It’s funny. Right before putting up a post about innovation, I find a post on slashdot that lets me perfectly set the mood. Drink the following in, mes amis – drink it in…

A New Scientist article details the claims of Jonathan Huebner, a Naval Air Warfare Center physicist, that the rate of technological innovation is actually decreasing, not increasing exponentially as some people believe.

Well, well, well.

Have I mentioned before that I think “innovation” is one of the most overused and abused words in the technoliterati lexicon? I see it everywhere and in so many contexts. Sometimes I don’t even know what it means anymore, or if it even does have a meaning. It’s almost become an approximation of a feeling. Very abstract. Its meaning has been so diluted that it’s practically interchangeable with “smurf” as a do-everything-word.

It reminds me of something that I did as a child. Out of boredom, I used to sit and stare at blank walls long enough that they would appear to begin to change color. The constant exposure to that one stimulus over an extended period of time resulted in a loss of context. That is, while just staring at one color for a long time and nothing else, that color eventually lost its value. While the wall was still technically white at the end of a staring session, I had become so focused on it that I could no longer tell what color it was. You really need to have at least one other color present to give another color value.

I feel the same thing has happened with “innovation.” I’ve seen it in so many ads, PowerPoint presentations, tech company initiatives, mission statements, and individual resumes that I feel like it doesn’t mean anything anymore.

Am I the only person who feels this way? I’m not going to name any names, but I’ve looked into a few online resumes that I’ve found at various blogs, and a surprising number list such qualities as:

– I am an innovative problem solver…

– I come up with innovative strategies to [blah, blah, blah]…

– My team was at the forefront of innovation for [Company X]…

I’ve been exposed to ad after ad from tech companies stating stuff like this:

– Our solution is the most innovative in the industry…

– We provide innovative products for [Problem X]…

Something I hear constantly inside Microsoft is that we need to be innovative in [Way X].

And I wonder: When will it end?

While I’m willing to accept that there has been tons of innovation in the world, it would only be so long as we accept that “innovation” is not defined as it is by the folks over at Merriam-Webster:

the introduction of something new

If we were to go with this definition without restriction, then we can assume that anything which did not heretofore exist is innovative. For example, I have bad BO right now, and I’m probably leaving a little trail of it wherever I go. That trail of odor, then, is new to the areas where it’s being left. I am, then, being innovative with how I spread my stink.

However, that’s obviously a ridiculous way to state it. That isn’t what we mean when we call something “innovative” in the tech industry.

Or, I should say, what we ought to mean.

As far as I can tell, the word “innovative,” when used in the tech industry, falls into several categories of meaning:

– The Null: It can be omitted from a sentence entirely without changing the meaning of the sentence

– The Addition: It can mean that some new lame feature has been added to a product, and the feature doesn’t really matter all that much

– The Theft: It can mean that [Company X] has taken technology from [Company Y] and implemented it in its own product

And then, when the planets are aligned just right, we see, on those very rare occasions, the word “innovative” come to mean what we all really want it to mean:

– The Original: A product/process/technology/etc. which changes its industry by applying an idea that is either brand new, or simply brand new to that industry

This last one is rare. It’s, like, “mystical beast of the forest” rare. You’ll probably get struck by red lightning while being breast-fed by Pamela Anderson before you encounter a true example of The Original type of innovation.

Nearly every product we see today is a “me too” or something which has easily traceable roots back to the 80s, the 70s, or ancient Mesopotamia.

Even my sitting here and telling you that innovation is mostly an illusion isn’t anything new. Ecclesiastes had me beat on it by quite a wide margin:

The words of the Preacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem.

Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity.

What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun?

One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever.

The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose.

The wind goeth toward the south, and turneth about unto the north; it whirleth about continually, and the wind returneth again according to his circuits.

All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full; unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again.

All things are full of labour; man cannot utter it: the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing.

The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.

And Ecclesiastes was no doubt inspired by some earlier bit of scripture. The idea is old. It’s not mine, and it’s not even the property of the author of this ancient bit of writing.

It is not innovative.

So why is it so many people are quick to claim that their skills, products, solutions, and methods are? This is something that’s driven me nuts about the Linux camp. While I don’t have any problem with the OS itself, I’ve always been bummed that there’s this big thing out there which is basically just a hunk of communal tech artwork, and it’s becoming…

…a Windows clone.

Many distros have KDE and Gnome configured by default to appear very Windows-ish. We see the Start menu, sometimes something resembling the Control Panel, and so on.

Here were these people who did have a chance to be innovative. Forget about the *nix underpinnings for a minute and think about what could have happened with Linux on the desktop. It could have become something so itself that there wouldn’t even be a notion of competition between it and other desktop environments. Instead, we have a platform that is growing more and more like Windows every day. There are even bridging applications meant to make it possible to run Windows applications and games on Linux.

That… is not innovation. They had a chance, and they blew it.

And that’s just one example. I bring it up because a constant anti-Windows argument I read on Slashdot is that Microsoft is no longer innovative, but that Linux and OSS are. Anybody who’s watched the evolution of Linux over the past few years can tell you what a load of crap that is.

However, not to pick on Linux, let’s go ahead and pick on my company. Actually, let’s pick on all big corporations for a minute which claim to be in any way innovative.

How many of them really are? I personally don’t consider Microsoft to be innovative at the moment. I want it to be, and I know it has the capability to be, but as things stand, we seem to be in a “me too” phase in areas where we aren’t already leading. I think we’re doing a good job with our OS, the Office Suite, and dev tools. We have some seriously kick-ass products, and we keep improving them. I don’t know if I would go so far as to call them truly innovative, but in a lot of ways, we’re doing things that aren’t being done elsewhere on such a scale or so well. But then look at other areas – we’re trailing in search, we’re trailing in large net-accessible apps, and I feel like I’m reading an announcement every day stating that Microsoft is about to get into [Field X] with its own offering, with the announcement usually trailing some other company’s by a couple weeks.

That’s fine. I love our stuff, but I’m not going to try to fool anybody into thinking that a lot of it is actually innovative. I’m not just going to pick on Linux and OSS. We’re all giving it to ourselves in the behind right now where innovation is concerned.

And why?

It might help to think about it in terms of popular music. I listen to stuff from the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, and the present, and it is fascinating to listen to two very disparate eras of music side-by-side. Take the Beatles and put them next to Coldplay. Coldplay is the current media darling, but what they’re doing is so utterly dull compared to what the Beatles did. Is Coldplay writing good songs? (This could be rephrased as: Is the OSS world creating a decent OS? Is Microsoft doing a good job with Windows?) The answer is yes, Coldplay is writing good songs, but that’s really just what they are: good songs. They aren’t testing us or pushing themselves. They’re playing it safe and putting out Very Pleasing Tunes That Everybody Should Love.

The Beatles… There was a band that dove right in. In the beginning, they weren’t that compelling, but as soon as they found their feet, they were off and running. Sargent Pepper and Revolver are still incredible albums because they were all over the place, exploring territory that nobody else was touching. While the various influences may not have been new, the combination of those influences and the personalities in the band created something which many of us can agree was pretty bloody special. It almost seems greater than the whole of the parts. It’s that good.

If we’ve heard anything like it since, it’s because other bands picked up on the success, and the territory the Beatles explored subsequently became safe. Now, in 2005, that territory is a well-lit neighborhood with a pleasant little cafe and a safe place to leave your kids while you go to work. The magic is gone. Drones of mediocre people have moved in and taken the places of the creative ones which were previously there. Corporate America owns pop music now, and it’s killing it. There are formulas employed by the industry which calculate whether or not a song should be successful. We have algorithms which determine the appeal of a song based on the success of those which preceded it. And yet musicians who have let themselves get sucked into these foolish contracts still try to be creative and original with these vice-grip constraints.

The result? Well, it’s not the Beatles. I can tell you that much. I travel a lot now and wind up listening to the radio for lack of other forms of entertainment, and as far as I’m concerned, there are only two bands left. There’s one where there’s this guy who sings, and there’s one where there’s this girl who sings. Their songs are on heavy rotation. (There are, by the by, only two songs – one from each artist.)

I’m being flippant here, but the point is that each artist on the radio is so similar to the next that I can’t tell the difference between them anymore. They’re all created from the same template.

Artist maleArtist = new Artist(Gender.Male);

So, where are we now? How does this relate to tech?

The first thing I want to say is that Big Tech Companies are crammed to the gills with innovative projects. The catch is that those projects are often not the ones being turned into products. They’re are the projects that might get a few minutes in the limelight after some tech site links to an R&D page. They’re the projects that we read about and think, “Hey – that’s pretty damned cool,” and then promptly forget, not ever stopping to consider that the company which owns them might forget too. (It’s interesting to note that the world is also crammed full of new and interesting music – you just won’t find it on the radio).

It’s sad. It reminds me of Xerox and HP. Xerox had everything it needed to conquer the world almost ten years before I was born, and HP turned away Steve Wozniak’s now famous work without a thought. Both companies were so set in their ways, cranking out the singles that everybody wanted to hear, focused only on playing it safe, and wound up seriously missing the boat. The future passed both companies right by.

Copy machines. That, as far as Xerox was concerned, was the future.

Was.

The word “innovation” is spread like oxygen inside Microsoft. But where is the innovation happening? It’s actually all over the place, but like the record industry, we’ve learned that it’s wise to play it safe. We’re working on creating better, more stable, safer versions of Windows. A lot of the really cool stuff will never leave R&D.

To me, that’s not innovation. It’s simply improvement. It’s a good thing, and it’s good for business.

But we shouldn’t all be patting ourselves on the back about being innovative. Not at Microsoft, not at Apple, and not in OSS land. We’re all just copying each other, fighting to create the most easy to use, stable, and safe operating system for general users. We’re writing the three-minute and thirty-second pop songs with a short guitar solo just after the second chorus that will be guaranteed airplay.

And that’s OK.

I’m fine with that.

But let’s stop calling it “innovation” until the day we step up to bat and swing one out of the park like nobody’s ever seen it done before.

Like with a fish. I bet you’ve never seen someone hit a baseball out of the park using a halibut.

That’s innovation.

[Note: If this post struck a chord with you, then check out the follow-up.]