As always, thoughts and/or comments are greatly appreciated.

• Why has Microsoft seemingly stopped innovating? [Quora]
  Quora answers the question:

  Apple and Google stand for innovation in my mind, where Microsoft represents the hum-drum. I’m particularly interested in Microsoft, which employs so much talent. This is a follow-up question to How should Microsoft respond to Apple’s iPad?.

• Uniquely positioned [The Economist]
  Innovation means doing something other than what the innovators of yesterday are doing, as Uniqlo is doing with Zara and H&M.
• Marico Innovation Foundation [Marico Innovation Foundation]
  An interesting effort to fuel innovation in India.
• On Biting [12ozPROPHET]
  Jim Jarmusch with some excellent advice on what to make of other peoples’ ideas.

As always, thoughts and/or comments are greatly appreciated.

• ‘Good’ Beats ‘Innovative’ Nearly Every Time [BusinessWeek: Innovate]
  Successful innovation rarely requires you to be original. Sometimes innovating results in a (technically) worse product, but one which users prefer.
• What Matters Now: get the free ebook [Seth's blog]
  Seth Godin asked seventy people what they think matters, with an interesting range of opinions resulting.
• CreativeMornings Video: Andy Bonventre, Google [Swiss Miss]
  Andy Bonventre’s presentation at Creative Morning at Google, discussing company’s approach to user experience. He discusses issues of respect between engineers and designers and how they can get on and work with each other.
• How A Kid Funded VoodooPC With His Credit Card And Sold It To HP [Mixergy]
  At 17-years-old, he couldn’t legally drink, vote or even sign a contract, but that didn’t stop Rahul Sood from launching a company. He just did it. Another example of how the traditional barriers to competition (and innovation) have been destroyed.

Google (well, James Hamilton) has weighted in on the question of private clouds. As expected from a large cloud provider, James takes the position that private clouds make no sense. His reasoning is straight forward: private clouds will never have the scale of public clouds, therefore private clouds can never achieve the same price point as their public brethren. Ergo, there’s no point in building private clouds.

As I’ve pointed out before, there’s a lot more to cloud than simply reducing costs. The biggest benefit is probably the agility that cloud can bring to your IT estate, leveraging a cloud platform’s ability to codify and automate many of the management practices and create a target platform that can work across a range of deployment options, as well as streamlining hardware provisioning. Companies are also increasingly having to deal with the realities of political boundaries, a situation where the best technical solution might not be acceptable due to legal requirements (such as privacy legislation). Developing a private cloud can be a sensible move in this context.

Of course, if you want to compete purely on cost then private cloud will never hit the same price point as public cloud. But this misses the point that for many companies IT flexibility/agility is more important than cost.

Note: I was going to post this as a comment on James’ post, but comments appear to be broken.

Posted via web from PEG @ Posterous

It’s Just a Bunch of Stuff That Happens has done a brilliant job of capturing this visually (included below). I like the usability aspect this highlights. A mash-up’s focus is cross-application usability—removing the annoyances of dealing with separate information sources. We could simply take these sources and squish them up against the glass, delivering the content into iGoogle or NetVibes gadgets. But what those original push-pins on a map mash-ups did was improve the usability of these information sources by eliminating the decisions required to navigate across them. Just as Apple did with the iPod and iPhone, eliminating or fusing functions to eliminate the (unnecessary) decisions required to navigate the overly complex and confusing interfaces of the mobile phones that came before them.

iGoogle and NetVibes are the Symbian to a mash-up’s iPhone.

Symplicity

Posted via web from PEG @ Posterous

As always, thoughts and/or comments are greatly appreciated.

This issue:

• Creative tension [Economist.com]
  Google tunes its approach to innovation as it tries to find a better way of turning good ideas into cash in the bank.
• Innovation Upgrade: How Global Shifts Will Change Your View on Innovation [Stefan Lindegaard]
  Globalization and web tools are starting to invalidate some of the assumptions we used when building our approaches to innovation. How should be foster innovation when ideas are commoditized?
• The Failed Promise of Innovation in the U.S. [BusinessWeek]
  “We live in an era of rapid innovation.” What if that piece of conventional wisdom is wrong?
• How nine of the world’s largest tech companies got started [Royal Pingdom]
  Many of today’s largest tech companies, such as Sony, Nokia, Samsung and IBM, have been around for a very long time (some since the 1800s). Their beginnings were often very humble, and it is fascinating to look back and see how they actually got started.

As always, thoughts and/or comments are greatly appreciated.

This issue:

• The Disruption Talk [A VC]
  Fred Wilson (a VC in New York) partly crowd-sourced a presentation on disruption, presented at Google, recorded and stashed on YouTube.
• In-N-Out Burger’s six secrets for out-and-out success [Daily Finance]
  On the heels of mounting cynicism generated by Wall Street bailouts and the perception that corporate leaders are gaming the system to make a profit, at least one American company is proving that businesses can survive and even thrive while sticking to traditional values.
• Farmers Didn’t Invent Tractors. They Were Busy Farming. [Ben Casnocha]
  There’s a cliche in innovation / entrepreneurship which says, “Scratch your own itch.” That is, solve problems that you know really well. This is not always so.
• Obama’s Seven Lessons for Radical Innovators [Harvard Business]
  Barak Obama’s presidential bid succeeded was a research lab for using social media in a political campaign. It differs from yesterday’s political organizations as much as Google and Threadless differ from yesterday’s corporations: all are a tiny handful of truly new, 21st century institutions in the world today. Here are the seven rules his campaign lived by.

As always, thoughts and/or comments are greatly appreciated.

This issue:

• How David Beats Goliath [The New Yorker]
  Disruptive innovation often comes from organizations and individuals that find ways to break with convention.
• Google: How does your innovation garden grow? [BusinessWeek]
  Managing innovation is often compared to tending a garden. What does it mean if your innovation garden becomes overgrown?
• the New Shelton wet/dry [pantherhouse]
  Innovation is often the process of taking old idea and applying them in a new context, much how Jeff Koons did when he put two or three New Shelton Wet/Dry vacuums in a plexiglass box, adding a title.
• Sid’s Rules [Designer Notes]
  Sid Meier has made some of the most successful computer games ever. Here are some of the priciples he works by.

As always, thoughts and/or comments are greatly appreciated.

This issue:

• Are Apple and Google still “the most innovative companies” in the world? [BusinessWeek]
  BusinessWeek and Boston Consulting Group have recently released the 2009 ranking of the World’s Most Innovative Companies. Apple is #1 for the fifth year in a row. Google is #2 for the fourth year. Still, these companies received fewer votes from the 2,700 senior executives polled than they did last year.
• Tomorrow’s Kitchen (1943) [Paleo-Future]
  It’s always worthwhile taking a little trip to the past to see how we thought the future would play out.
• Bacontrepreneurs building bacon empire [abc news]
  The investment required to start a company has plummeted in recent years: and not just web entrepreneurs but business that make and sell real, physical products. Today, new products and competitors can emerge from the most unexpected quarters.
• David Lynch on ideas [cultural-fuel]
  Ideas, it appears, are like fish.

As always, thoughts and/or comments are greatly appreciated.

This issue:

• Inside Google’s design process [BusinessWeek: Innovation]
  Google takes an integrated approach to innovation, pulling together design, analysis and engineering to create an iterative processes which helps them nurture small ideas into big products.
• Horizontal Innovation Networks: By and for Users [Eric von Hippel]
  Innovation development, production, distribution and consumption networks can be built up horizontally—with actors consisting only of innovation users (more precisely, “user/self-manufacturers”). Some open source software projects are examples of such networks, and examples can be found in the case of physical products as well. In this article, we discuss three conditions under which user innovation networks can function entirely independently of manufacturers. We then explore related empirical evidence, and conclude that conditions favorable to horizontal user innovation networks are often present in the economy.
• Jim Jarmusch On Stealing From Everywhere [PSFK]
  Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination…
• If Isaac Asimov designed your computer… [Educated Guesswork]
  Like nearly all science fiction authors of that era, Asimov got computers pretty much all wrong, in at least three major ways.

As always, thoughts and/or comments are greatly appreciated.

This issue:

• The Challenges of Innovation [BusinessWeek]
  Indifference, hostility, and isolation are among the major obstacles to a healthy innovation environment.
• Touching and hearing the past in Dresden [psfk]
  Those who visit Brühl’s Terrace in Germany are set to get more than just pretty view. Markus Kison’s touched echo brings life to the 1945 Dresden air raids. Visitors to the area can hear the airplanes, explosions and air raid sirens of the 13th of February raids though four small, disguised sound conductors.
• NASA Spinoff homepage [NASA]
  NASA’s yearly Spinoff publication was recently released, celebrating the agency’s 50th anniversary with 50 ways their technology is used in everyday life.
• Inside Google’s design process [BusinessWeek]
  Insight into the design process behind Google’s G1/Android mobile phone.