I don't think it's minimizing someone's innovations to point out that they rest on previous work. The fact is that Zuckerberg had a lot of R&D done for him by friendster and myspace and orkut and so forth, which allowed him to avoid a lot of mistakes and take a lot of ideas which had become obvious. The iphone, of course, was a pretty obvious move and others had already moved on that concept. Sort of a forced move, really. Failure to combine the ipod with a phone would have been an inexplicable blunder. Making that move was not a stroke of genius. And of course Java was explicitly intended to be, basically, C++ done right.
All of those examples are examples of innovation, sure, but they point out how little innovation is involved in making a category leader - not how much. You take everything that works and use it, and then you just fix a few things. If Steve Jobs had insisted on innovating in the mePhone, in terms of externals, it would have been a disaster. Imagine if java had not used the C syntax so slavishly - how many potential users would they have lost, simply because of the extra work of learning a new syntax? On Thu, Jun 21, 2012 at 6:55 PM, phil swenson <[email protected]>wrote: > it's always easy to minimize other's innovations. > > iphone? there were smartphones in 2000, they just stuck a pretty UI on it. > Facebook? same as friendster. > mongodb? how is it any better than oracle? > java? c++ dumbed down > > > On Thu, Jun 21, 2012 at 12:12 PM, Fabrizio Giudici > <[email protected]> wrote: > > On Tue, 19 Jun 2012 17:26:04 +0200, Kevin Wright < > [email protected]> > > wrote: > > > >> It's therefore no surprise that people in the US are far more likely to > >> Try asking around in China what people there consider to be innovative, > I'd > >> > >> be very surprised if many people there regard Twitter in this category. > > > > > > I don't live in China, still I don't consider Twitter a big technological > > innovation. It's just marketing. I don't see anything that you can do > with > > Twitter and you couldn't do with other means, such as a RSS feed. > > Furthermore it's a single point of failure (80 minutes of blackout > today). > > > > > > -- > > Fabrizio Giudici - Java Architect, Project Manager > > Tidalwave s.a.s. - "We make Java work. Everywhere." > > [email protected] > > http://tidalwave.it - http://fabriziogiudici.it > > > > -- > > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > > "Java Posse" group. > > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > > [email protected]. > > For more options, visit this group at > > http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en. > > > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Java Posse" group. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > [email protected]. > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en. > > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
