Comments | azooey: Innovation and Size

azooey

Innovation and Size

Jul 22, 2006 22:57

... dont seem to love each other's company. If innovative skills were any indication, Microsoft's pulse has long gone silent. As Guy Kawasaki would put it, if it were daisy wheel printer company, it would think innovation means adding Helvetica in 24 points.

Or if Microsoft were just Microsoft, it would set out to follow someone else's curve.

May ( Read more... )

Comments 7

hmmm anonymous July 22 2006, 21:41:52 UTC

very interesting post...especially as I was having this conversation with another friend of mine related to MSFT...three interesting observations ( ... )

Re: hmmm azooey July 23 2006, 01:57:45 UTC

hey Ash... been reading ur contributions to the mbajackass that vishal pointed me to. I could talk for hours abt that, but for now, welcome to LJ ( ... )

Re: hmmm anonymous July 24 2006, 19:19:01 UTC

The thing I like about Google is that they're on fire.Are you sure about this one? The simplicity of design is Google's only "true" innovation (there were other innovations that were required for the search engine: PageRank, Google FS, C-COTS machines, etc., but what won the market was its user interface rather than its search results). The applications themselves have all been ideas of others. Pick any "winning" Google application and I can show you somebody who had thought about it and implemented it before Google took that app and made it nice ( ... )

Re: hmmm azooey July 28 2006, 07:17:40 UTC

I'm not sure i comprehensively understand what you mean by "process innovation", but i would really like to know what degree of success its predecessors(the ones who came up with the original ideas achieved), although, frankly, I know little about Google's "process", much less about its "innovation".

By "getting better" i meant incremental change i.e. version 1.1 being "better" than version 1.2. "Making something new" would, in my eyes, be the same as creating a new product which may cover a superset of previous accomplished capabilities, or a whole new set. In the former case, its important to note that the new capabilities are not just hung on the previously exising ones, but have a significant market/demand that has a potential of spawning a whole new trend of usage of that product.

And not that i need to defend, but I did not utter anything abt a company being a dinosaur :)

mannu July 22 2006, 22:04:14 UTC

Google Video is innovating. Well, at least they're implementing new features. Just a couple of days ago I learnt they added the ability to link to any point within a video (which YouTube doesn't have yet).

About Microsoft, I remember having read somewhere that they had spun off MSN as a separate business unit only so it didn't have to suffer the "bigness". But I wonder what's happened after the recent re-organisation. Surprisingly, MS has been really good at communicating with customers using new channels like blogs (they have 3,000+ employees blogging about their work).

azooey July 23 2006, 02:10:10 UTC

Yes, one must distinguish between making it better with radical new features as against making it better with a spanking new-look along with a few "new" adjustments and tweaks.

If the new feature can spin off a whole new trend of usage, that IMO is an innovation.

Communication with customers is surely good, as I would know from personal experience :) but customers are not blind, and its not customer service they're paying for. They're paying for the product. Half of all customer service efforts are marketing strategies.

mannu July 23 2006, 12:05:11 UTC

It's not "customer service", as you put it. It's about listening to customers (end-users, developers, etc.) and incorporating their ideas and suggestions into your products. It's a constant dialogue with the users. In Microsoft's case, the users are software developers, and blogs are a perfect channel for this sort of communication.