No it is not. And when you think about it’s kind of a good thing. Because it means that the path from technology to revenue is that much shorter. Of course, the other side of that coin is that there are many people competing for that same revenue.

After writing my last post on this, and Marc’s comments, I started to ask myself some questions, such as:

• What is technology? Is it mechanical, digital, a hybrid?
• What is software? Is it the nail, the hammer, the glue, something else?
• Should software be an end-product? Is is worth anything without the hardware, is hardware worth anything without software?
• What would it take to make something innovative, aka. high-tech?

Certainly not an exhaustive list, but a good start.

My favourite of these is the fourth question, what it takes to be innovative. Back, when I was trying to convince myself to go into software, my main objective was to create something that would change my / the world in some ways. But it was strange, every-time I was thinking about a product, or rather a service (I see software as a service), I was always thinking that it would be so much better if there were hardware designed for / with it.

It’s the age-old debate of Apple vs. Microsoft, Quicktime vs. Flash or Java, a console vs. a computer, Firefox vs. IE/Safari etc. The difference between these “technologies” is that the one is designed to be—somewhat—platform-agnostic, and the other is designed for a platform.

We’ve rehashed Apple vs. Microsoft many times, so I won’t go into that too much. But if you look at cross-platform apps like Flash (as well as AIR) or Firefox, they are clearly feature-rich, but in many cases laggy as hell. I would consider both an inferior product, simply because it does not work as well as other competing products on the same hardware. The same with Windows, which has huge legacy-support, but is in some cases (a loud minority, I’m sure) not as “plug & play” with the systems it runs on, as e.g. Apple’s OS X, or the Xbox-OS.

Both of which are designed for the specific hardware, and it is actually the whole package—hardware + software—that is considered the innovation.

For something to be considered innovative, it should be seen as the whole end-product for the consumer. A minor example. When I installed OS X Leopard on my ancient (but perfect) G4-laptop, it gave me the two-fingered right-click. By all accounts a hardware-innovation, a tiny one, but which made the whole interface better. I’m not sure if software on its own could ever achieve a similar effect on the user.

So what would it take for real innovation to occur? It would have to be a paradigm-shift. We’re seeing a lot of interesting software coming out, a good example probably being Second Life. Yet Second Life—which was inspired by a world called “The Metaverse” that an author, Neal Stephenson, came up with in a book, called “Snow Crash,” is nowhere close to that ideal.

The reason is that, from a user-perspective, the Metaverse started with the interface—gloves and a helmet hooked up to a box—which allowed the user to literally hook into a system. How does Second Life ever compare to that? Instead, it forces users to be immobile behind their PCs, staring into a 2-d interface, imagining themselves to be in a world, in which they clearly are not.

And, in my eyes, the same applies to lots of software designed for an interface that simply does not innovate.

Facebook, Windows, OS X, Open Social, AIR, etc. All platforms actively marketing for developers. Yet how much of that marketing is happening in hardware, an area which has largely been commoditised over the last 20 odd years to the degree that R&D in that area must have been stagnating much.

You do see some changes. Microsoft, when it started on the Xbox, made a paradigm-shift. Apple has been doing the same for years, but now at an exploding rate. Microsoft’s Surface will be very interesting, as will the next version of Windows, though still restricted to a 2-d interface. And there’s probably 100s of other examples, which I can’t think of now.

The thing is that innovation in software has exploded in the last decades, as has, to a lesser degree, hardware. But we have reached a mature-level where the novelty has worn off. For software to become interesting again, we need new hardware—a new way to interface with technology, that takes us away from the boring old mouse and keyboard, and allows us to the live the mobile life for which our physical bodies were actually designed.

The Wii is a good example of what happens when you don’t just focus on hardware, you don’t just focus on software, but you focus on how your product can actually become useful in the lives of people that are not geeks, early adopters, or the loud minority.

Vincent out. This is my last post this year, I think.

Like

Unlike

Related posts:

1. The Euro vs. Dollar double gambetto for high tech corporations
2. Is software high-tech?
3. Is Software High Tech? If not is it a Commodity?
4. With Virtualization, does hardware simply no longer matter?
5. US subprime crunch impact on high tech