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Imitation is the best form of flattery, but does it make for good innovation???
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Friday, April 13, 2007
In my 8 years at AOL, the majority of the time, I have heard developers, managers, testers, customers, you name it, say "You should be more like 'insert company name here.'" Most of the time the company they named was a competitor. Heck I am guilty of it at times, but it has triggered this thought in my head, "how does imitation make for good innovation?"
I am betting that AIM, AOL, or any other company out there looks at what their competition is doing whether you own the pole position in your industry or not. Maybe the most notorious copying job, was Apple "stealing" from Xerox back in the early 80s, then Microsoft stealing from Apple a few later the same technology Apple took from Xerox. I am willing to bet that Xerox got ideas from someone else, but it is not documented as well as Apple and MSFT are.
Looking at Vista you get the impression that Microsoft has decided it is easier to copy what Apple is doing then it is to innovate on the operating system. I think there are a few reasons why they are in this rut, but needless to say, I have not seen anything come out of Redland in the past 5 years that makes me say, "wow, " with the exception of XBox 360 and Windows Live Maps.
When in a time/money crunch we as human beings, tend to fall back to things we know work. So how do we ever innovate? Startups are forced to innovate because their investors won't give them a dime if they are just copying. Inside AIM, we have managed to innovate by removing process and the over saturation of ideas. My team is left alone to work on the IM Engine and to build cool stuff using it, like AIM Lite, mostly as a means of testing the Open AIM API.
I tend to use American football as an analogy to what we are building on AIM. There are many days where it feels like we are not advancing the ball down the field, but then we hit a pass for 20 yards. AIM 6.1 is the best looking client we have released for AIM since probably AIM 3.5. In the next couple of weeks hopefully I can share a little on how we are innovating for the next AIM release.
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Imitation is the best form of flattery, but does it make for good innovation???
I am betting that AIM, AOL, or any other company out there looks at what their competition is doing whether you own the pole position in your industry or not. Maybe the most notorious copying job, was Apple "stealing" from Xerox back in the early 80s, then Microsoft stealing from Apple a few later the same technology Apple took from Xerox. I am willing to bet that Xerox got ideas from someone else, but it is not documented as well as Apple and MSFT are.
Looking at Vista you get the impression that Microsoft has decided it is easier to copy what Apple is doing then it is to innovate on the operating system. I think there are a few reasons why they are in this rut, but needless to say, I have not seen anything come out of Redland in the past 5 years that makes me say, "wow, " with the exception of XBox 360 and Windows Live Maps.
When in a time/money crunch we as human beings, tend to fall back to things we know work. So how do we ever innovate? Startups are forced to innovate because their investors won't give them a dime if they are just copying. Inside AIM, we have managed to innovate by removing process and the over saturation of ideas. My team is left alone to work on the IM Engine and to build cool stuff using it, like AIM Lite, mostly as a means of testing the Open AIM API.
I tend to use American football as an analogy to what we are building on AIM. There are many days where it feels like we are not advancing the ball down the field, but then we hit a pass for 20 yards. AIM 6.1 is the best looking client we have released for AIM since probably AIM 3.5. In the next couple of weeks hopefully I can share a little on how we are innovating for the next AIM release.
gregsblog at 6:21:00 PM EDT Blog about this entry |
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This entry has 2 comments: (Add your own)
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I really hope in your process of innovation, the AOL team has the gusto to take a risk and do something to help us Vista users out. I'm itching for some kind of IM client that uses the power of Vista. Considering the AIM team has been the most innovative in the past year (or maybe even longer), I find a bit of an excuse to be optimistic. Then again, Yahoo's WPF demo is pretty intriguing.
4/13/07 7:27 PM
On top of that, a modular install would wow people. I'm sure you've seen it on Neowin, people love to complain about bloat. If the program does anything more than send black text to another recipient, it's automatically bloated. Modularity would be a very enticing means of appeasing this crowd of people.