[ih] Review: Yasha Levine's "Surveillance Valley"

[Dave Crocker]

> The research on innovation very clearly shows that significant, game 
> changing inventions almost always come from big companies. The myth of 
> two dudes in a garage ignores the fact that it takes big money to take 
> big risks.
> 
> Apple succeeded with the iPhone while Handspring and Nokia failed in 
> large part because of the music infrastructure the company had built 
> around the iPod, another second or third mover that succeeded where more 
> ad hoc MP3 players had failed.


This casts things as either or, which is in line with how the thread has 
gone, but probably misses a basic distinction, namely basic innovation 
from what I'll call scaling innovation.

Creation of the basic capability versus delivering a version of the 
capability that gains widespread success.  The latter is not a 'mere'.

Being able to get the balance of features, costs, marketing and sales 
choices just right is, obviously, not obvious.  But it is quite 
different from what we often call 'technological breakthrough'.

d/
-- 
Dave Crocker
Brandenburg InternetWorking
bbiw.net