Hey, Where Did All the Smart People Go?
Jan 30th, 2008 by dave
I participate in lots of industry and academic technology groups on Apple’s behalf. In the last ten years or so, I’ve noticed a real decline in the number of really good people and ideas being presented in these groups.
I blame it on the increasingly litigious environment in which we live, combined with a lack of understanding in corporate executive offices regarding what should or should not be held back for competitive reasons.
Even the free software movement has been affected negatively by this. Every time I hear of some large commercial concern (Novell/SuSE, Sun/MySQL, IBM/everyone) buying or throwing money at some formerly free-thinking idea or group, I shudder a bit. The problem is that technology companies are all so competitive with each other, and are so ready to sue each other to maintain that competitive edge, that true innovation suffers greatly as a result.
The really good ideas get held back. The smart folks are cautioned to “keep it under wraps” until the company can figure out how to monetize it.
Trouble is, many good ideas need first to be exposed to the daylight of peer review, comment and improvement before they become sufficiently mature to be realized into a fully-functional standard, system, product, or whatever. The act of keeping an idea under wraps virtually guarantees that it will get very limited review. As a result, we’ve all seen some really, really bad ideas become announced as products or services by companies that should have known better.
What follows then is a very predictable cycle of increasingly non-compatible revisions as the idea or product gets knocked around in the “real” world, and the company reacts by fixing the apparent problems. These fixes are too-often spun as “improvements”, and some companies have even shown the chutzpah to charge their hapless customers for the privilege of upgrading.
At the standards organizations these days (IEEE 802.11 or .15, for example), the best ideas rarely prevail. Instead, they are pushed aside by corporate business plans and the need to make a buck first. The “A Team” thinkers are not business-savvy, so they are augmented or even replaced at these events by the “BizDev” or (shudder) marketing guys. The best, most well-intentioned, altruistic thinking gets shoved aside. Instead, it’s all about getting votes and trading favors. It’s become way more political, and much less intellectual.
Sad but true.