Surface innovation setting up valley for a fall

February 6, 2006 | Michael Bazeley | Comments | |

Entreprenueur and engineer Bill Grosso is watching all the innovation around web applications in the valley and shaking his head. In a recent blog post, he questions the increased reliance by start-ups on outsourcing. And he takes big swipes at what he sees as “surafce innovation.” (He’s not the first to go down this path lately.)

Whether you use Ruby on Rails or Django, whether you use Dojo or Mochikit, whether you build on a newfangled Java platform or go totally Lamp, the barriers to building good web apps are falling by the wayside.

That’s intense, stunning, and exciting. I guess.

But it’s also superficial. And it’s leading people to incorrect conclusions. And it’s setting the valley up for a fall.

Interestingly, he sees Microsoft as the 800-pound gorilla. In fact, he makes no mention of Google at all.

Microsoft scares me. When I look at what’s in .NET, and I look at what’s going on in Vista, and I look at the overall platform strategy that Microsoft is embarked upon, I see three things: long-term planning, coordinated action, and fundamental innovation.

When I look at the valley, I see a lot of innovation. But it’s surface innovation instead of deep innovation. To dramatically overstate the case: we’re focusing on building better event calendars and better blog aggregators. And on bringing the same functionality, slightly tailored, to all the nooks and crannies of the long tail.

Microsoft is focused on changing the game entirely.

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About the Author, Michael Bazeley

  • Bill's right in pointing out that managing outsourced resources is very hard. Anyone who's worked in international business knows this.

    And he's correct in being concerned about the shallow nature of Silicon Valley innovation and investment. Let's face it - shallow is easier to pitch, fund, close.

    Deep innovation requires real commitment: long-term, heartfelt, and honest. Oh, and one more thing - it requires humility. Intellectual humility - the recognition that you don't know all things and there is always more to learn. And business humility - the understanding that the world does not and will not change for you.

    But as long as Silicon Valley continues to fall prey to the belief that we can and should control / understand / invent according to a preconceived set of convenient conditions favorable only to narrow interests (customers be damned), my advice to serious entrepreneurs who want to dive deep and grab that shiny penny is simple: "Warning: objects in pool are closer than they appear." :-)

    Lynne Greer Jolitz
    Chief Technology Officer
    ExecProducer / CoolClip Network
  • Ed
    Bill is correct about Microsoft. I also see some long term planning and forward looking from Microsoft that will eclispe this well-coined 'surface innovation' that is overly celebrated.

    //In fact, he makes no mention of Google at all.//

    Waaaaaah.....
  • As someone working in an SaaS company that's been around for 7 years (and yes we're using a lot of 'web 2.0' technology, most of which has existed for years), I couldn't agree more- the really hard parts of building this kind of business is support, reliability (this is killer- try being around when someone's email or, God forbid, online back-ups, aren't working), scalability and sales. Building a cool app that sorta works doesn't cut it out there in the marketplace. SMBs for example, could care less about all the chatter about Web 2.0- they need software services that work, period. And are integrated- what good is an online calendar that is not integrated with contacts, email, tasks, notifications, etc.? Yet one launched yesterday (30 Boxes).
    If you try to outsource these critical functions you are putting your company in someone else's hands. Look at Six Apart's datacenter issues a few months ago...users don't care about it being a partner's fault.
    So yes, Microsoft is still out there although I disagree regarding Google. To my mind they are still the 50,000 LB gorilla because they've been massively hosting services for a long time and MS has not.
    You can't build a business by outsourcing the hard parts. If you do, all you really have is a cool idea.
  • You couldn't be too right there Michael. People are thinking about the small pictures and not the big picture. Something I have been guilty of myself.

    The difference between Microsoft and Google is MS has the stronghold on the desktop market and they have leverage with that but it is losing some steam against web services. Google is poised to lead the way in web services. It also seems Yahoo wants to lead the way in "average joe" people based web services whereas Google seems tailored practically to anyone but seems to get praised by technical people.

    But yes you are correct...