation and hype erode profitability.
IBM's comment is just ridiculous. There's the famous patent comment from the last century which others have pointed out. Then there's the Web, which both Steve Jobs and Bill Gates thought was a waste of time at one point. Video game consoles were considered a fad, and not a viable big business. So was digital music, broadband, online shopping, mobile phones and small-scale stock brokers.
There are always things which can be gigantic market and economy changers, even if they aren't The Internet or Radio or The Combustion Engine.
I can think of quite a few items that might completely change huge sections of business in the next ten-twenty years:
Wireless everywhere - 'nuff said
Hydrogen or other alternative fuel vehicles - no commodity driven marketplace for Middle East interests.
Digital Ink (e-Ink)
Droids/Automatons (we already have Roomba and Asimo - I am already preparing to be crushed by the first robot rebellion)
...but rather change where you are looking. This quote would only come from someone in a huge company, since that's not where most the great tech innovations came from. Odds are, the next big thing is already out there, and two guys in a garage, basement, dormroom, etc are looking at it right now trying to figure out exactly what to do with it.
It also reminds me of Isaac Asimov's Foundation series, where this enormous empire of billions of planets is going to fall apart, in part because scientists, engineers, and other technical people believe that everything that can be invented has already been invented, and the empire begins to wane as a certain ennui sets in.
It is always a bad thing to think that we already know everything. How do you know that someone won't invent warp drive ten years from now? Or maybe there is a force we can harness, say, like electricity, that we don't know about yet but will discover fifteen years from now. Or perhaps some kind of antigravity device will be invented that allows cars to fly. Or maybe GM will put the finishing touches on their automatic navigation system they've been testing near San Diego for 15 years, that allows cars to drive themselves with the help of a huge network of computers controlling every section of road and each car, and an array of sensors in each vehicle that prevent collisions, so that cars can go 100 mph on the freeways at a distance of inches between them, making traffic officers, traffic tickets, traffic courts, traffic jams, traffic accidents, and other traffic things a thing of the past. I'd say that all of these potential things would change a lot of things.
Who's to say that innovation is over?
My work here is dung.
That's probably what they said during the industrial revolution...
A million monkeys and this is the best sig they could come up with...
Perhapse you haven't noticed the breadth of history presented by that list?. This kind of thing has gone on for a long time... and isn't likely to stop any time soon.
Help! I'm drowning in a flood of bad metaphors!
We're in fact seeing a rapid pace of technology development - I could wave my hand at the past 20 Slashdot news stories alone for an example. It's strange to hear this coming from IBM, who has become so friendly to Open Source these past few years. If the innovation in software isn't coming from Open Source these days, it ain't coming from nowhere.
But just a teeny tiny bit. People who claim innovation has ended because "we've invented everything already" are inevitably wrong, because future knowledge cannot be predicted (or it would be present knowledge). However, we do need to keep in mind that people solve the easiest, most beneficial technological problems first. So you necessarily see a progression where it takes more investment to achieve "wow" technological breakthroughs. (I hear a lot of PhD students on Slashdot talk about how $PHYSICS_GREAT's dissertation was ~15 pages, while theirs is 150. This is an example of the above effect.)
We *may* have passed the point where one person working alone can come up with great ideas, but even that is far from certain. So yeah, this is just another necessarily false prediction, but it's true innovation keeps getting harder.
Rank my idea: http://www.sinceslicedbread.com/node/531
What has come out in the 21st century?
The Ipod and the mp3 player market, much more advanced 3d video cards, composite 3d accelerated desktops, new video players and microized computers that are pda in size (blackberry, Ipod video, Orgami, etc), a shift from dynamic cgi websites to interactive ones wiht complex javascript and ajax, and the $100 computer that is quite feature filled.
Whats in the futre? Better wifi and other internet technologies that are wireless, physics accelerators in 3d cards, 3d interfaces, and seemingless networked clusters or SSI(single system image) where you can hook up several computers that act as one whole computer image rather than the traditional cluster.
Also phones are going to take off as well with bluetooth and other technologies. The europeans already have it because they are not under monopolies who like to sell trusted drm midi ringtones for $3.
http://saveie6.com/
I think he thought he was in a quarterly stockholders meeting and was speaking just for his company, which is fast becoming a services only company.
There are new science discoveries all the time which will eventually lead to new engineering applications.
If you've been to a single sci-fi movie or read a sci-fi book once in your life, you'll know that there are so many crazy ideas that are just waiting for the technology to progress enough. Ideas that are not only 'the next big thing', but technology that has the potential to change the world.
It's sad to see such a lack of vision in a person that should be a leader.
Seriously... Who's producing truly innovative technlogies anymore? Nowadays, the entire technology industry seems to be about:
1) Making some small and/or insignificant improvements to an existing product
2) Bumping up the version number, or adding something like "XL" or "GT" the product name.
3) Charging 10% more for it, and using some slick marketing to convince users that this is the Next Big Thing(TM).
I haven't seen any real major innovations in the computer industry since the start of mainstream Internet adoption about 10 years ago. Everything else was evolutionary, not revolutionary.
He is quoted out of context, and is hard to know what exactly he meant
by "stop looking for the next big thing" quote. As far as I know, he may be saying that his job is not to hold a crystal ball in hand and try to predict the next big thing (neither should you). And he does *not* say there is nothing new to be discovered. He only says it is harder to come by these things in the tech world today. Elsewhere in the article it stands out clear that he is busy seeking to enable innovation, instead of getting worried about what the "next big thing" will be. So clearly he does not discard the power of innovation.
One cental remark he makes, that "innovation today is more about services, process, business models or cultural innovation than just product innovation" sounds *very* well put, IMHO. Let us not forget which sort of innovation Google, eBay, Yahoo, Amazon, Orkut, LinkedIn, Napster (the original), iTunes, and even Slashdot itself, among others, brought to the world -- hint: it is not technical.
Quem a paca cara compra, paca cara pagará.
Sure. I had a bag-phone (still have that thing) which you really pretty much needed all that transmitting power for, because towers were few and far between. It was also a big thing to spend $35/month on fees.
Now? Now people shell over $100/month and are talking about The Bob-knows-what in the pub, on the road, in the store, on the sidewalk, etc. and The Bob-knows-why have to be connected all the time or their lives will come to a halt the same way a cow does after a 10,000 ft plummet.
Douglas Adams made a lot of fun about Dominant Life on earth being Cars (hence the name Ford Prefect) and people's fascination with digital watches. What do you think aliens would think now? Cell phones are the dominent life form and these gangly things are their servants.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
and not ONE proclaiming that they have the "next big thing".... in their PANTS!
C'mon people, you can do better than this.
Where does the school board find them and why do they keep sending them to ME?
When he saw people walking on the moon, don't said that it was a big thing.
:-)
He saw the automotive, telephone, radio, movie, television, color photographie, plane, sound-breaking plane, x-ray, H-bomb, home tape recording, etc. been invented !
When men walk on the moon, it say "Oh well, just sometime a little more than a supersonic plane!"
This Nicholas Donofrio is just a old grandfather next to be retired.
Why I should care ? My self, I saw tv from b&w to color, Electronical time keaping wrist-worn, calculator wrist-worn, GPS wrist-worn, tv wrist-worn, camera wrist-worn, when I saw the first Linux wrist-worn computer in 2001, it was a big thing, the one that made a Slashdot article this week wasn't a such big thing.
A author, a lot of years ago have write "Everything has been say!" a lot a people talking about that
Ceci n'est pas une Signature !
...and you'll certainly stop finding.
How did this guy get that high up in an IBM research org?
For example - - Digg!
(I'll get my coat...)
AT&ROFLMAO
Pretty self centered of IBM to say that. Just because they have chosen not to innovate and concentrate on services and social changes, this guy feels there will be no further innovation. So, if Big Blue doesn't do it, nobody will.
yeah, fusion power or the space elevator (both likely to be developed this century) won't be big by any standard...
I'm sure slashdoters could name off a number of other items that will have very big implications that are likely to be developed in the next century.
I ignore Anonymous Coward posts. If you want to discuss something, that's awesome. Log in.
I would like to throw my weight out there and call Donofrio an idiot, at least in relation to this statement. There are still many Next Big Things that we have yet to achieve (though the ability to achieve such may or may not exist, but we won't know till we try.)
A short list:
- Hovering vehicles
- Anti gravity (which is probably related to the above)
- hand held energy weapons
- teleportation
- economical space travel (think "to mars", or, at the least, consumer viability for going to the moon)
- curing cancer
- controlling computers with our brains
- mechanical prostetics that respond either to brain waves or nerves (we're right on the edge of this one- I believe someone had a really basic, bulky unit working, it just has to become available for the common man)
- growing of artificial organs for transplants (goodbye organ donors!)
- interactive holographic interfaces
- solar energy that's +60% effecient
Okay, maybe that list isn't so short. Sure, many of those fields are being worked on, but nothing concrete and ready for mass use has been created (to my knowledge.) All of those items will help to advance the human race in terms of how we live and effect our environment, as well as populating into space.
Also, I'm still waiting for my damned hoverboard. Back to the Future Part II is full of lies, I tell you, lies! (I realize that the events in BttF2 don't occur to 2015, but we should be seeing regular hover technology by now if we are to meet the deadline of mass production for hoverboards that can be used by everyday kids.)
Of course, there is a "next big thing".
Saying that there is no next big thing is saying that we know everything in the entire universe.
The very nature of "next big things" is that they just seem to come "out of blue", without much prediction.
The more unpredictable, the bigger the "next big thing" is.
I would say that we don't even have any idea how much we have no idea about the entire universe.
We have seen huge innovation because computers became cheap. Everyone could play or, using slightly more technical jargon, the barriers to entry were quite low. Personally, I don't see an end to innovation any time soon. We have nowhere near tapped out the potential of computers to change the way we live. All we need is for someone to crack a couple of tough nut problems and we'll be off like crazy. My own favorite vision is the 'Santa Claus machine' postulated by Don Landcaster. Pop in a design and out comes a product. That would change the economy more than a little bit.
Maybe he has already found the Next Big Thing and just doesn't want us to catch on....
Big ones, small ones, some as big as yer 'ead!
Give 'em a twist, a flick o' the wrist...
Time to sell the big blue stock! Mr. Donofrio shouldn't be heading up the innovation and technology department if that's what he really believes. While it's possible that services or social changes will be more of the focus over the next few years (which I would doubt) to say that innovation is a done deal is preposterous and damning for business.
You can have my cynical agnosticism when you pry it from my cold, dead logic.
If I were a creative, hard-working guy at IBM, and I heard something like this, I'd be thinking that I needed to get a new job, as I'd have no future at IBM if that is the sort of thing coming down from the top.
http://www.thebricktestament.com/the_law/when_to_
ConsultingFair.com
It's a common phenomenon in history where there is a cultural lull and pundits are claiming that everything that can be done has been done.
Just look at biotech. WTF, this executive is a tunnel vision idiot. There are amazing things on the horizon.
If Donofrio, IBM's Grand Poo-Bah of Innovation and Technology, is really espousing this as the company line, innovators everywhere can now breath easier in knowing that their largest potential worldwide competitor, one with near-bottomless personnel and cash resources, will no longer be racing them to realize innovative ideas and technologies from the shadowy ether of "just how exactly does {x} work?".
The basic research space is [mostly] all yours now. Enjoy!
Sad for IBM, though.
The whole "next big thing" concept generally means you can't see it comming.
Any grammatical or spelling errors above are for comic effect, and do not signify imperfection in the writer.
Considering the enormous amount of innovation which has taken place over the past 100 years, from widespread electricity, to faster transportation, telephones, radio, television, computational devices to commputer networks to mainframes, drugs and medical advancements, surveillance via camera to satellite... I can go on.
What will happen as new innovation continues, is essentially the wrapping-up of these new technologies into functional packages, i.e. onboard USEFUL computers for cars, better communication and record keeping in hospitals.
The base technologies which we now work with daily will become more refined, and as such, will become more accessible. Sometimes, the best innovation is to take an existing product and improve upon it.
As far as social innovation, this is inevitable; our smaller planet due to globalization will change in a big way as time passes, from balance of wealth to equal rights, to widespread democracy / democratic socialism / democratic monarchy / democratic monopoly -- we will continue to change.
What is software? It isn't a new technology, it's a new solution, and the solution can be applied as such.
When I invent my remote bitch slapping machine, he'll be the first to feel its wrath.
Any civilisation is driven by technology. Modern technology is driven by miniaturisation. So contrary to the article's prediction, we're should be fine for now. But not for long! Moore's law is on it's last legs. If there's nothing to replace it, humanity is heading for a depression.
Many are pointing out that this sounds like Charles H. Duell, who wanted to close down the Patent Office.
Well, I too want to close down the patent office (for opposite reasons though) so I think I'm going to have to agree with this assessment!
m
Anyone who goes looking for the Next Big Thing (tm) isn't going to find it. It's not predictable. We never know whether something is going to catch on in a big way, until after it happens. All you can do is sit back and wait to see what people are paying attention to.
Take a look at Microsoft, for example. They have a huge war chest full of monopoly money and they have been actively trying to create the Next Big Thing for nearly two decades now, and not once have they succeeded. Don't you think that if it were possible to predict the Next Big Thing, that those with the financial and political means to do Whatever They Want (tm) would have a virtual lock on it?
In technology, the innovations that change everything come from where you least expect them. That's because the big dogs have a vested interest in preserving the status quo.
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It is no surprise to me that comments like this are starting to appear from people who should know better. In the past century much of the impetus for innovation in the day to day lives of Americans, has come from, at some point, basic research. In the past few decades we have been reducing funding on basic research and thus less is being done. Now with that said Mr. Donofrio obviously isn't aware of other sectors of technology. Biotech is getting funded by both private donors as well as government agencies. I am reasonably sure there will continue to be breakthroughs in that field for at least a few years to come. But all of science relies on developing technologies that are needed to learn more about some basic system. These type of experiments are not being funded. And in the long run if this does not change I could see Mr. Donofrio statement being closer to reality.
This reminds me of a high school history lesson, we were studying the turn of the 20th century and a patent office administrator had said something along the lines of "no more new patents need be issued", implying everything mankind could possibly invent has been invented. If only he knew. Just because one of IBM's VPs currently lacks a futuristic vision doesn't mean that there aren't many greater things to come. One need not look further than the front page of Slashdot every few hours to see this.
Oh, and btw, since when was innovation ever easy?
We're just seeing the whining of the ever-narcissistic Baby Boomers turning old and decrepit. Just like they act like they invented fun in the 1950s, they're acting like creativity is dying along with their own will to create.
Of course, theirs will become the conventional wisdom. Because the corporate media has incubated them from before conception to cashing in their life insurance. The truth doesn't matter, just the ease of marketing to Baby Boomers; fools ever easily separated from money, as long as the "truth" is "as seen on TV(TM)".
The rest of us will carry on without them, as we did before, during and after their blight on demographic marketing.
--
make install -not war
Innovation
Function: noun
1 : the introduction of something new
2 : a new idea, method, or device
3 : (buzz word) a term used to loosely relate to 1 & 2, primarily to manipulate an audience into favoring whatever someone who wants something is talking about. Often used to deceive a less informed audience and scare them into compliance
It is usually used in FUD, commonly preceded by the word(s) "stifle" or "hurt" or "slow" or "KILL". Other uses are to "hype" a mundane/trivial feature and or addition to something which usually isn't very spectacular to begin with.
See: "We need a multi-tiered internet ($$) as to not stifle innovation."
"Aero is innovative"
"Piracy slows innovation"
"Communism hurts innovation"
"Terrorist kill innovation"
"Open source stifles innovation"
"insert item here does not benefit or is inconvenient to me, therefore it stifles innovation"
I believe def. 1 and 2 are alive and well.
i don't care
Those who say there is no more innovation have no imagination.
--- Location Unknown
...we still have to invent warp drive, phasers, photon torpedos, transporters, and replicators.
Oh, and androids.
-William Brendel
Its the next big thing!!!
Jonathanjk.com
"Ev'rything's up to date in Royal City
They've gone about as far as they can go!
They've got a baby screening system that you just can't beat
When your social life begins to slow
Kissing all the girls in Royal City
And I never heard a one say no!
When DNA's compatible the kiss will taste real sweet
If not you kiss the next girl and stay light upon your feet
I've 6 million more girls that I would really like to meet!"
-from the first gay Cowboy movie
One word: Biotech!
Unless the world's basic economic problem -- resource scarcity -- has been resolved, there will always be room for The Next Big Thing. Of course, IBM's current business has little to do with these fundamental issues, so I guess I can understand his point from his perspective. But from a wider view, it's absurd.
I'm not sure if I agree with his conclusions, but if he's right, and innovation is dead, it could be ironically construed as a 'big thing' in itself. Maybe we're turning a corner where technology is so commonplace and pervasive, we're no longer suprised by it- even when it does new things. In which case, the "next big thing" may be going camping for the weekend.
The criticism over the article should be that Donofrio is just spouting common sense that we already know, not trying to push down some strawman argument that he never espoused.
Everyone's jumping on this guy for pronouncing the death of innovation. But that's not really what he said (or not all of it, anyway). His argument is more that innovation will be focused on services and social changes. Is that really so hard to believe? Certainly all the folks looking to push innovation who were around in the last century seem to be gradually shifting to a service-based model, and there's very sound economic reasons for this. Those same reasons point to a focus on innovation in services over product.
That being said, the guy does say that product-based innovation is over, and that's just nonsense. The focus may be shifting, but there's nothing exclusive about one segment or the other. I suspect the primary motivation here really is for IBM to continue to look innovative despite a dwindling product portfolio (and i think they genuinely are innovative, despite a dwindling product portfolio; it's just this guy's job to sell that image).
Rest assured, innovation is alive and well, the economics of bringing new things out have just changed somewhat. I've got the Next Big Thing right here, actually... or one of 'em, anyway. I know two or three other people who also have the (a?) Next Big Thing. Plenty of innovation going on, if you know how to find it. And if anybody's got some excess cash lying around...
i speak for myself and those who like what i say.
The next big thing will be private space exploitation; tourism, mining the asteroids, microgravity science, exotic/nano materials, settling other celestial bodies. With the exception of China, government funded space operations are obsolete. Profit drive is what's going to open the space frontier up.
Well if you include the aliens that live among us which have invented intesteller travel, teleporter machines and ray guns then that a big part or inventions are gone but there are the oil companies which have patents for a cars that run on air/water/trash and tire companies with lires that don't wear down. Not to mention cold fusion has allready been invented but a conspiraricy not known to me has been covering it up. The only invention left is something that can uncover these conspiracies so there is only one invention left.
Knowledge = Power
P= W/t
t=Money
Money = Work/Knowledge so the less you know the more you make
I tire of articles that basically say, "Look, look, we found a person who holds an important position in the corporate world and they said something without thinking (possibly just to make shock value news)! Let's all point and laugh."
Corporate bigwigs are bound to run out of shocking things to say.
Sometimes having a human do something is a nicer experience, but replacing our tedious duties with machines seems like a fine way to make life a little more livable.
Storm
The fact is, the big players rarely come up with TNBT anyway. If I were on the board of IBM, I would immediately have this man fired. How can the VP of Innovation say there is no NBT.... truly sad. I have at least 2 sure-fired NBT in my own tiny brain, and only a lack of capital and entrepeneural know-how is keeping me from developing them immediately.
So an executive for a former innovation company that is now essentially just a services company says that innovation will be replaced by services.
Why should we listen to this guy at all? If he were saying this from a company that was still aggressively moving things forward, then maybe his opinion would carry some weight, but IBM? Who cares? I guess this is part of their new sales pitch.
"Service without Innovation...We're IBM"
What an inspiration to the troops this guy is! Just go into the laboratory - or computer room - with a couple of bright undergraduates and give them an interesting problem to work on. You will be amazed at what they come up with. I've also worked in industry (3M) and the number of creative people there who came up with new and inventive things was also very impressive. (and not just "post-it notes") Perhaps this guy was just having a bad day and made some ill-considered remarks, I hope so.
Innovation is OLD CRAP reworked to LOOK NEW.
Invention is NEW CRAP.
I wish people would stop using this buzzword as if it means to invent things. tech innovation is the only things left. But there will always be inventions.
The next big thing is directly controlling matter with our minds!
Off the top of my head, here are a bunch of things that haven't yet been invented, and most definitely WILL change the world when it is ...
- cold fusion (may lead to: ultra-small, nearly limitless batteries for handhelds, cars, etc.)
- anti-gravity (better transportation methods)
- reliable, useable, near- (or faster than?) light-speed travel
- mass-producible optical computing
- mass-producible quantum computing
- vast, livable colonies on other planets (and the infrastructure by which to travel there regularly / safely)
And so forth. Point is, as long as we can keep dreaming up these kinds of grandiose ideas, technology isn't dead -- far from it.
What an idiot. We shouldn't give famous people air time for saying dumb shit.
"Freedom and Justice for All" is a registered trademark of The United States Govt Inc. Not available in all areas.
Don't worry; porn will help revolutionize the "choke point". If there is anything that has influenced corporate innovation and technology advancement, it's the bottom line... and what produces more profit than the promotion of ideas for "choking the chicken"?
I for one think innovation has gotten out of hand.
Opinion:=TMyOpinion.Create(Me);
Yes, innovation is completely dead. Humanity will never invent anything completely new again, ever. Thanks for playing.
Geez, ask a stupid question, get a stupid answer.
Greetings,
Please read the whole article. And while you are at it, please try to understand the difference between invention and innovation. If you read the article and understand the differences, he is spot on the money. I may not be happy with his premise, but it is very accurate.
He is basically stating that we have reached the limits of what we can innovate, based on what we have already invented. As stated previously, the internet didn't take off until the the web browser was "created". This is a case of invention vs innovation. We had invented all of the tools to provide a web browser long before someone decided to get innovative and merge those tools into a a single tool. When the web browser was created, it was not new technology, instead it was old technology, simply repackaged.
Computer technology is in a very simiar boat right now. Moore's law is still holding true, however, we haven't really invented any new technology in about the last 6 years, instead we are innovating new things based on our existing technology.
It appears that most of the Slashdot crowd agrees this is bunk and, of course, they are correct.
Our understanding of Physics alone is still so incomplete, that until we know it all (and I suspect that day may never come), there will still be tons of possibilities for the next big things coming out of that field alone.
Computer technology is still in its infancy. Anyone who thinks it's not going to change as drastically in the next 50 years as it has in the past 50, is fooling themselves.
Then there's the cool stuff we all want which, we know is possible and is only a matter of time. Cyborg type stuff, for example (and I'm not talking about the previous article on insects). I'm talking about devices implanted in our bodies to give us additional abilities. Imagine having direct internet access from your brain. There's simply NOTHING that makes this impossible and anyone who thinks it won't be a "Big Thing" simply lacks imagination.
I suspect that's the real problem right there. Mr. Donofrio simply lacks imagination.
I had to check twice to make sure that the article wasn't written by Dvorak or Metcalf.
I guess Donofrio's been reading those two, becuase if he things the next "big thing" is more about:
He needs to be talking to Steve Jobs about the success of the iPod.
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
I think this is the mentality of someone who has given up. Maybe this guy is sick of his job, hates his family, and loathes getting up in the morning. What kind of example are you setting for your staff if you make retarded statements like this?
Victory shall be mine!
If you're looking for the next big thing, stop looking.
Ok, thanks for clearing that up for us, guess our society should just stop prospering and get ready for the dark ages.
Check out the cave on the east side of lake Hylia. Strange and wonderful things live in it.
The problem isn't technology, it's cooperation.
Some time ago, I read an article by Tim Berners-Lee which starts off with a description of a technology (semantic web) aided lifestyle where your car will automatically book itself for an oil change with your mechanic, and that type of thing. The thing is, we have all the knowledge and technology to make that kind of stuff happen *today*, yet I still don't think we will see it will happen any time soon.
The problem is that to take things to the next level like that, we need *extensive* ongoing cooperation between hundreds and thousands of people, organizations, and companies - where such cooperation might not have any short term payoff, or the long term payoff might not be in the best financial interest of those involved (ie, Microsoft realizing a universal platform neutral programming language like Java would mean people don't need Windows). I mean, hell, we can't even get broad agreement on a single XML Word Processing format.
Our problems now are more systemic than technologic. We aren't leveraging what we have.
I'll take Cringely's take on it: people overestimate change in the short term and underestimate change in the long term.
thinking there's "no big thing" coming totally misses the fact that *most* people never saw the "next big thing" except those actually making it.
There will be a next big thing, and like every "next big thing", nobody will see it coming. That's the whole point. If you can see the next big thing, YOU go make it.
jackass has no imagination left.
about all I can say about "next big things" is that there are so many developers out there that it can be easily cloned within a matter of days, open-source or not.
"But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
-- Joe
Of course there are no more things to be invented.
Out science fiction writers have been very thorough !
In the Dilbert Future, he already predicted the next big thing - the head cubicle. It's basically a helmet with an integrated phone, monitor, etc. This will be a tremendous cost savings for large companies. Instead of having to use valuable floorspace for cubes, they can stack people with their head cubicles.
Right now, I'm taking up 72 square feet/576 cubic feet (6' deep x 12' long x 8' high) with my cube. That's valuable real estate for someone who, sitting in a chair, wearing a head cubicle, could be accommodated easily by a 3'x3'x4' area. That's only 36 cubic feet. 16 people could be housed in an area the size of my cube.
Sure, stacking people in boxes seems inhumane and degrading, but since when has that stopped companies from realizing a minor decrease in costs? Given the cost of real estate, companies who don't flock to the head cubicle would be at a very serious economic disadvantage.
Given the rate at which new things are being discovered about the properties of materials at nano scales, I would cheerfully bet that there are a number of "big things" still to come.
There is also a market for maybe 5 computers in the whole world.
If only they had done away with software patents back then. Oh wait, there was no software back then.
Learn from the past man. Didn't IBM once say that there was only a market for 5 computers in the world?
This is a very sad statement. IBM still operates one of the few corporate R&D lab operations, but have been shifting theri focus to consulting. Yes it can make more predictible returns. But where will the next atomic force microscope come from?
IBM should find a PR person to babysit this guy.
http://www.viewaskew.com/tv/leno/flyingcar.html
Get moving mad scientists!
BitWorksMusic.com -- odd tunes for odd times
That someone from a company that filed 2,974 patents in 2005 claims that there is no next big thing in 2006?
We're not even close on figuring out how to do the things that we know we will be able to do someday.
For example, instead of grinding up plant seeds to get oil, make plants that leak oil continuously - use something such as pine trees.
Centuries ago, a famous Rabbi once said that "There is nothing new under the sun". In the 19th century someone was famously quoted as saying "Everything that can be invented has already been invented". I dare say there have been a few developments since then. Every generation thinks they are at the pinnacle of technical achievement - and without exception they are proven wrong.
Um, you might be interested in this: urban legend
Here's the important excerpt from that page:
Rumor has it... that a Patent Office official resigned and recommended that the Patent Office be closed because he thought that everything that could possibly be invented had already been invented!
While that statement makes good fun of predictions that do not come to pass, it is none the less just a myth. Researchers have found no evidence that any official or employee of the U.S. Patent Office had ever resigned because there was nothing left to invent. A clue to the origin of the myth may be found in Patent Office Commissioner Henry Ellsworth's 1843 report to Congress. In it he states, "The advancement of the arts, from year to year, taxes our credulity and seems to presage the arrival of that period when human improvement must end." But Commissioner Ellsworth was simply using a bit of rhetorical flourish to emphasize the growing number of patents as presented in the rest of the report. He even outlined specific areas in which he expected patent activity to increase in the future.
Taken out of context, such remarks take on a life of their own and are perpetuated in publication after publication whose authors, rather than check facts, copy and quote each other. For example, recent publications have attributed the "everything that has been invented..." quote to a later commissioner, Charles H. Duell, who held that office in 1899. Unlike Ellsworth, who may have been merely misquoted, there is absolutely no basis to support Duell's alleged statement. Just the opposite is true. Duell's 1899 report documents an increase of about 3,000 patents over the previous year, and nearly 60 times the number granted in 1837. Further, Duell quotes President McKinley's annual message saying, "Our future progress and prosperity depend upon our ability to equal, if not surpass, other nations in the enlargement and advance of science, industry and commerce. To invention we must turn as one of the most powerful aids to the accomplishment of such a result." Duell adds, "May not our inventors hopefully look to the Fifty-sixth Congress for aid and effectual encouragement in improving the American patent system?" These are unlikely words of someone who thinks that everything has been invented.
"You will pay for your lack of vision..." - Emperor Palpatine to Ray Charles
Obviously he has not seen Altiris Software Virtualization Solution. Very Hot!!!
This sounds suspiciously like this quote from 107 years ago:
"Everything that can be invented has been invented." Charles H. Duell, Director of US Patent Office, 1899.
In the past 7000 years of human existence, there has always been a next big thing. In the next 7000 years, it will still be true.
It does appear that areas of technology can be mined out.
Sometimes a breakthrough revives a stuck field. This happened to optics. Optics was a solved geometrical problem. Then came nonlinear optical materials, lasers, active optical components, and a new name, "photonics". Whole new industries emerged.
It's not so much that it doesn't exist, as that it's //hard to spot//.
1) Innovation happens faster, and so gets compared and intergrated more quickly with innovations already on the market. This makes TNBT more difficult to predict, but doesn't eliminate it. It's not so much that TNBT doesn't exist, but that looking for it for the purposes of betting on it is now too risky to be a profitable pasttime.
2) Innovations are now so complex, of necessity, that they often require cooperation of lots of of humans to get into a workable niche. Successful innovations tend to be emergent social phenomena rather than corporate brainchildren (Donofrio says this much, in fact).
You all need to stop comparing quotes from people from more then 100 years ago.
The 18 hundreds and early 19 hundreds were a completely different time.
None of the basic technologies were in place.
Everything back then was new....Like the light bulb. the phonograph, automobile, plains, plumbing, radio, and yes even computers.
God they all that the telegraph was the shit!!
Now lets move to today as see what has changed....Nothing!!
Were still driving on 4 wheels, were still flying in a plane with wings, were still taking a dump and flushing the toilet the same damm way as they did way back in the day, and were still using radio to transfer data.
Rinse wash and repeat.
So many things are still based on technology that came from that time. Sure computers are faster, do a lot more, better this better that...But they are based on the same damm thing they were back in the fifties....Input...doing something....output.
As a society were are at our peak.
I know people are very smart in this world and have a great imagination, but I just cant see anything COMPLETELY new heading our way.
I think science fiction has spoiled us, really....
It's left blank because I have nothing to say to you punks!
I've been waiting FEVERISHLY for someone to finally admit this, because I've been just ITCHING to go out and buy me one of them i-pods and an X-Box (or maybe a PlayStation!) I think I might pick up a DVD player and a laptop computer while I'm at it. Y'see, I hadn't learned my lessons from LP to 8-track to cassette and I just had to go out and buy a CD player, only to find (almost literally the next day) they were coming out with DVD's. That's when I vowed I wouldn't buy a SINGLE new thing until I got someone on record promising that that was IT , and now I have.
I've even heard something about satellite radio lately that was kind of interesting...and oh, HEY, I can finally ditch those "rabbit ears" and get satellite television!!
/sarcasm (mostly)
does this clown seriously expect us to believe there's not going to be another "next big thing" ever?!?! There've always been "next big things" and there always will be.
Or at least there'd better be.
If he knows what's good for him.
This space intentionally left (almost) blank.
I just love these people who declare were almost done with things. Rutherford told the Physics community "stop training students...all we have to figure out is this electron thing and were done" (to paraphrase). Then along came Quantum Mechanics and Relitivity and suddenly there was a job to do and nearly 100 years later were still working on those two next big things. Astronomy did simillarly with cosmology ("if we can just get omega up to 1.0 then we understand it all"). Now its Computer Science's turn to be just about finished....
The point is the next big thing is not something you ever plan for. It happens. Did ARPA know their net was going to change the way we do business? No. Will something else come along and change the way we work, live, and exist? Yes, because it always does.
Now go turn your crystal balls into magic 8 balls. They are more reliable that way.
Today is a gift. Save the receipt.
1) Video on demand coming from internet
2) Next generation forums that will filter trolls away and make interesting speakers rise to the top.
God spoke to me.
As my foggy memory (and limited Google skills) serve, the Ipod was introduced
about 3 years ago (2003).
Would people have taken such a pronouncement as obviously true 3 years ago?
Why should it be given any more credence today?
There are many fields in computing and general science that haven't been explored yet or are just beginning:
Sprite-based video compression, speech recognition which doesn't suck, 3D (holographic) video, motorless robotics (artificial muscles), brain-machine interfaces (there's a working prototype of a brain-operated keyboard), solid-state storage (aka the end of moving parts in computers), hundreds of nanotech discoveries, efficient power generation / storage (boosts in solar cells, efficient hydrogen cells), ultra-efficient home lighting (like with LED's), holographic "touchable" aids for computing a-la Johnny Mnemonic / Minority Report, AI-based audio compression, (sampling the instruments in real-time and generating the notes / effects, or phonemes/variations for speech and songs), photo-realistic computer animated characters which don't suck in the audio sync, the Open Source desktop era which i'm still waiting for...
A simple example of the "next big thing": Do-it-yourself cartoons. A program where you specify certain character designs (or patterns), taking some samples from existing cartoon or anime characters, and specify: "I want this nose, these eyes, a mixture between this and this face", male-female, measurement, body height from 3-heads tall (chibi) to 9 heads-tall characters (ultra-atheltic)...
Or to go to a much simpler example, automatic shading / coloring algorithms. You specify certain spots or lines with certain colors in an area (a drawing you need to colorize), and the paint program interpolates them using AI algorithms, creating a perfect shading for you. That'd render the famous dodge/burn photoshop technique OBSOLETE.
Or how about this? You draw a sketch with paper and pencil and the program creates a 3D model for you, without needing to tweak a mesh like today's 3D drawing programs...
Now combine that with VR-interfaces, and you'll realize that we're still in the stone age in CG art, not to mention computing as a whole. Perhaps we might need another VR or graphics engine-based computing language to do stuff like this.
IMHO, software development becomes the greatest lag in technology. In a couple of years we may already have increased bandwidth capacity but software development keeps stalling, as it depends on something which is very expensive: Work time.
The problem with people who think "there's no next big thing" is that they've forgotten the meaning of "revolution". There are many revolutions to come in computing. It's just that no one has pictured them yet.
The problem is not that new technologies can not be invented....
/. story)
It's not even that there are not a few of us who live outside the law, and invent despite the IP regime that claims anyone showing an image in the Internet is violating a US patent (as per a recent
It's not that we can not get out inventions, code, etc. distributed - anyone can ignore DMCA notices by going to foreign web hosting and domain name registration. (DMCA notices are notices under the Digital Millinenum Copyright Act that you have invented something new, that makes the BSA / RIAA / MPAA organized crime family look bad. Think of it as a death threat.)
It's that people like him still use IANA name servers, and don't see the real Internet.
Andy Out!
And here I was hoping I would never have to read another article by JonKatz...
(For those too lazy to click the links, the Wired article was by Jon Katz. And for those who don't know who that is, read here.)
The Innovator's Dilemma by: Clayton M. Christensen http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0875845851/002-91 22322-8829606?v=glance&n=283155/
My sigs offend the max # of people all over the world, regardless of race, religion, color, sex or creed. It's a gift.
I find it fitting that a VP of one of the largest, slowest-responding companies in the world says "there's no next big thing." For him, and for IBM, he's probably completely right. Not so much for the people who are working on the next Google. Mesh networking using mass-produced embedded systems in cars? Could happen. Would be very useful. Won't be designed by IBM.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
flexible, inexpensive room tempaerature superconductors.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
That's pretty sad coming from a "VP of Innovation and Technology"... if I were IBM I'd can his worthless ass and hire someone a bit more visionary.
I'm sure that within 50 years (maybe 10) there'll be new technology that will blow our minds... you'd have thought that IBM would want to be inventing it, not sitting on the sidelines saying "nah.. it's all already been invented".
I'm more inclined to believe those who see the speed of innovation increasing exponentially, maybe towards something so extreme (e.g. man-computer hybrids) that it can be called a singularity, than believe those who think it's all been done.
He is probably right that there will not be a next big thing, at least the next big thing is not going to be coming from the west. At least not until our broken business model is changed. Bottom-line thinking and shareholder value do not lend themselves to large, time spanning research projects, the types of projects that actually produce the "next big thing". The current patent system only goes to aggrivate an already messed up system of hording wealth instead of supplying products the customers want. Massive cutbacks in education spending is assuring that our educational institutions dont have the funding they require to produce the science the engineers in industry use to create the "next big thing". As Chinese and Indian corporations become more independent of the west you will the "next big thing" coming from there, and the west falling farther and farther behind. It wouldnt suprise me if countries like France and America started resembeling the very countries they are enabling to become the new "first world" nations today.
1. Worldwide internet communication allows large numbers of international friendships, dampening public support for all geopolitical war.
2. Cheap connectivity makes government propaganda impractical in every country
3. Nearly all software becomes free, as the impracticality of selling infinitely copyable material becomes evident.
4. Pop culture dies for the same reason, and is replaced by amateur arts and culture
5. AIDS vaccine is found, triggering second sexual revolution
6. Tech advances too fast for traditional college to keep up. Other methods of training become more prominent.
7. Privacy dies. Morality becomes more utilitarian as "public face" becomes impossible
Step into a huge movement. Don't Tread In Me.
Apparently you didn't get the memo: Justin Simoni is the next big thing.
The next big thing IS coming, and SOON, and it will be Molecular Nanotechnology.
If that's not the most disruptive technology the world has EVER seen, I don't know what is. Furthermore, it will open up all sorts of crazy possibilities when it arrives, that we can barely imagine today.
Now I've heard Nick speak and he's a very smart guy, on the ball, so I expect he was just quoted way out of context here, or something.
I thought the Michelson quote had another sentence: "now, if we can only figure out why these salts fog our photographic plates..." Or was that an ad-lib by my Physics Professor? (Dr. Thomas Eck, CWRU)
The thinking was that to the room of physics knowledge in 1896, the radioactivity door led only to a small closet of additional knowledge, rather than opening out into the wide, wide world.
In 1896, noone knew what made the sun shine. Now we do.
IMHO, precision chemistry (e.g. nanotechnology) will lead to some amazing things, but not at all the ones that people expect. K. Erich Drexler's universal manipulator will not happen, and a space elevator is a lot more likely. Precision fibers and laminates will do surprising things. MEMS and biotechnology will shake things up.
As fossil fuels dwindle and become more expensive, energy conservation will become more important, as will turning plant material into liquid fuels. There will be much innovation in how to do things using less energy, or less fuel. The accelleration in processor power will slow down, as thermal and quantum effects become more and more important and harder to overcome. But storage technologies, hard disk and flash will continue improving.
All of the changing ratios of relative costs will keep innovators busy finding better solutions to the changing problems.
I can refute that headline with two words:
Quantum Computers
While everything has not been yet invented, I'd wager that virtually all technologies that could be combined in a novel way have already been patented.
Which means I'd going to have some grey or white hairs before the The Next Big Thing can emerge without a flurry of lawsuits. Until then, the only innovations will be in marketing and sales tactics.
It's in the Bible! Better start working at night, I guess.
Reminds me of another famous quote:
"I have determined that there's no market for talking pictures" Thomas Edison 1926
Hmmm.
/. read science magazines, watch the general news. You will see new inovations occuring very regularly. A german company is about to start production of transparent LCDs, the human genome has been mapped, cameras can be put as a feature on a phone, the ability to produce nano tubes has been discovered and used in products, HDD memory densities continue to increase despite claims that they can not be increased further, a filter to clean blood of viruses is available on the market, a new mathematical theory to describe gravity has been found and verified etc... etc... etc....
...
If you watch specific areas of technology and view only earth shaking brand spanking new solutions to old problems as "The next big thing..." then I suppose you could view the incremental improvements as being ignorable.
However, technological inovation is not dropping off. Watch
I realize some of the above may not sound tech related. Really thats my point. If your point of view says that the only things to watch are higher DRAM densities then you may not see DDR2 as a next big thing. However if you watch advances in science, such as the ability to slow light down using specific materials, you will realize that there will likely, eventually be a next big thing for memory (although it may feel a bit like waiting for Duke Nukem Forever to come out).
My POV is that there is absolutely not chance that important innovations will stop, unless research using scientific reasoning stops.
We're all just looking for ideas that can make us rich. There's plenty of those left.
"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers."
-- Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943
Good to see IBM are still employing the same fortune tellers.
Much like the Spanish inquisition nobody expects the next big thing.
Sky subscribers are morons. They pay to be advertised at !
...you just need to know where to look.
The energy companies paid Allaire (Now Macromedia (Now Adobe)) to come up with their web application language and name it "Cold Fusion" so that searches for the the real cold fusion technology would be completely drowned out by all the screaming of the pseudo-programmers posting questions about why their code doesn't work part of the time.
NOT GOING TO HAPPEN:
- Hovering vehicles
- Anti gravity
- hand held energy weapons
- teleportation
- economical space travel
- controlling computers with our brains
- solar energy that's +60% effecient
- interactive holographic interfaces
MIGHT HAPPEN:
- mechanical prostetics that respond either to brain waves or nerves (we're right on the edge of this one- I believe someone had a really basic, bulky unit working, it just has to become available for the common man)
- growing of artificial organs for transplants (goodbye organ donors!)
PROBABLY WILL HAPPEN:
- curing cancer
Perhaps I'm misunderstanding what is meant by death of "tech" innovation - but I find it very difficult to believe that there will not be major innovation in fields such as energy and medicine within the next fifty years. Maybe computing won't change very perceptibly but there will definitely be innovation in these fields. That, or I wasted four years getting my chemical engineering degree in the hopes that it would be "hot" in the same fashion my father's CE degree was 20 years ago.
OEÉæÁÄZÝÈA OEÉæé_CX
Does he work for the same Big Blue that figured there would be five or six computers on the whole planet?
Throughout history, people have predicted the end of progress. Throughout history, they have been totally, unambiguously, 100% full of crap.
Just because you can't imagine change doesn't mean it won't happen.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
Even if you take an incremental change, say the use of scram jets in passenger aircraft, you are talking about a rather big change in the way the world works. If you can fly to New York to Beijing in 2 hours, you are changing the world.
If he can't imagine where the game might fundamentally change - faster means of transportation (warp drives), fission, or whatever - then he lacks imagination.
1) Design a battery 100 times more efficient than current Lead Acid Batteries 2) Clean cheap energy, ala zero point energy, cold fusion 3) Develop transporter / inter-dimensional worm hole technology 4) Profit, Ascend ?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Energy and medicine to name a few.......hopefully.
do i smell post-modernism?
THINK!
Maybe they need to bring that one back. Innovation is hard! The Next Big Thing is hiding between the Mountain Dew and the Cubical Wall.
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As stated in above posts, it did not go down like that.
The definition of an invention is something new. Obviously to make something new, you have to be creative. To say there will be no more "next big things" simply means you lack creativity.
I can think of a lot of next big thing - Personal Area Networks, Augmented Reality, Holographic displays, new forms of energy, just to name a few. These things are GOING to happen, it's just a matter of time.
We have more "next big things" than any other time in history.
or else!
I mean, if you can not imagine how much technology could improve, that you were happy with the current state of technology, and thus, didn't dream about what improvements could be made upon it, then yes, innovation is dead.
I would sell my off my stock of IBM if this is the company's outlook of their executive officers, that they had done all they can dream about and don't have any new dreams to aspire to.
Simply put, we are still in the infancy of technology. Its only been in the last 30 years that we have hit upon the idea that simple bits of silicon and metals could offer us such a huge potential for technical innovation, not just in computing, but in all aspects of science and technology. Nanotechnology would have been a joke 20 years ago, now CPU's are shrinking into the nanoscale realm which is spawning off other imaginative innovators to create smaller machines and other nanoscale products and technology.
While the industry may be slowing down in the number of awe-inspiring innovations per year ratio, to say that there will be no more great innovations is the sign of someone that has grown weary of this industry and probably should retire. I mean, they are working on quantum computing which completely blows my mind. They have also figured out how to slow and trap light and there have even been reports of small scale fusion using crystals. There is a very conceivable plan to build a space elevator using thousands of miles of carbon nanotubes. If these don't lead to impressive innovations in the near to not so near futures, then what is this guy thinking? Perhaps he just needs to spend a day browsing Slashdot.
I think it is quite short sighted to say, "Well, we done it all folks, nothing left to see here, move along!". If companies like IBM are believing this is possible, then I think it is part of a common emerging trend I see happening in the computer and technology industry. Legacy companies like IBM, Microsoft, Intel, Apple, etc, I.e. the grandfathers with 30+ years of experience under their belts are starting to get shoehorned into a line of thinking that is being plagued by baby boomers who never thought the current level of technology and innovation was ever possible or imagined.
I mean, sure Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Gordon E. Moore, and Thomas J. Watson Sr were all innovators, they helped to define the technology today. But after spending most of their lives in this industry wrapped up in their own ego's don't you think they have become a little jaded and contrived?
Intel started down a path that lead them to hit a brick wall. The idea of simply doubling transistors and Mhz would perpetually gain them higher performing CPU's on an 18 month clock cycle. That idea has failed utterly with the Pentium 4 Netburst architecture. Instead, going back and designing new architecture that focuses on performance per watt, rather then performance per millions of transistors is now starting to turn around a slump in Intel's products. While AMD is no spring chick in the electronics industry, it wasn't until the fresh idea of the Athlon came about, when AMD started focusing on performance per watt from the start that Intel realized their legacy ideas were failing them.
Honestly, I think the baby boomers need to retire and let their offspring enter the market. I don't see this industry slowing down or nearing its end, I see it only just starting to take off. I can imagine in so many ways how technology can not just be improved upon like building the better mouse trap, but new innovations that blow the current technology out of the water.
Maybe some old CEO of a company waking up in the morning with a stiff back dreading the morning commute in his Merc or Bimmer or even Limo might feel that innovation is entering its golden years because he just isn't inspired anymore. But I can honestly and safely say that its just him that is slipping into the light, not innovation.
Baby boomers move over, your starting to stink up the joint with Bengay!
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
The pattern of the history of technology is the yeast growth curve, and it usually takes two generations for technology to transition from its initial take-off into exponential growth and then into linear growth. The Wright brothers invented the airplane in 1903. By the late 1960's Boeing was building the first models of several models it makes today. Computers and semi-conductors were invented in the late 1940's, I think they will transition to linear growth by the end of this decade. Some evidence -- Intel stopped development of the Pentium IV because of power consumption problems caused by gate leakage. Microsoft is now 2 years late with the next version of Windows and they have removed several key features that were promised for this version such as an improved file system.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
...how history repeats itself. How many times do people have to declare that "innovation is dead", "all ideas have been invented", or "there's not going to be a 'next big thing'" before we all realize that such predictions are bunk, and general promulgated by those who are themselves out of ideas?
Kythe
Rodgers and Hammerstein's said it best, "they've gone about at fur as they c'n go" "I got to Kansas City on a Frid'y By Sattidy I larned a thing or two For up to then I didn't have an idy Of whut the modren world was comin' to! I counted twenty gas buggies goin' by theirsel's Almost ev'ry time I tuk a walk. 'Nen I put my ear to a Bell Telephone and a strange womern started in to talk! (Whut next! Yeak whut!) Whut next? Ev'rythin's up to date in Kansas City They've gone about as fur as they c'n go! They went and built a skyscraper seven stories high, About as high as a buildin' orta grow. Ev'rythin's like a dream in Kansas City, It's better than a magic lantern show! Y' c'n turn the radiator on whenever you want some heat. With ev'ry kind o' comfort ev'ry house is all complete. You c'n walk to privies in the rain and never wet your feet! They've gone about as fur as they c'n go, (Yes sir!) They've gone about as fur as they c'n go! Ev'rythin's up to date in Kansas City They've gone about as fur as they c'n go! ..."
(From "Kansas City")
assuming gp is right and the year of the michelson quote is in the 1890s, then likely your professor was adlibing
the first photographic image of any kind was made in either the late 1830s or early 40s (cant' remember, but the image itself is preserved at a UT library)... the first "propper" "photographs" were made nearly simultaneously in 1848 (within months of each other) by researchs working independently, J.P.L.M. Daugeurre, and William Henry Fox Talbot (note - lots of initials are needed to invent photography)
by the 1890s, silver-based photography was pretty much not significantly differnt from what we know today (although 35mm file wouldn't be invented until the 1920s)
of course, i could have totally misunderstood you and the gp entirely, and this might not actually be relevent
So, in other words, he's saying, "Don't try to create the next big thing. Just create the next thing, and let history decide if it's big."
I'm all for that. Too many people today who are in the business of creating set out from square one with the idea of changing the world. All they have to do is make a change...whether it ends up changing the world is up to too many factors that are beyond their control.
We can believe in you for 3 minutes, but beyond that, even the King of All Cosmos can't be expected to wait.
is precisely when the Next Big Thing is about to happen.
...
My guess right now would be the breakdown of traditional media, in our censored US society. But I'm just guessing, I have no real idea what the next Big Thing will be
only that it will happen.
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5. AIDS vaccine is found, triggering second sexual revolution
Well, we do have a better understanding of the receptor mechanisms, and we do have vaccine trials, but I don't think it's likely to result in a second sexual revolution, America's too uptight.
On a lighter note, the lab I was working at last year just announced a major discovery from our work (back when funding wasn't on hold) of a major Malaria drug target receptor mechanism. That will be good news.
But I can pretty much guarantee that half the people in Africa are still going to die from immuno-compromised diseases - and they're 90 percent straight for all you mythologists who think HIV is gay-related.
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that there will be no next big idea is that IBM and all the other big corps hold vaguely-worded patents on nearly every conceivable idea. Of course, that leaves room for inconceivable ideas, and for winning patent lawsuits. But that's not a lot of room in which inventors can operate.
I know this has been said so many times and how often dont we all laugh at bill gates 640kb memory comment - however who the hell tagged this as fud? come on - if this is fud then everything on every tech site is fud.
...it's patented.
help me i've cloned myself and can't remember which one I am
A short list:
- curing cancer
They're already working on a cure for 50 percent of all cancers, over in the UK. The trials are likely to take until 2010 or 2012, though. It's kind of fun, they use the apotosis mechanism and internal heat to make the cancer kill itself while the non-cancer cells hum along fine (with about 1 percent good cell death, very low).
- solar energy that's +60% effecient
We already have +40% efficient low cost flexible solar cells. Better results from wind turbines, though. I wouldn't worry about this one.
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Yeah, I want a nanobot Taibo runnin' around my veins!... with a webcam!
That said there will never be a need for more then 3 or 5 computers in the world.
--
At the end of the nineteenth century at an international physics conference - a renowned physicists gave a talk asserting that just about everything was known in physics (wish I recalled his name). He then list a handful of problems where the solution was not known, but assuredly would be solved soon. I only remember one item on the list - the photoelectric effect. But each issue, when addressed turned classic physics on it's head.
It's easy to mock a speech like that after the fact. But, at the time, it seemed to be conventional wisdom. Most progress is indeed linear, but then someone will come up with a startling innovation (relativity, DNA, the web) that will change everything. These discontinuities in innovation can't be scheduled or forecast. So the 'safe' thing to do is to predict linear changes. Safe, but wrong.
[Insert pithy quote here]
....that this article was written by a very narrow-minded individual. His ancestors were probably busy bashing Alexander Graham Bell and Henry Ford in the local papers during their generation also.
Be sure to remember the Programmers Prayer
The fact is that innovation was a little different in the 20th century. It's not easy (now) to come up with greater and different things.
hahahahahahahah. P2P, BitTorrent, MP3, fuel cells, social networks, MMOs, RAC, mesh networks, VoIP, Sudoku, VTEC, reality TV, must I go on?!? Outta the way old man, time for you to retire.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
Innovation is certainly not dead, but a lot of innovators are on strike. Think "Atlas Shrugged" and Galt's Gulch. With today's IP environment which heavily favors large corporations whether or not you work for them, I for one refuse to play the game. Did the patent game both under my name and as a consultant, created lots of fun stuff, but for what you end up getting out of it, it is simply not worth the extraordinary time investment. I personally know at least half a dozen just like me, and I'm not exactly the most socially connected nerd...
What I invent now I do for fun and for just myself and my friends.
Every person takes the limits of their own field of vision for the limits of the world.
...and this is another example of it. Nanotech, biotech, AI, quantum computing, advanced fuzzy math/chaos theory/swarm intelligence computer modeling techniques etc. etc. etc. There are technological innovation coming right an left and it's on an exponential scale not a diminishing one. It will be come more so as the fractured nature of specialized knowledge comes back together and people from diverse fields combine skills and apply knowledge in completely new ways outside of it's original intended areas of use.
-Arthur Schopenhauer
People have regularly claimed nothing new under the sun and there always is something. That's not to say that there won't be a shift to services for a while or that we won't see some of his trends come true in the short term but in the long term there is still lifetimes full of knowledge to be discovered.
Maybe he does lack imagination as some have said but he's got a point.
Consider the field of electronics. Most of the engineering work during the past 50 years has been refining the fabrication of the transistor and it's application. Regardless of whether you're talking about TV, audio equipment, computers, defense systems, industrial controls or any other product made of electronics.
It's all been about the transistor. The nobel prize in physics was awarded to 3 engineers in 1947. It took more than a decade to get the transistor into a form that could be used in prodcution. Since then, there have been many refinements including printed circuit boards, integrated circuits and lots of miniaturization of systems. We've gotten lots of mileage out of the transistor because of it's versatility as a controlled source. It can be used as a switch or as an amplifier. The mother of it's invention was the need for a better way of performing these switching and amplification functions than vacuum tubes could provide.
Transistor technology is mature. Discrete transistor circuitry is already considered as quaint as tube circuitry. Soon, we'll regard standard ICs the same way.
But where are the glass or plastic light based circuits on Star Trek and 2001 Space Oddessy? The answer is that awaits a breakthrough in physics of the same magnitude as the transistor was.
Since most of the people reading Slashdot are programmers rather than EEs, I will point out that much of the software we develop runs on machines made of this 50 year old transistor technology. Having machines based on light or water or living tissue or whatever form they'll eventually take is bound to change this.
But this breakthrough in physics hasn't happened yet. It might be next year or it might be 30 years from now. Look at the time it took us to progress from vacuum tubes to transistors. It's hard to predict. But there will be a certain transition period between transistor technology and whatever replaces it. Only then will we have some idea what the next big thing might be. Whatever it will be, it ain't in sight yet.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
"We stand on the threshold of rocket mail"
EMail?
Adventure City Tours
Ecclesiastes notwithstanding, coming from a life in the sciences and medicine, my own perspective is that the more we know.... the less we understand. If we shed anthropomorism we just might enter a new realm of discovery. But what do I know.
I agree with you up to the point where you state that any civilisation is driven by technology, but the real drive has been economics. As loong as there is money to be made, there will be someone to find that way to do it.
I mean, the next big thing, is just a label we put on something that succeeds, but it doesnt necesserly have to be something new. It could be an old idea that was ahead of its time, and catches on.
As soon as someone finds a way to make desktop cold fusion, we're gonna have heeps of "Big things", even really really small big things like nano-stuff
...that the people who used to be able to find the next big thing are just no longer capable -- and that it is going to be the next generation of big-thinkers that find the "next big thing".
My guess? We are in the lull right before the storm, and in the next few years (I'm thinking 5-10) new advancements will shake things up like they always do. Those who claim otherwise have fallen off the cutting edge and are nursing their wounded pride.
"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."
-Gandhi
I think this is more of a statement about competition with the united states. Other countries are now catching up with the united states in regards to technology and innovation. Instead of these companies trying to pull out further ahead with innovation, etc... they are trying to use what control they still have left to lock in customers with monopolistic practices (aka. "services"). As in, we're not going to let our products do anything new and useful for you but rather tie our products in with annoying systems of control and services.
Transportation is inarguably a major factor in boosting human productivity. I've lived in a lot of different countries, both developed and developing, and in the developing countries it is mobility and the capacity for transportation that blows open the doors to productivity - much more than computers or telecom, as far as I've seen. Transportation is definitely comparable in importance to water and power in terms of its fundamental impact on productivity.
A-Bomb
Nope nothing big, only this little genome revolution and the 2nd space race, move along now, move along
There will be for the rest of the world, and the field will be biotech, whilst the USians will try to outlaw the next big thing because US is being run by the X-tians. They think all science is 'the devil'.
The "next big things" are here already if your paying close attention. Nanotechnology, Biotechnology, and Robotics. IBM may not be part of this new wave of tech and it may not be in traditional IT but much of it is already underway.
It sounds more like their out of ideas over at big blue.
-Matt
-makoffee
As a designer, the first thing that comes to mind is ... "errr, what do IBMs design teams look like?" And by "design" I'm not referring to a pile a of engineers dubbed "designers," or a bunch of art school kids who don't understand how a product actually functions. I'm talking about a real design team with industrial designers, graphic designers, interactive designers, engineers, social and psychological researchers all working in the same building, on the same floor, and drinking from the same water cooler.
I seriously doubt IBM does this, or does this well. Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if they simply dream up garbage and ship it off to a design firm to become pretty. I don't know.
I know more then a few people who would love to, and know how to, design the "next big thing(s)," but a company such as IBM needs to accommodate an innovative environment. Moreover, they can't rely upon people in a vacuum to develop such an environment. They need to get off their butts and start hanging out in firms like IDEO. They need to see how people innovate on a daily basis.
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
That being said, that addition to the Michelson quote is almost certainly an ad-lib. I don't know if there's good evidence that Michelson even said the first part- as the other posts for this story are pointing out, a lot of those "esteemed figure makes completely wrongheaded prediction" quotes are bogus.
To back up your point:
1900 13.5m horses in the US. Depending on how you count roughly 2.7m are draft horses (1.4m-6.5m depending on definition used)
1920 95k draft horses
1945 2k draft horses
There is no such thing as the "next big thing." The potential innovations and achievements that we hail as the next big thing typically end up fading away (see: Electronica). The truly groundbreaking inventions are judged so by history, and their effects on society are almost never foreseen. Nobody would have guessed how the automobile has been the cornerstone of American culture. There was no speculation that the Wright brothers made the world a much smaller place to live with their exploits in Kitty Hawk. When the internet was a DARPA project, did anyone think ".com" would be a household word twenty years later?
Inventions can be the catalysts of change, but only when we embrace and properly utilize them. Looking for the next big thing before it arrives is nothing short of quixotic.
what about quantum computing mr. vp?
Creativity people. As long as you can dream up a "Next Big Thing", what's stopping you from making an attempt to create it? You know what would be cool? Get a bunch of scientists to watch some "futuristic" animes, and try to actually make some of the gadgets in those.
Nobody's gay for Mole-Man.
Even disregarding morality, there's still the regular STDs like gonorrhea, syphilis, chlamydia, hepatitis, etc.
If the executive vice president of innovation and technology for a technology firm utters that kind of garbage and doesn't find his ass on the street the next day, that firm is rotting from within. Welcome to the next long farewell from IBM.
Luke, help me take this mask off
Well, it is from IBM but I didn't think that was news to anyone.
Even disregarding morality, there's still the regular STDs like gonorrhea, syphilis, chlamydia, hepatitis, etc.
... yes, I'm that old. I remember when AIDS became a deal, even though being straight, I clued in a few years later than the gay community.
Morality doesn't exist at the biological and biochemical level. Science is observation, not an attempt to project one's views on the world.
That said, you're absolutely correct in terms of STDs, and impacts on "the 2nd sexual revolution".
Ah, for the good old days
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Is the next big thing. You can take that to the bank. Not your father's plastics, but plastics you are able to print at home into any configuration imaginable, including parts for the device that does the printing.
...the whole “no more Next Big Thing” phase is the Next Big Thing!
Creative misinterpretation is your friend.
I'm still waiting for the last big things....
1.) Commonplace touchscreen interfaces
2.) High speed terminal access from the street corner
3.) Secure computing
I guess when patent office hands out patents for ideas instead of actual inventions, innovation becomes a matter of buying the right aspects of a gadget and assembling it together, costing more money in tribute and royalties.
The next "John Holmes" to come down the pike and there will be all sorts of talk about "the next big thing". ;p
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
It was little over a century ago that a young college student approached his dean and asked about a career in Physics. The professor told him that there was in fact no more areas remaining to be discovered in Physics. With the Lorentz equations and the laws of Thermodynamics, virtually everything in Physics could be explained. Of course there was a small matter of the Ultra Violet Catastrophe, but that was an anomaly that could probably be resolved in time.
The students name was Max Planck, and he decided to go into Physics after all. Fortunately for the rest of us.
-- Should there be smoke coming out of my CPU?
How about a pill that makes you lean, ripped, and muscular without exercising? Or a pill that makes you tan year round. Those seem like big things to me. And they are coming.
Man, this guys is going to RUE the day he said this. I am not saying its easy to distinguish what the next big thing will be, but it will eventually come and this tidbit, his quote, is going to look hilarious. Recall Gates saying 'No one will need more than 637 kb of memory for a personal computer' or whatever.
"No one will ever need more than 640K of RAM"
I think that this is probably going to be the most exciting 50 years ever--so many new advances and new problems facing the world. I think that this guy needs to stop letting nostalgia get to him.
When in history have: so many people had the ability to share and communicate ideas
When in history have we actually had to worry about the carrying capacity of the planet.
When in history have we had one world government coming into power?
Ok, those are all social changes. Tech? Shit, too many to list: NANOTECHNOLOGY for one, will change everything from computers to cars to carpet. GENETIC ENGINEERING/BIOTECH will probably create a drug that stops the aging process (in the next 50 years), clones, etc. SPACE, humans will again turn their eyes towards the sky once we are mostly living peacefully around the world. Mars, Venus, probes, space stations, space tourism, space elevators (see NANOTECHNOLOGY), MORE.
Yeah, it's not as "easy" to innovate, but when was it ever EASY? Edison worked for years on the light bulb and his other inventions, which is probably one of the simplest things we use each day.
I mean, sure, most innovation today is happening either at a really large scale or a really small scale and so to the "average human" it doesn't seem very cool or sexy (it's not "human sized"). But once people see that these things will create human sized changes in the world, they are going to take notice.
IBM should FIRE this guy if he's the VP of Research.
Cool! Amazing Toys.
As usual, the summary misses a critical qualification to his point. "That is not to say that the 21st century does not also require invention, creation and discovery, he said. But these days, people are looking for value that arises from a creation and not just looking at technology for its sake, he explained." (Emphasis mine).
He's not saying there's nothing left to invent. He's saying cultural changes are sapping the will to go out on a limb and pursue bold ideas. Research is getting costlier and costlier. And these days, securing investment dollars is getting harder. If you can't explain the value proposition of a line of research to a horde of bean counters, forget it. That's one trend.
Another factor is the fact we've left the modern era. The 20th Century was perhaps unique in that, for most of the century, a very significant portion of the population saw science and technological achievements as an intrinsic good. This was especially true in the political and business communities. Since about the 60s, however, we've been seeing a growing mass distrust in technology. You can clearly see this in the rise of the environmental movement, not to mention the rise of religious fundamentalism. Just look at all the wailing and gnashing of teeth over the potential environmental/health hazards of nanotech for a good example. People no longer see technology as an intrinsic good, by and large, and in many cases see it as a threat. Another good example is the move to ban stem cell research. When you look at a lot of the big leaps made in the 20th century, they were done with research that would never be allowed today on ethical and legal grounds.
The bottom line is people are getting queasy about progress. Big business is less willing to stick their neck out for uncertain gain. We live in a culture that loves to thrash expertise and blames a lot of social ills on technology. The next big thing is definitely still out there. But we may never reach it because of politics and timidity. (Personally, I think it's more likely the next big thing will happen, bust just not in America or other Western nations because of the large amount of cultural resistance) I think his point is we're headed to an era where further research is going to be chained to the twin weights of "value proposition" and "cultural backlash," and that's going to keep discoveries in a relatively small "safe" zone.
Wait till a full 32-qbit ALU becomes feasible. Quantum computers and optical interconnect will break the electric speed limit and will be quite revolutionary (upto 8-bit operations are already being done with 8 atoms). Its pretty much around-the-corner.
Else good fuel cells will be revolutionary. Think of a laptop that you can ACTUALLY carry out with you running and work from the park.
If thats not revolutionary enough for you, cars will be electric...(and much simpler and cheaper too) and wait till nuclear fusion becomes commonly available. Electricity prices will drop.
Flash is getting faster and more reliable. Think of an 80GB flash disk. Especially if its cheaper than the winchester equivalent. Drop that laptop all you want! I consider that revolutionary.
Still not convinced? Think of everyone using Linux as standard, think of free wireless Internet in all cities, laptops that can last a week, and chips that run as cool as TMS370 (that Ti chip that runs off fumes pretty much, around 5uA).
The space elevator will be built in 50 years and people will land on Mars.
But something even more revolutionary than these will probably come up suddenly. I still have faith in a cold-temp hydrogen fusion reaction and wormholes. When youll see a real live T-Rex walking around in a Jurassic Zoo, you'll say holy crap, we were wrong. Mammoth bodies with intact DNA have been found already. I'd be more interested in homonids from the Ice Age, Homo Erectus, Neanderthals and Florensis. Think of keeping THOSE around for a pet, or just to lug that desktop around for ya between lanparties.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
In the olden days if you had 637K of free space, then you had a virus that had reset the top of memory pointer. The x86 computers had a one megabyte address space, broken down into 16 64K pages. The first 10 pages (10*64K=640K) were RAM, the last 6 were reserved for hardware, ROM, etc.
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
It's just that the next big thing is a ways off. That's because he have much further to go before we've fully implemented the technologies we already have. For example, we have the tech to replace automobiles with mag-lev PRT systems today, but we still have to build it and figure out the best way to implement it. Also, computer technology it far from fully implemented. Moreover, we are still using old legacy power generation systems, when newer technology exists. I could think of dozens current technologies that still need to be fully implemented.
Until the existing technologies have played out, we have more to gain by implementing and refining current technologies than from trying to develop new ones.
This man is OBVIOUSLY WRONG for his job title.
I have lots and lots of imagination to go around. Hey! IBM! Give ME his job (and salary) for ONE YEAR, and I will prove to you that there is more yet to be invented and innovated than already has been.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
Society as a whole is not stagnant like in books like Brave New World, change is inevitable. There will be a next big thing and it will likely come from young innovators. Old corporations (like RIAA, MPAA, IBM, etc.) would like things to stay the same and maintain their profit margins. Remember web searching was dead until Google reinvented it.
It's not that there is no Next Big Thing.
It's that Dinofrio is out of imagination.
Yea he's right there..Tech innovation is dead!j sessionid=EMLBLGM0N2FAIQSNDBOCKH0CJUMEKJVN
http://www.techweb.com/wire/networking/181504006;
- Robotics
- Nanotechnology
- Voice recognition technology
- Genetic engineering
- Quantum computing
- Artificial intelligence
- Fusion technology
And, no, I am not a shill for Ray Kurzweil.People have announced the end of progress before and been wrong every time. I think we have a few Next Big Things in store; the one I have been waiting for will be imminent as soon as the Little Giant Home Genetic Engineering kit becomes available in 10-20 years. Another is nanotechnology; even without the wilder dreams in this realm coming true, this will be a highly disruptive tech.
..like everyone else trying to complete their mental shortages by centering the universe around them selves.
who reads all this shit?
Can anybody think of more things to add?
And these are just the things we're expecting to eventually achieve! Of the big things of the past, how many of them have really been anticipated? I'd say human flight was probably the most anticipated, but a lot of people were skeptical it was possible until it actually happened. Radio, television, computers, and all these other toys that electromagnetics gave us...nobody saw them coming. Heck, I remember my dad being amused back in the 80's when comparing fax machines to the way some old scifi shows portrayed futuristic space crews using teletype machines.
Of course, my list is filled with really big stuff. The point of the article was not that there is nothing left to invent, but rather that pretty much all the easy stuff has been invented already. The wheel? Check. Lightbulbs? Check. The Ferrari Enzo? Check. Hoverboards like in Back to the Future? Still working on it...
I was shocked when I read Stephen Hawking's Universe, which was a biography written by the same author as A Brief History of Time. Hawking was quoted in it as saying he thought there was a good chance all the big mysteries remaining in theoretical physics (unified field theory, etc) would be solved in about 20 years, leaving just experimental physics to play catch up. Flash forward 20 years and we find ourselves practically no closer to the end, with string theory raising just as many questions as it answers.
Here's one of mine:
"There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement" - Lord Kelvin
Kelvin conceded that the only two clouds on the horizon of physics were the results of the Michaelson-Morley experiment and the ultraviolet catastrophe.. Those two problems would lead the complete disruption of classical physics and the establishment of both general relativity and quantum mechanics.
(Also, if I ever formed a band, I would call it "The Ultraviolet Catastrophe" because that name rocks.)
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Back before the restart of time, I was sufficiently out of synch to ask (w)hat happens if there is no "Next Great Thing"? on July 19th, 2001.
Only goes to show how stupid such predictions can soon look when I therein also predicted "(t)he inevitable Peace with Drugs".
But with even the war machines increasingly looking outside for innovation, it isn't hard to wonder just where left field went.
-- Our systemic servants do not good masters make.
Its just sleeping.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
What a load of hog-wash.
The next big thing:
A computer language/compiler/architecture/OS that allows ideas to be expressed without fault, i.e. a computer system that never crashes regardless of input.
"Maybe he does lack imagination as some have said but he's got a point."
....
... and yet, somehow, a person travelling through time from 1947 to present day would feel like he was in a science fiction novel.
Actually he has two of them. I believe I have seen his picture many times in the Dilbert series.
"Consider the field of electronics. Most of the engineering work during the past 50 years has been refining the fabrication of the transistor and it's application. Regardless of whether you're talking about TV, audio equipment, computers, defense systems, industrial controls or any other product made of electronics."
And most of the work in pharmaceuticals has been with molecules, so clearly we haven't had any new innovations in the field of medicine either
"It's all been about the transistor. The nobel prize in physics was awarded to 3 engineers in 1947. It took more than a decade to get the transistor into a form that could be used in prodcution. Since then, there have been many refinements including printed circuit boards, integrated circuits and lots of miniaturization of systems. We've gotten lots of mileage out of the transistor because of it's versatility as a controlled source. It can be used as a switch or as an amplifier. The mother of it's invention was the need for a better way of performing these switching and amplification functions than vacuum tubes could provide."
"Transistor technology is mature. Discrete transistor circuitry is already considered as quaint as tube circuitry. Soon, we'll regard standard ICs the same way."
And this supports your claim that the IBM PHB has a point how?
"But where are the glass or plastic light based circuits on Star Trek and 2001 Space Oddessy? The answer is that awaits a breakthrough in physics of the same magnitude as the transistor was."
In other words, the next huge leap in computing technology will come from the transition to quantum computing. Just as a single transistor was only conceptually useful 40 years ago, quantum gates and storage techniques are conceptually useful in the present day. Then there is nanotechnology, which is going to revolutionize things in ways nobody can even imagine at the moment. These are just two 'next big things' that are definitely on the horizon.
"Since most of the people reading Slashdot are programmers rather than EEs, I will point out that much of the software we develop runs on machines made of this 50 year old transistor technology. Having machines based on light or water or living tissue or whatever form they'll eventually take is bound to change this."
Are you serious? The first microprocessor wasn't even manufactured in the commercial sector until 1971 (IIRC) and a multi-million dollar supercomputer from the early 80s couldn't keep up with the average desktop machine of today. Physics precluded clocking in the megahertz until chip fab technology shortened the distance between gates from inches to nanometers, and those distances are still getting smaller. Not to mention, to adopt Sun's adage "The Network is the Computer", we do use light for a fair amount of processing already. Where would Google's search engines be if they didn't have Sonet (Synchronous Optical Network) or FDDI (Fiberoptic Digital Data Interconnect) as part of the Internet's backbone?
"But this breakthrough in physics hasn't happened yet. It might be next year or it might be 30 years from now. Look at the time it took us to progress from vacuum tubes to transistors. It's hard to predict. But there will be a certain transition period between transistor technology and whatever replaces it. Only then will we have some idea what the next big thing might be. Whatever it will be, it ain't in sight yet."
It's in sight, you just haven't been looking in the right places. Again, thi
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Would that by chance be the Illunimodi?
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Is going to be the Next Big Thing of '06?
EpiAdv - if you like Pokey the Penguin, try this comic!
I wonder, does the average slashdotter still bother to click the article link? Seems not.
Here is the relevant part:
All in all, he's not saying anything new, too much. But maybe it's a message that not everybody has heard yet.I suspect that the depletion of fossil fuels will spur the development of Nuclear Fission technology so that energy will be perpetually cheap, at least for the next million or so years on Earth.
I'm not sure what the implications of this will be but I'm betting that the vast differences in Human existence in different nations today will be gone by the end of the 21st century.
We've mined less than one ten millionth of the Uranium on earth. See here and here for the implications.
won't they all be surprised when I invent the universe, it'll be bigger than anything else...ever.
Any company who thinks innovation is dead will find themselves envying the other companies that do innovate. This is coming from the company that co-developed the Cell processor??
Haven't you seen Die Another Day (007 movie)? :)
Actually there has been experimentations in this field, and the concept of a "cloaking device" is not at all infeasible.
Ever notice how comments on the goodness of human nature on /. constantly get modded up? However if we were talking man's brutal past and evolutionary psychology one would think otherwise.
You really gotta wonder how many /.'ers here really do read science. Faith in human nature is akin to faith in religion.
if there even is such a thing as progress is in dispute, philosophically, and part of a long running argument.
I believe in progress, that makes me progressive.
-pyrrho
Is this person implying that nuclear fusion, superconductors, nanotechnology, quantum computers, and manned space travel would not be the "next big thing" if perfected and done on a large scale? I think there are a lot more things that can be invented.
Just because a unique new idea for the industry dosnt pop up everyday, dosn't mean that innovation is dead. Look at physX cards...
I cain't tell ya what it'll look like. But I'll know it when I see it.
"No fear. No envy. No meanness." Liam Clancy
Oh. My. God.
Do you have to get this simple with *everyone?*
You have just explained the obvious. Why do people assume we are done with knowledge? Hell, wasn't it an IBM founder who decried there'd be a need for perhaps 100 computers world-wide?
We are not close to the end of knowledge. Thanks for pointing out the obvious to the obtuse.
This is essentially a, "Me, Too!" message.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
I think that was a king, not a rabbi, some bloke by the name of Solomon.
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The idea that there is no next big thing. What's the next big thing for humanity after that? The idea that the world is made of applesauce.
Screw the rules, I have green hair!
Where are these then?
Flying cars
Cheap nuclear power (desktop fusion?)
Safe, Effective Diet Pills
Space Travel for the Masses (affordable)
Cure for Cancer
Cure for the Common Cold
Artificial Intelligence approaching at least Dog Levels
Independence from Oil
Cybernetic Implants
Browsers with Spailcheckers
Table-ized A.I.
"Oh. My. God."
"Do you have to get this simple with *everyone?*
What the hell are you talking about?
"You have just explained the obvious. Why do people assume we are done with knowledge? Hell, wasn't it an IBM founder who decried there'd be a need for perhaps 100 computers world-wide?"
Well I've seen numbers like five, and now one hundred, but I never heard anyone claim that he added the words 'not just in the near future, but forever'
"We are not close to the end of knowledge. Thanks for pointing out the obvious to the obtuse."
Yes. It was so obvious that the IBM PHB, the poster I was replying to, and the person who modded his post up all missed it completely.
"This is essentially a, "Me, Too!" message."
Again, what the hell are you talking about? In fact, I have to wonder, do you have any idea what you are talking about?
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
I reckon that both China and India are on the verge of entering a golden age of "garage invention" far more influential to world history than the one North Americans enjoyed over the past century. They also have the luxury of access to all the important technologies, processes, and ideas that western nations have been outsourcing to Asia for the past decade plus.
Essentially, western nations have done a great job showing Asians the wonders of garage-style innovation (I'm thinking of Silicon Valley, etc.). However, China and India are not yet extensively fettered by the complex (and basically greed-driven) legal/IP issues that are stifling western nations' abilities (especially those of Americans) to bring innovation to light. Asians can and do innovate with impunity, and the sheer volume of population in a relatively high concentration of access to technology greatly increases the likelihood of impressive results.
The real unknown is whether Asians can innovate themselves out of a massive societal collapse caused by unprecedented environmental impact, before the impact is irreversible. Human societies have a poor record of this. (See Jared Diamond's book "Collapse" for details.) Of course, they could always take raw resources from elsewhere (e.g. Canada), or move there to take them. Basic resources like clean and plentiful drinking water form the foundation of any successful society.
The western world (especially North Americans) would be foolish and naive to think that 2/5 of the world's population (i.e. China, India) would give a damn about another country's IP laws if those laws stood in the way of a valuable societal advancement. Laws are merely social conventions. Wars break these conventions, often because essential resources (food, water, land, mates, security, etc.) are somehow lacking. And there's no end to innovation--legal or not--when basic survival is at stake.
None of my comments are meant as any kind of flamebait. My point is that humans can and will innovate to ensure their survival. At this time in history, there seems to be a much greater motivation for humans in Asia to innovate than there is in North America, for instance. In North America, standards of living are generally much higher and this tends to reduce the motivation to be resourceful. When resourcefulness is not perceived to be needed for survival, greed (i.e. IP laws, copyright, etc.) becomes an "affordable" luxury.
or maybe 6 for all of it's future gaming needs.
These periodic pronouncements that everything has been discovered, blah, blah should be embarrassing to the people who make them.
I worked for IBM when this trend started... they bought the company I worked for, and, unlike many in companies bought by IBM, I stayed around for a couple years (compare 54% attrition in a year vs. 6% attrition in a year for most Cisco acquisitions).
One really stupid thing that happened before I left was that they decided that each of the major labs would have to come up with at least one product every 6 months, instead of dedicating themselves to research. This was one of Lou Gerstner's last gasps, but it redirected the company focus from doing things that no one else could do, to doing things that made short term profit.
Then others in the company (Sam Pamisano, Bill Etherington, et. al.) decided that individual contributors compensation would be based on the overall profit more than division or personal performance, and that managers and above would still have it based on division, personal performance, then overall profit, in that order.
Either they believed the engineers working for them had never had any higher math in the area of game theory, or they were simply ignorant that the emergent property of that type of staging is to keep your boss pleased by keeping the division up at the expense of the rest of the company, so the boss is happy and cuts you in on the cake.
Finally, it was a matter of pride to IBM Global Services that they had so much consulting effort that had been sold that they had a 2 year backlog - WTF? Who could *possibly* be proud of promising something you're unable to deliver in the timeframe you promised it, or having an organization that can't meet the demands of its market?
It's really unfortunate when a large company that people have depended upon for their livelihoods starts a tumble into short term thinking, and from there, into mediocrity.
-- Terry
IBM should fire this guy immediately. They should have transferred him over to Lenova when they had a chance.
... will be advertised.
Sounds more like an IBM PR Effort.
Call my cynical, but have you noticed how much of the content is "IBM has done this" and "IBM will do that"? This smells like an article from IBM's PR company. They have made a provocative statement to get people reading and discussing the article. But the true intent is to say how wonderful IBM is, and oh, by the way, they would be good to do business with because they are really good at "innovating", whatever that is. Write it up, hand it to a journalist, bake for 2 days and serve.
Every 100 years somebody (spelled *F*O*O*L*) stands up and says
"We've reached the limits of the known world. All that can be
discovered has been discovered.". Each time, maybe 10 years later,
there's a big discovery right after that and everything is unknown
again.
Pretending to be able to predict the future is rather prattish.
I think 3 things will change life as we know it even further:
-Fusion
-Genetic engineering for the common man
-NASA's SATS project comes to be and jet aircraft become inexpensive enough for the average middle class man.
Libertas in infinitum
Artificial Intelligence.
Do not downmod posts "overrated" simply because you disagree with them.
Maybe our culture is about to change once and for all, by this I mean something simple. Science and technology maybe coming to us, so fast, that we won't have time to call it "Next Big Thing". How can it be, if every month or so we got something world shattering but with the corner of the eye we hace an exotic new perspective! There won't be a Next Big Thing because the future will be plagued by what in other eras we called Big.
I put it on technocrat.
http://technocrat.net/d/2006/3/11/1281
Here's the URL to the actual product page, it's a fraunhoffer institute project, the "berlin brain computer interface"
http://www.bbci.de/
The next BIG thing will be a social structure change, after the "big kill":
... but it will be:
Previous NBTs:
Fire, Religion, Printing Press, For-profit infinite life Incorporation, Public Health, Combustion Engine+Industrialization. Antibiotics and Vaccines, Computers, Them Thar Intarnets...
Not sure what the words will be (posthumanism?)
Distributerd "Mutual Benefit" mentality supported by persistent, global communication -- the free and open society outside current control strucutres of governement, religion or for-profit business. You're starting it now and don't even see it yet.
No, there is no more 'big' thing, but this is not due to lack of innovation, but due to an abundance of communications.
... and as an interesting tidbit, did you know that the patent frequency in a country correlates better with divorce rates than it does with innovation rate? And that innovation correlates far better with communications infrastructure and education than it does with patent frequency?
Previously a thing could seem 'big' because either the inventor had kept it to himself until it had sufficient height to seem 'big', or because the distribution of knowledge was so small as to make natural synthesis of ideas revolutionary.
Now, the 'lone' innovator can innovate all he wants in his attic, but the fact is that the billion connected other people will likely out-innovate him by a matter of many, many orders of magnitude, rendering his 'big' step taking decades a series of smaller steps taking days or weeks, each step of which will appear insignificant.
'Big steps' these days are just a matter of you not being in the loop for a few weeks.
Then came along industry executives and businessmen and turned tech into money and patents.
Constraints have increased and increased to this day, and you really can't do anything innovative anymore without breaking the law. I'm sure someone is going to make a law soon that will make it illegal to use technology that hasn't been approved first - making a final end of any innovation.
People have become scared of our police states (read: USA and EU) to the extent that nobody wants to be made an example of by doing something suspicious.
At the same time we are sliding into sexual delirium, rebellion against parents, deceit and all kind of abominations, which can only lead to a NEW DARK AGES!
I said DARK AGES all over again. It's not the decline in potential scientific discoveries, but the deterioration of our society that we are facing here. Wake up!
In today's "Comment & Analysis" section of the Financial Times, they voice a rather different interpretation of what's bogging down our quest for the Next Big Thing:
Anyone who gets a patent on that bit of the invention -- not difficult in a world of overworked and under-resourced patent examiners -- can hold the whole product hostage, to extrace a settlement far more valuable than the worth of the original idea, they say.
The key to all this power is that federal courts will almost always grant an injunction in cases where infringement has already been proved -- stopping people who make things from continuing to do so, even if the patent they have breached is only a tiny fraction of the total.
It's kinda hard to keep on truckin' down the Innovation Superhighway when you gotta stop and pay every damn Patent Troll that lumbers out at you from beneath the underpasses. How many Looneys does RIM have to shell out again just to keep the Blackberries of the world from becoming paperweights?
Ain't a particularly original point, I know (especially around here); but I noticed that the notion never once surfaced in the original article. And since I can't imagine Mr. Donofrio had never heard of it, my guess is that he's ignoring it.
Not that the Financial Times has, however. They've been foaming at the mouth over this issue for almost as long as Slashdot has.
now is the time to sell.
"If you're looking for the next big thing, stop looking. There's no such thing as the next big thing," he added.
A more insightful thing to say would be, "If you're looking for the next big thing, stop looking. Real innovation isn't just about the next big thing." As far as innovation being harder now, yes... that's right.
Innovation is harder now because of terrible Intellectual Property law. Innovation was always hard from a technical stand point. The concepts we take for granted now, grand earth shattering paradigm shifts such as the concept of "zero" or the very idea of a variable, were always very difficult to create. Modern paradigm shifting innovations such as the light bulb and the assembly line were also very hard to come up with.
On the upshot, he's implemented programs to actually listen to his employees. He may have said there is no "next big thing" but I think he's hit upon "the next big thing" and that is: Actually listening to your own people. He's actually using the internet for what it was meant for instead of just selling widgets! Communication! Wow, the first and last big thing.
[signature]
I am probably too late to get modded up but anyway, here is my real life experience in how these things actually work.
First off I have a degree that relates closely to innovations. Moreover for this particular design I knew the customers, their needs and their actual working situation. Looking at the forest from the outside I was not blinded by looking at each tree too closely but got thr overall picture and could make a design for something that would not only ease their jobs but also save lives.
So my company gave me a token award, no pay rise nor any monetary gains. Instead to save money on bonuses they fired me, one even told me that bonuses was for management only. Nice. And now because of more Dilbert grade reorganisations this thing has been forgotten by most people and nothing, absolutely nothing happens.
My colleagues in the innovation contest saw what happened to me and does not feel much like coming forward with their great ideas.
And that is how it happened not only here, rather a lot of my colleages and friends have tons of great ideas for the next great (or more often incrementally good) idea but quickly get their enthusiasm killed by management. Let's not dismiss increemental ideas, the world is full of them and they do help. Trouble is that they are often anonymous and there is little incentives. Example: can you name even one engineer at Intel that made your chips run faster and cooler? No?
So the only route out is quitting and starting up on your own. That takes about 5 times longer and you risk failure throughout the project and when (if) you get success you still risk being sued by your former employer looking for low risk earnings.
And then people wonder why there is little innovations these days??
Socrates said that his greatest wisedom was in realizing how little he knew. Mr. Donofrio should take a lead from Socrates.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
Hamlet, 1. 5
Actually its from the Bible
Innovation in computers is severely hurt by the current crop of programming languages/operating systems that allow erroneous programs to be built. Give me a programming language that does not allow even the slightest error to happen when the program runs, and you will see innovation in everything else (because computers affect our life in numerous ways).
There Is Nothing New Under The Sun. (Ecclesiastes 1:9-14)
Hasn't the president of IBM said something along these lines before?
Granted, this was some 40-50 years ago, but still...
Or maybe that was that there would be a world wide need for no more than 5 computers...
Ahh, those were the days =)
Move sig!
"Everything that can be invented has been invented."
- Charles H. Duell, U.S. Commissioner of Patents, 1897
"There's no such thing as the next big thing."
- Nicholas Donofrio, Executive VP, IBM, 2006
Today, IBM's VP of Innovation and Technology announced that innovation was dead, stating there would never again be the "next big thing", that every really big innovation had already been discovered.
In other news, the VP of Human Resources for Microsoft announced they wouldn't be hiring anyone else because, "we've pretty much hired everyone worth hiring."
The VP of Product Development for Maxtor announced today that Maxtor's R&D department was shutting down because, "The human race has pretty much stored everything that can be stored already, and in the case of some poorly lit movie files, thanks to peer-to-peer file trading services, stored them repeatedly across half the hard drives in existence."
Borland's Chief of Technology announced they were selling off their software development tools because, "All the really good software has already been developed. Now we're going turn to the business of inserting actualizing process into the B2C2B2WTF stream to variably potentiate the arrogating corporate officer pool's bottom line."
Yup, looks like innovation is just GRINDING TO A FRIKKIN' HALT.....
*** *** You're just jealous 'cause the voices talk to me... ***
Even when the NEXT BIG THING shouts right in its face IBM is often characteristically oblivious to it. Remember PC? Remember Relational database? Both were originally brain children of IBM but adopted by Bill & Larry right after their birth. More recently, when BEA announced ESB (enterprise server bus) product a paper immediately appeared on IBM's site claiming ESB is not really a product you can buy. It was slightly entertaining to observe IBM scrambling to come up with its own equivalent of ESB a few months later. Obviously, when someone is obsessed with cheap labor on a sub-continent (isn't "service" just another way of saying outsourcing these days?), you certainly cannot expect him to come up with anything truly innovative.
nope you had a 1 megabyte address space broken down into 64K overlapping 64K segments giving a segment start every 16 bytes.
i'm not sure just how much conventional memory you could get free under dos but i gather if you loaded drivers into UMBs and dos into the high memory area (the first 64K minus 16 bytes of XMS accessible due to a design glitch) you could free up most of it.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
I stand (or rather sit) corrected. I never understood the purpose of overlapping memory addresses, having never got around to programming down at that level. My only concern was in freeing as much memory as I could. The tools I used broke memory down as I described above, so that's the mental picture I have.
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
It is official; IBM confirms: Innovation is dying
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered innovation community when IBM confirmed that the number of innovations has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all products. Coming on the heels of a recent US Patent Office survey which plainly states that Innovation has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Innovative design is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin [amdest.com] to predict innovation's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Innovation faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Innovation because Innovation is dying. Things are looking very bad for Innovation. As many of us are already aware, Innovative products continue to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
Open Source software development is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time Innovative developers Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: Innovation is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
IBM leader Nicholas Donofrio states that there are 700 professional inventors. How many hobbyist inventors are there? Let's see. The number of professional versus hobbyist posts on the alt.inventors Usenet newsgroup is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 700/5 = 140 hobbyist inventors. Middle-School inventor posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of adult hobbyist posts. Therefore there are about 70 child inventors. A recent article put professional inventors at about 80 percent of the Innovation market. Therefore there are (700+140+70)*4 = 3640 professional inventors. This is consistent with the number of professional inventor Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of BeOS, abysmal sales and so on, the Be Corporation went out of business and was taken over by Palm who sell another troubled OS. Now Palm is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that Innovation has steadily declined in market share. Innovation is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Innovation is to survive at all it will be among large, corporate dilettante dabblers. Innovation continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Innovation is dead.
Fact: Innovation is dying
---- "XML is like violence. If it doesn't fix the problem, you aren't using enough."
If I accept your definition of breakthrough as 'the transistor, and nothing else' then you have a point. Unfortunately for you, the rest of the world recognizes Xerox PARCs GUI as a breakthrough, Tim Berner's Lee's Hypertext/World Wide Web as a breakthrough, the Microprocessor as a breakthrough. You want to set this magical breakpoint and define it as the breakthrough. If we extend your logic, however, we find that the transistor was not a breakthrough because it started out as a theory about semiconductors, and it built on earlier research in physics and electronics. According to your logic, once again, there are no breakthroughs in the pharmaceutical industry either, since all drugs are based on molecules, compounds, and the like.
... the transistor was not the last breakthrough, and there are many more to come in the very near (almost immediate) future.
..
It doesn't matter what lengths you go to, including nitpicking over 40 years (as I basically pulled out of thin air based on a best guess without researching it) rather than acknowledging that there is some number, even if it is 60 years, that makes my statement correct. In the end, you arbitrarily picked the transistor as the only real breakthrough in the last n years, and I have some bad news for your absurd point
You had a few morons mod your post up, but you shouldn't let that fact cloud your judgement into thinking that there was any veracity to the statement whatever.
Peace
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Yes, I'm aware of that. That is where King Solomon was published.
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