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Startups a Safer Bet Than Behemoths
Former Slashdot editor ScuttleMonkey raises his voice from the great beyond to say that "TechCrunch's Vivek Wadhwa has a great article that takes a look at difference between startups and 'established' tech companies and what they each mean to the economy and innovation in general. Wadhwa examines statistics surrounding job creation and innovation and while big companies may acquire startups and prove out the business model, the risk and true innovations seems to be living at the startup level almost exclusively. 'Now let's talk about innovation. Apple is the poster child for tech innovation; it releases one groundbreaking product after another. But let's get beyond Apple. I challenge you to name another tech company that innovates like Apple—with game-changing technologies like the iPod, iTunes, iPhone, and iPad. Google certainly doesn't fit the bill—after its original search engine and ad platform, it hasn't invented anything earth shattering. Yes, Google did develop a nice email system and some mapping software, but these were incremental innovations. For that matter, what earth-shattering products have IBM, HP, Microsoft, Oracle, or Cisco produced in recent times? These companies constantly acquire startups and take advantage of their own size and distribution channels to scale up the innovations they have purchased.'"
You're just reinforcing his point.
Google Docs was born as Writely and then bought by Google.
Google Voice was born as Grandcentral and then bought by Google.
Android was born as Android and then bought by Google in 2005 (and never mind that Intel and Nokia were experimenting with Linux-based phones too).
What could have been a valid point gets derailed by blatant fanboi blinders. Apple is NOT an innovative company either. It's an innovative spin doctor. They are good at convincing people they must have a trimmed down, stylized, and monetized versions of established technologies. iPod? MP3 players. iPhone? Smartphones. iPad? Tablets. iTunes? Napster.
Apple is very good at taking technology and making it usable for the general consumer. Were you around when the iPod was launched? There were two basic classes of MP3 players. Small portable ones that could hold maybe a dozen songs and large portable CD players that could hold a thousand songs or so. If you are just looking basic functionality you could decry that the iPod wasn't innovative. Having actually used the MP3 players at the time, I can tell you what made the iPod different was that it was small and held a lot of music. The other thing I can tell you is that the UIs for other MP3 players sucked. The software for them sucked as well. As a geek, I put up with it. With Apple they actually spent time in addressing all the little things that would annoy an average consumer. Syncing is one step. MP3 ripping and encoding occurs immediately when you stick in a music CD, etc.
The same with smart phones. Yeah they've been around but they sucked well before Apple made theirs. Having one issued to me by work, I can tell you I detest using it. It's a WinMobile phone. It seems to me MS just took an OS, made it almost the same as desktop Windows, changed a mouse for a stylus and called it done. No thoughts were given about how the UI might need to be tweaked for an interface with a much smaller screen and small keyboard but no mouse. With the iPhone, Apple didn't put OS X desktop onto a phone and walk away. They actually thought about how a user might need to interact with it differently.
The same with tablets. MS has been pushing tablets for almost a decade. Like the smart phone, very little thought was given to the fact that a tablet user may need to interact differently than a desktop user. Most of the tablets I've seen were basically a full desktop PC and OS shoved into a small form factor. MS just changed the mouse for a pen. No rethinking about how touch could be used better.
Napster, really? You're going to compare a peer-to-peer filesharing system that allowed its users to illegally share copyrighted material to a centralized and legal music store.
Further, Apple is just as into buying up established tech and upstarts to inject life into its glossy image as everyone else (SoundJam MP). It even buys open source projects when parts it requires are at risk of being GPLv3'ed (CUPS). Hell, if it were not for FreeBSD's license terms, there probably wouldn't even be a OS X or iOS at all.
I don't dispute that Apple does buy other companies. However, they are very selective about what they buy. Unlike other tech companies (Time Warner buying AOL, MS buying Danger, etc.), every one of their purchases has actually led to a product or service of some sort to the company. NeXT technology became OS X. SoundJAM became iTunes. KeyGrip became Final Cut. Emagic became Logic Pro and Garage Band. Fingerworks' technology is used in both the multi-touch iPhone and the multi-touch trackpads. PA Semi is designing their mobile chips, etc.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.