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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.'"
They don't innovate. They scrape the internet looking for ideas, making products that are "just different enough" to avoid existing patents, and they buy up startup companies just as you describe. Just because Apple has better press management skills doesn't mean they don't have similar business practices. Apple is not an exception -- stop dodging this just to please the fanboys.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Google has quite a few features I use a lot that noone else offers. Google Docs for things I like to keep location neutral while still having full create and edit abilities while not downloading anything. Google Voice to keep my phone number portable along with all its other features. Android running on my as well as millions of other smartphones. etc. Google doesn't innovate? Sounds like selective memory with a bias towards Apple to me. About par for a Slashdot submission as of late.
Oh you mean how apple buys up startups to produce their products or how the iPod, iTunes, iPhone and iPad were really just incremental innovations of other services and products that people were already offering?! Yea, I agree. Apple is the greatest tech company, but lets be honest; they are more polisher than innovator.
For those of you who are new to the tubes, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Nomad, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PressPlay, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartphone, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tablet_pc
Yes, Apple's products did improve upon all these ideas, but they weren't earth shattering. They just used Apple's "size and distribution channels to scale up the innovations" and bring it to the masses.
IBM innovates more than just about anyone, but most of it is behind the scenes. How about GMR disk technology, for one? Before that, a terrabyte took up a whole room. Now it sits in your hand. Never mind a lot of memory and CPU tech. Problem with IBM is, since it's the biggest of the behemoths, it can be hard to look below the layers of marketing and management to see the cool stuff going on. The startups get a lot of press because they're trying to be seen. That raises capital. The bigger companies with established capital keep their innovations close to the vest till they're ready to exploit. That way, even if they have to share them with others, they still have a bit of a head start.
Agreed.
If you think that the iPad is a groundbreaking innovation and (for example) Google Docs is not, you're seriously biased. Both are "incremental innovations". Tablets have been around for a long time, and so have office suites. While Google did improve some things, like collaborative editing, Apple did just improve the UI without adding any remarkable technical features.
The term "technical" is far to often used for things that are clearly not technical (like UIs), just because they are used on electronic devices like phones and computers.
PS: I'm not a Google fanboi (i don't use it at all), I just used it as a comparison.
Is that why apply products have a ticking timebomb in the form of non-user replacable batterys?
The author seems to be taking an awfully narrow view of innovation, as if it only matters what occurs in front-page consumer electronics. All of the big companies he names are quite innovative in commercial software and hardware in systems like industrial control, telecommunications and finance that are too complex and specialized to make the splashy tech news. Occasionally news of some big company innovation like IBM's new mainframe makes it to the front page, and reading about the history and technical details of an achievement like that gives some realization of the magnitude of technical progress and innovation going on behind the scenes.
Explorers discover or invent things. Pioneers are early adopter to integrate and make useful these inventions. Settlers reap and create a bussiness ecosystem around the places proven by pioneers. Apple has mainly been a pioneer, and microsoft a settler. Apple did not invent the GUI or Dynamic Memory, or Switching power supplies, or Post script or the Mouse. But they did pioneer the use of those technologies. Microsoft and dell/compaq settled those. They did not invent or truly pioneer MP3 players but they did advance that sufficiently to call it their own and then they settled it. Apple did not invent unix, but they did pioneer moving it from the etherial workstation market to the consumer market and now they have settled unix in the consumer market.
Other than their pioneering in search, Google is purely a settler in every market they occupy. Unix on devices, e-mail, documnet process, thin clients (aka "the cloud"). If you want to call google a pioneer then you have to think of it as a meta-pioneer: integration is really what they are about. But That is almost the definition of settling.
Microsoft did pioneering work in a few areas such as windows GUI on embedded devices. You might say that was apple or palm however.
Apple to it's credit actually does a lot of exploration you don't ever hear about. ARM processors? Power-PC processors? Firewire? Conformal Batteries? But they don't really play that angle up a lot. Lately I've been really impressed with microsoft's investment in the visualization field so maybe they are starting to innovate again.
I also suspect that Microsoft has a shot at becoming a settler in the "cloud" field. THeir new Azure technology seems to be just what bussinesses of many different sizes are going to need to go to managed IT.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
whos this moron? I thought slashdots for geeks? Not a Justin. Bieber loving teenagers.
You know it is BS when they trot out the iPhone. Please explain to me how the iPhone is at all innovative. It is a touchscreen smartphone. Not only had I seen those before, I'd seen lots of them. The smartphone market was well established when Apple came in. They may have done theirs better than some others, they may have presented it in a package more attractive to consumers but those are not innovations, those are good design and marketing.
An innovative product is something that is new and different. It is something that people didn't think about before but now go "Oooo, I see a use for that." For example the microwave was an innovative product. It cooked food in a completely different way, using a different technology.
Apple hasn't been in to innovation much at all these days, but the iPhone is the worst example of all. It is their least innovative product, and an example of them going in to a well established market. None of that means it isn't a good product, or a popular one, but you need to separate those from innovative. After all, LCD TVs are an incredibly popular product these days, but certainly aren't innovative, we've had LCDs around for decades.
Unfortunately I think too many Apple fans drink the marketing kool-aid and think that everything Apple does is "innovative". They feel like that matters, for some reason, that somehow it isn't ok to but a product just because it is good and you like it.
Except they completely change the paradigm of how people actually consume products. Apple brought MP3 players to the masses, multitouch to the masses, modern smartphones + mobile apps to the masses, etc. There are clear before and after effects. If you think innovation is purely in an algorithm, you're a moron that clearly has never tried to actually productionize anything.
Hahahahahahahahahahaha!!! This is the funniest thing I've read in years. Apple hasn't counted as a startup company in twenty years!
What earthshaking things have the giants done? Let's see...IBM's technologies underlie your high-capacity hard drives. Yeah, those ultra-high capacity drives? IBM developed the technology to record 1Gb/1" square. IBM patents more of its own stuff than any other company in the world, and tons of stuff rely on their development work. Cisco? Ever heard of the Internet? No, they didn't invent it, but without them it would not perform the way it does today.
Now, Apple's iPod? An iterative improvement on the original Walkman. Oh, wait...that was Sony, another giant company, that innovated the personal, portable digital storage media.
The references are all to hardware products. What about Gmail's innovation to get 8gigs in a free account? It used to be hard to get 50mb in your attached account. Innovation is not limited to physical products. I love most of apple's stuff, but this is awfully dismissive. It's an assessment of goals based on a narrow definition.
Is that innovation is often something that you can't see, because it applies to early tech. It happens behind the scenes, and you don't see the results for many years. For example is a scientist invents a process for using carbon nanotubes to produce sub 11nm processors right now, engineers won't be able to develop that in to a workable fab solution for probably a half a decade or more. Then once it is workable, it will take time to design a CPU using it, and build fabs to produce it. By the time yo have the 11nm CPU in your home, the technology is 10 years old.
Also it doesn't seem innovative on the surface. "Oh look, someone made a faster CPU, because that hasn't happened for the past 40 years." You don't see the massive innovation behind that faster CPU.
Consumer products are not on the cutting edge usually because you don't want cutting edge. The cutting edge is expensive, and riddled with problems because it is new. You want tech that has been developed and tested, that is easy and stable to use and can be purchased cheaply. Nothing at all wrong with that, it just means that you rarely see an innovative consumer device.
Which one?
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If you want pound for pound revolutionary change to society, Google Maps has done way more to change our lives than the iPod, which is really just the next step on the evolutionary chain started by the Sony Walkman. Incremental, my ass. It has single-handedly democratized the way we interact with location and geographical information.
The iPhone was pretty revolutionary, though, touching off a revolution in how we integrate handheld devices into our social lives. And GMail is mostly a souped-up Hotmail that sucks slightly less.
Also, both Google and Apple began as startups with revolutionary products, and both have had hits and misses over the years.
I have no idea what the point of the original article was. None of its assertions sound remotely true.
You can have them replaced by Apple.
I'm not defending — or criticizing — non-user replaceable batteries, just stating that calling them time bombs is a bit of an exaggeration.
I'm sorry, but this is garbage.
Summary: "Apple is awesome. Everyone else sucks."
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.
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.
Putting Shinola on things is a far cry from being innovative.
Exactly. If you look at companies that were startups a few years ago, then you will see a lot of innovation. You will not see the large number that went bankrupt in the intervening period. Survivor bias.
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Your idea is not that bad.
I see a problem with it, maybe you come up with a great idea, build a product for big business and patent the idea (I know ideas should not be patentable, but that's what software patents are). You can choose to license it at a thousand dollars per processor, and it would be OK in a financial sense.
I come up with the same idea, but for consumer products. It's good, maybe some multitasking improvement, but not worth your thousand dollars per processor.
You stop me from innovating, period.
Here's a better idea: no patents. I don't see any downside.
"Well established"? Smartphones were a niche market before the iPhone, and only exploded in popularity (and continue to grow dramatically) after the iPhone was introduced in 2007. Windows Mobile was far and away the largest smartphone platform; where is it now? And as to your assertion that the iPhone was not at all innovative, please show me the touchscreen smartphones before the iPhone that had a UI designed for a touchscreen device, not a desktop OS shoehorned into a mobile device. Please show me a smartphone that had a mobile Internet experience comparable to iPhone. Please show me even one of the "lots" that you've seen that had such easy access to a large and diverse collection of applications. Oh, and please show me the plethora of touchscreen Android devices that existed before the iPhone. If in your view the iPhone was not innovative, how would you classify the Droid X and HTC EVO, et al?
Congratulations. You just described the iPhone and iPad. The hardest part by far in consumer electronic design is not the features, it's the interface, and if you think that Apple's success with iPhone and now iPad are due to just good design and marketing, you need to take off your hate-colored glasses and stop with the feature-checkbox mentality. It's all well and good for technically minded persons and tinkerers, like many (most?) Slashdot readers, to think that it's fun to have to trim the spinnaker, strap the cat to the buttered toast, and change the dilithium crystals just to check their email, but for the average non-tech-elitist Joe and Jane, it's completely unacceptable.
Most people only think of innovation as occurring within their narrow range of interests, and for geeks that means that anything with electrons or logic flowing though it will make them jizz their pants. How many Slashdot readers would consider Dell to be an innovative company, much less one that had a seismic impact on computing? And yet it was Michael Dell's commercial and production innovations that resulted in the commoditization of the personal computer and made them widely affordable to the broad public, including most people here I'd wager. Demystifying existing technology for the average user and presenting them with easy and intuitive ways to interact with their data is Apple's genius, and it is true innovation at work, despite what you might think.
Here's the downside: suppose you own a small business that has created a remarkable new widget. People like your widget, and you are happy to sell them widgets for a small profit. However, a very large company reverse engineers your widget, and sells it for less. Suddenly, you can't make any money any longer. If you know that anything you invent can be copied by someone else, why bother inventing anything at all? Patents are meant to spur innovation by providing inventors an opportunity to make a profit from their innovations for a limited period of time without competition.
Is the patent system perfect? No. But the solution is not to entirely eliminate it.
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So suppose a company wants to do something about energy efficiency. They invest $10 billion dollars in R&D, and invent an amazing new room temperature superconductor. It works without caveats, it is just a wire that can pass a near infinite amount of current. The process for making it isn't that complex, so it doesn't cost all that much. So they can make it for $0.50/meter. They add $0.50 more to recoup their R&D and it sells for $2/meter to the end user.
Ok but now say there's no patents, so anyone can do it. they look and say "Oh that's not hard to do," and start making the wire. It also costs them $0.50/meter to make. However they've no R&D to recover, so they can get it on the market at $1/meter. Now the original company is fucked, they can't compete on the lower price, they've got $10 billion in R&D to recover. They lose a massive amount because they were the ones willing to take the risk and initiative to develop something new.
While it may be easy to say "Well screw them, we take it for the betterment of the world," consider the real result is that the first company would just never invest the dollars in R&D in the first place. If they know that the invention would just be taken, why bother? Instead they concentrate on just making things with existing technologies. Maybe do a bit of cheap development, but mostly you want to just produce, since creating just means you get it taken away.
So long as the economy is fundamentally a capitalism, which it is in every free country, then you have to have something to help protect inventors. Not saying the US system is the way to do it, but you can't just have it where inventions are free for the taking.
Really? You think patents are a measure of innovation? The vast majority of patents issued by the USPTO would have failed the test (that it be non-obvious, novel, and unique innovation), had it even been applied (which it won't, because that would cut deep into the revenue stream).
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars