I can't find the source right now, but I remember reading a paper where it was assessed that a new technology needs to be roughly twice as good as what it's replacing if it is to be successful due to the inertia the post describes.
The post also makes you realise that marketing and evangelizing is a very important aspect of doing a startup, especially if your product is groundbreaking and threatening to the status qou.
it'd be really interesting to see that paper, or even get a bit more information about where you think you saw it/what discipline it was in/etc., so i could find it myself.
Read the second comment, which is by the author; it ends with "This post is laying the foundation for what is to become my argument for why the iPad could be the largest mistake that Apple ever made."
It's sort of a tautology. If innovation happens in a mature section, it creates something different so it's happening in a different field. If no innovation happens, well then it's still the same field. Next year he could be talking about the rapid rate of innovation in dumbed-down tablets.
I think this misses a key phase in technological progress which doesn't match simulated annealing:
Once you get to that final minimum, where you can only iterate to improve, people see it as the every-day, and start latching onto a new round of fluid creation (and there's the fight-The-Man attitude, too).
I'll call the growth-after-optimum a "flowering" period, where things shoot off in all directions. Frequently, they're based on that optimum, but not always (seeds spread).
(and how exactly is the Windows / Command key a major innovation? there have been function keys longer than there have been computer keyboards)
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 40.7 ms ] threadThe post also makes you realise that marketing and evangelizing is a very important aspect of doing a startup, especially if your product is groundbreaking and threatening to the status qou.
Once you get to that final minimum, where you can only iterate to improve, people see it as the every-day, and start latching onto a new round of fluid creation (and there's the fight-The-Man attitude, too).
I'll call the growth-after-optimum a "flowering" period, where things shoot off in all directions. Frequently, they're based on that optimum, but not always (seeds spread).
(and how exactly is the Windows / Command key a major innovation? there have been function keys longer than there have been computer keyboards)