Category Archives: Apple

A few thoughts on innovation

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I was invited the other day to a conference about innovation in the information technology sector. There was nothing remarkable about that event, except perhaps that it led me to voice an opinion I held for years: I do not understand what people are really talking about when they talk about innovation, at least in software, that is.

It might be odd to write this, but if there’s any concept that’s both fuzzy and dangerously misleading in the software industry, that would be innovation. I have read for many years and listened to people explaining how to “stirr and create innovation” in a company or in a community. Maybe these words have been used for lack of a better term; but I still don’t see how you can create innovation. I think you might be able to stirr it somehow, as it’s already a humbler verb. But frankly, can someone out there tell me what does innovation mean in the software world?

In general terms, I would define innovation as the big and small changes constantly leading to a change of the art in any given field. I think that’s pretty much what one usually understands by that word. So why could this not be applied to software? Precisely because software is rarely -if at all- the result of big changes happening all of a sudden and by accident. Software development usually happens at an incremental pace, whether openly so (think about the agile development practices) or even when there’s a structured corporate environment favoring traditional code reviews and quality assurance processes through stable product development cycles. Software is not produced by accident. Software is the result of process, and in theory accidents do not happen there. In fact, I could also point out that incremental changes or a period of technological incubation might be observed right before the emergence of almost any given technology. Take the medieval rudder for instance: it’s been rumored to have been imported in Europe around the 12th century by Chinese ships, but there are tracks and evidence of previous try-outs by European sailors and shipyards to design wooden rudders and articulate them with a complete mechanism. Similarly, it is hard to say how “innovation” happened in the sixties when the U.S. decided to send manned flights to the moon, but the wave of small and not so small innovation that was the result of this huge project is still visible to everyone (think of the Tefal pans, among many other things).

Thus there are, I think, two points that need to be highlighted: First, innovation does not happen all of a sudden if the field of software field and more generally ICT. It is a set of processes that ultimately lead to new software, or software that’s supposedly not as bad as the former state of the art. Second, what’s unclear is how -to quote several people I listened to- innovation “happens”. It sounds sometimes that innovation is a mystery or the philosophers’ stone that require care and secrecy to happen. Yet in the software industry, it does not work that way, for all the marketing and bells and whistles that come out of software vendors do not brush aside the fact that even inside these corporations software development is a set of very well defined, but non-public, processes.

Innovation is not a mystery and I don’t think that you can track how it works. You can assume that a certain set of circumstances and an environment letting people code start-ups emerge and Free & Open Source Software projects grow will ultimately translate into something that someone, whether a journalist, consultant, politicians or venture capitalists will call innovation. Anything else besides that, innovation sounds more like vapor and magical boxes. This should probably express what I feel about software patents, by the way.

One last thing: Innovation is different than progress. Progress is usually applied to fields that do not necessarily belong to science or technology; it can be more a perception and may concern society as a whole. Yet the interesting thing is that while progress seems to be an even more elusive term than innovation, you can actually tell progress from regression or stagnation: people perceive it almost immediately, however relative it sometimes may be.

Enjoy the beginning of the Holiday season!

Links for the beginning of November

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  • The light is shed on OOXML; I’ve lost count of how many officious, ISO sub-versions (and subversions) , alongside the proprietary formats also called OOXML but used in MS Office are now floating in the air. In any case, this short document from the ODF Alliance explains this obscure matter in a remarkably simple way.
  • The Document Foundation publishes the first hints of its bylaws for the Community. Not exactly a draft, as it obviously lacks some real meat, like process and governance description, yet an interesting read nonetheless.
  • Apple exits the server market. I have a good friend who worked at Apple until two years ago or so, and he always told me that Apple’s XServe product line surprisingly sold like hot cakes, although most of the customers were not interested the OS X server, but in the machine itself and ran various Linux flavors on it.
  • European Union invests 22 million Euros in the Symbian operating system, just days after the Symbian Foundation announces it’s about to close. Wait, what? I thought Symbian was a platform losing customers and momentum… A strange surge of European “patriotism” that I’m not used to, as someone who had to attend European Commission conference calls starting at 6 pm in order to accomodate US lobbyists.
  • If I wasn’t pointing that out, I guess something would be missing: Rehost & Carry on T-shirts available on Café Press.
  • This blog will soon undergo a server upgrade (next week or so) so apologies in advance for any downtime.
  • Last but not least -I still want to get the facts and numbers straight- it seems we won 50 new developers contributing to the core of LibreOffice. Thank you! You can donate to the Document Foundation here, meanwhile.

Who said Macs were for creative people? (random thoughts on Apple)

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These days it’s pretty fashionable to discuss the iPad, and indeed the other evening Jerome, (the other co-founder of Ars Aperta) and I were talking about the iPad when he made a comment that is I think the key to understand Apple’s strategy. Just after Steve Jobs had made the statement that there is a market for paid digital content on the  D8 stage, something that he is essentially right about, Cory Doctorow had written an article which I find essential as it phrases what the problem is with the iPad.  But let’s go back to Jerome’s comment: Ever since the return of Steve Jobs at Apple through the acquisition of his former company NeXT, the perception that Macs are for creative people is still around, but has proven to be very much wrong. In fact, Macs are fantastic computers designed for consumers of digital content. Let’s never forget that Steve Jobs used to buy what would become Pixar from the LucasFilm company and that he sold it back to Disney, becoming one of its shareholders in the process.

Steve Jobs is therefore a many of the “entertainment industry” as much as he’s an IT genius. Too many people forget it. Because of the focus on developing and selling machines for digital content consumers who are supposed to pay for it, one can come to see the iPad as one other device to consume paid content. The point, unfortunately, is that the lines are very much blurred at this stage between pundits taking on the angle of the tablet metaphor and the ones focusing on the business model instigated by Apple on the iPad (and the iPhone, indirectly).

The fact that the iPad is not capable of multitasking might have come as a disappointment to mostly IT people, but it’s beside the point: We will see multitasking iPads, make no mistake about it. The problem, and the one that Cory Doctorow does in fact properly discuss in his article, is not the hardware. The hardware is very nice, somewhat weak, but it will improve anyway. The problem lies in the economic model of the iPad: Digital content publishers adapt to one particular sales channel for one or two specific devices with a revenue sharing model that does not seem to satisfy them for the most part, and by doing this they essentially relinquish control to one player (Apple) controlling both the delivery channel and the device.  That does not end there. The device itself, be it an iPhone or an iPad, is not meant as something you can create anything with. Sure, there’s IWorks, but that hardly counts as a truly creative software. Anyone can get an office suite. On the iPad… you can only have this one. So because of the tablet metaphor, which in itself is not bad at all, the content delivery channel and the inherent limitation of the software platform, the iPad turns its “owners”‘ as passive consumers of digital content.

Now, there is surely a market for paid digital content. It would be better if this paid content was in the form of non-DRM riddled open standards and if you could actually have the tools to freely collaborate, share and create. That’s not what the iPad is intended to do. And that’s where Cory’s article hits the target. But there is more: the civilization in which the solely accepted way to use software and digital content is to be a passive consumer is over. It may perhaps never have really existed. The reasons for this are complex, and relate directly to the very end of the mass consumerism era as we know it, with its environmental and social damages (see the Story of Stuff for instance) it induces.

The iPad essentially is perhaps a beautiful tool, but it litteraly frames us in an environment where the only accepted form of creative creation comes from the established entertainment industry. It’s the television that everyone can take in his/her hands, and that dream already existed for 3G phones 10 years ago. But today, in the age of social networks, collaborative platforms, free and open source software, this model looks strangely outdated. As the famous sociologist Bernard Stiegler puts it, people have become sick of mass consumerism and eerie marketing strategies that tend to frame people as objects.  Entertainment consumerism is no different. And the irony of all this is that we still perceive macs as being computers for the creative bunch. It’s actually quite the contrary. And that’s why, by the way, my next laptop will not be a mac, inasmuch as I love its hardware.  Macs, iPads, iPhone will continue to generate enormous revenue, but they  have it backwards and will have to be reinvented (again): Apples never fall far from the tree…