The computing technologies developed prior to 1980 have mostly become cheap enough that they have become accessible to a mass audience, in part because of iteration on manufacturing techniques, & mostly because of cheap labor (in the form of fresh-out-of-college CS students who will write bad code for half of what you’d pay the PhDs to refuse to write bad code, and will work unpaid overtime if you give them a ball pit and a superiority complex).
I guess you could do that by defining everything that's happened since then as "not innovation" but how is that meaningful? This is a content-free rant.
I guess you could do that by defining everything that's happened since then as "not innovation" but how is that meaningful? This is a content-free rant.
It's just... this means that the invention of the Web was not innovative, and nothing that's happened on the Web since then was innovative. Linux was not innovative, and no improvements to it in...
It's just... this means that the invention of the Web was not innovative, and nothing that's happened on the Web since then was innovative. Linux was not innovative, and no improvements to it in its entire history were innovative. Google's search engine doesn't count. Smart phones don't count, and neither do any improvements to them. Wikipedia doesn't count. No programming languages invented since 1978 count. Improvements to video games since Pong don't count. No improvements to personal computers since the Apple II count.
It's excluding almost everything interesting about computing. The word "innovation" is nebulous and possibly, you could make up a definition so that none of these things are innovative. But what's the point of that? It's just an edgy take.
Okay, but… Linux wasn't innovative. It was a Unix clone for x86. It wasn't even the first Unix clone for x86. "Not innovative" is definitely not to be read as "not impactful" here.
Linux was not innovative
Okay, but… Linux wasn't innovative. It was a Unix clone for x86. It wasn't even the first Unix clone for x86.
"Not innovative" is definitely not to be read as "not impactful" here.
That's a common take and I could give you that one, but there's more to building a good operating system than having the basic idea and getting a proof of concept working. Maybe the first version...
That's a common take and I could give you that one, but there's more to building a good operating system than having the basic idea and getting a proof of concept working. Maybe the first version didn't break new ground, but that doesn't mean no innovative work was contributed since.
I'm no expert in Linux history, but I'm reluctant to dismiss the work of thousands of contributors as "not innovative." It just seems like a shallow take. We aren't going to settle the question without actually looking.
That could be an interesting question: does more innovation happen in academia or in industry? But it might be difficult to answer to anyone's satisfaction, because the question is so nebulous....
That could be an interesting question: does more innovation happen in academia or in industry?
But it might be difficult to answer to anyone's satisfaction, because the question is so nebulous. You need to define "innovation" and then decide what accomplishments count as innovation. Then decide who gets credit for them, which is itself a hard problem, often disputed. Then decide whether they were in academia versus industry. Many of these distinctions are going to be arbitrary and people will quibble with them.
One reason this is going to be tricky because some parts of academia work very closely with industry and there is a revolving door. A famous example is that Sergey Brin and Larry Page invented PageRank while still at Stanford. I guess that counts as "academia" but it seems arbitrary when the same people are doing good work in both places and most of the work on Google's search engine was done after they left Stanford, by people they hired at Google.
Stanford is itself very industry-focused. A lot of people go there to learn how to found startups. There are courses and everything.
This isn't limited to Internet startups either. Many professors found companies to commercialize their academic research in scientific fields.
(Also, many early innovations happened at Bell Labs and PARC, which were industry labs.)
This nebulosity about what innovation means and who is responsible for it is why it's hard to get satisfying conclusions out of articles written about innovation . The "great stagnation" debate has similar problems.
Even when the conclusion is debatable, it's possible we might learn something about history from articles like this, if they are good at telling stories about specific examples of innovation. But that doesn't seem like the case with this article? He's just name-checking well-known history and saying "come on, you know it's true."
There has been a lot less blue-sky research in the industry since the heydays of Xerox PARC and Bell Labs etc. But, there are still cool things coming out of big tech R&D. They just tend to not...
There has been a lot less blue-sky research in the industry since the heydays of Xerox PARC and Bell Labs etc. But, there are still cool things coming out of big tech R&D. They just tend to not trickle out into the larger market. Stuff like Facebook’s social graph tech and Google’s knowledge graph tech are innovative. They’re just proprietary and only indirectly accessible for now.
I agree with the author, but I think that it's worth noting that it's only really true insofar as being about Silicon Valley in particular. And even then, my level of agreement isn't exactly 100%....
I agree with the author, but I think that it's worth noting that it's only really true insofar as being about Silicon Valley in particular. And even then, my level of agreement isn't exactly 100%. There really is some levels of innovation coming from Silicon Valley, but it tends to get overshadowed by the big 'tech giant' companies making millions of dollars on services that may or may not actually be technology related. For instance, Apple has done a lot of work to make digital video a reality. And all the things that make digital video as efficient and high-quality as it is today is not because manufacturing is improving, but because of actual technical inventions that are combined together in novel ways - real innovation!
But the grain of truth that the author is grasping at is that there is not enough money being used to research fundamentals. All of those technical innovations he talks about likely wouldn't have happened without someone figuring out the physics behind transistors. Without money being spent on researching how we can apply novel physical forces, there's not going to be a technological revolution any time soon.
And of course, most of what is coming out of Silicon Valley today isn't innovations, but instead just offers various types of services in new packages. Consider how we talk about Uber as a tech company in spite of how their actual income is from people driving cars for them. Look at how many companies are just turning desktop applications into cloud services or phone apps. The public perception of what 'tech' is essentially amounts to churning existing technology into novel forms to make them more attractive to consumers.
I thought this was a good response to a more-recent article that made the similar claim there had been no advances in "software technology" since 1996: Nothing is New - On inventions, improvements...
Oh man, I did a spit-take when I read that!
I guess you could do that by defining everything that's happened since then as "not innovation" but how is that meaningful? This is a content-free rant.
It's just... this means that the invention of the Web was not innovative, and nothing that's happened on the Web since then was innovative. Linux was not innovative, and no improvements to it in its entire history were innovative. Google's search engine doesn't count. Smart phones don't count, and neither do any improvements to them. Wikipedia doesn't count. No programming languages invented since 1978 count. Improvements to video games since Pong don't count. No improvements to personal computers since the Apple II count.
It's excluding almost everything interesting about computing. The word "innovation" is nebulous and possibly, you could make up a definition so that none of these things are innovative. But what's the point of that? It's just an edgy take.
Okay, but… Linux wasn't innovative. It was a Unix clone for x86. It wasn't even the first Unix clone for x86.
"Not innovative" is definitely not to be read as "not impactful" here.
That's a common take and I could give you that one, but there's more to building a good operating system than having the basic idea and getting a proof of concept working. Maybe the first version didn't break new ground, but that doesn't mean no innovative work was contributed since.
I'm no expert in Linux history, but I'm reluctant to dismiss the work of thousands of contributors as "not innovative." It just seems like a shallow take. We aren't going to settle the question without actually looking.
That could be an interesting question: does more innovation happen in academia or in industry?
But it might be difficult to answer to anyone's satisfaction, because the question is so nebulous. You need to define "innovation" and then decide what accomplishments count as innovation. Then decide who gets credit for them, which is itself a hard problem, often disputed. Then decide whether they were in academia versus industry. Many of these distinctions are going to be arbitrary and people will quibble with them.
One reason this is going to be tricky because some parts of academia work very closely with industry and there is a revolving door. A famous example is that Sergey Brin and Larry Page invented PageRank while still at Stanford. I guess that counts as "academia" but it seems arbitrary when the same people are doing good work in both places and most of the work on Google's search engine was done after they left Stanford, by people they hired at Google.
Stanford is itself very industry-focused. A lot of people go there to learn how to found startups. There are courses and everything.
This isn't limited to Internet startups either. Many professors found companies to commercialize their academic research in scientific fields.
(Also, many early innovations happened at Bell Labs and PARC, which were industry labs.)
This nebulosity about what innovation means and who is responsible for it is why it's hard to get satisfying conclusions out of articles written about innovation . The "great stagnation" debate has similar problems.
Even when the conclusion is debatable, it's possible we might learn something about history from articles like this, if they are good at telling stories about specific examples of innovation. But that doesn't seem like the case with this article? He's just name-checking well-known history and saying "come on, you know it's true."
There has been a lot less blue-sky research in the industry since the heydays of Xerox PARC and Bell Labs etc. But, there are still cool things coming out of big tech R&D. They just tend to not trickle out into the larger market. Stuff like Facebook’s social graph tech and Google’s knowledge graph tech are innovative. They’re just proprietary and only indirectly accessible for now.
I agree with the author, but I think that it's worth noting that it's only really true insofar as being about Silicon Valley in particular. And even then, my level of agreement isn't exactly 100%. There really is some levels of innovation coming from Silicon Valley, but it tends to get overshadowed by the big 'tech giant' companies making millions of dollars on services that may or may not actually be technology related. For instance, Apple has done a lot of work to make digital video a reality. And all the things that make digital video as efficient and high-quality as it is today is not because manufacturing is improving, but because of actual technical inventions that are combined together in novel ways - real innovation!
But the grain of truth that the author is grasping at is that there is not enough money being used to research fundamentals. All of those technical innovations he talks about likely wouldn't have happened without someone figuring out the physics behind transistors. Without money being spent on researching how we can apply novel physical forces, there's not going to be a technological revolution any time soon.
And of course, most of what is coming out of Silicon Valley today isn't innovations, but instead just offers various types of services in new packages. Consider how we talk about Uber as a tech company in spite of how their actual income is from people driving cars for them. Look at how many companies are just turning desktop applications into cloud services or phone apps. The public perception of what 'tech' is essentially amounts to churning existing technology into novel forms to make them more attractive to consumers.
I thought this was a good response to a more-recent article that made the similar claim there had been no advances in "software technology" since 1996: Nothing is New - On inventions, improvements and stagnation in the software world.