The Innovation Wave by Robert Hooker

This is my idea about how new ideas come in to being and become products we all can use and take for granted.

You start with imagination, just science fiction really. Things in Star Trek or movies or in novels that only a few nerds are interested in.

Then somebody gets hold of some money and starts a new company to release the product. These new small companies are extremely mortal, but they introduce almost all the really new stuff. The firms that have been around for more than 10 years become static and just take other people's ideas. For example, RIM and not Apple or Microsoft made the first mass used smart phone.

These companies are very likely to die off or fade. When you look at some of the companies on my list of "New and Nerdy" innovators you will be worried for the future of RIM and Red Hat.

Once a concept is somewhat established with a geeky crowd one of the "cool" companies takes it up moving it to a "hot buzz" phase. For example RIM's Blackberry was for suits, then the iPhone made the smart phone cool. Ubuntu has made Linux cool. Probably Apple is the king of this space.

But in time the buzz fades and the established crowd of big companies like Microsoft, IBM, Novell, Sony, HP, Dell, Fujitsu, and all the others produce established versions.

Think of the path of the PC. Starting as geeky toys made by Sinclair, Atari, and Commodore. Wang then made a PC workstation companies could use. But Apple's Mac really showed what a PC could be, with a "Window"s based OS. In time Microsoft finally got it right with Windows 2000 and now we just have Windows XP everywhere.

Notice though I have not stressed the role of time in this wave. Though normally you can think of products evolving in this wave it is more complex than this. Different user groups will be at different levels. For example I might be an established Linux user with Novell SUSE on servers for years, but someone else might be discovering it as something cool with Ubuntu. I could be a mature SmartPhone user and find people going on about iPhones as wasting money on toys. Sometimes all three events could be happening at once. With the smart phone we will soon have RIM, Apple and Microsoft all with mature offerings on the market at the same time. Slowly though the population becomes used to the item and starts buying on price rather than coolness, and the established large vendors can sell at massive volumes, and they take the industry.

It is also worth noticing that some people get stuck in certain parts of the process. Some people love innovation and want the newest thing before it is cool. I am probably in this group. I built my own netbook 3 years ago, I have been using smart phones for 7 years now. Some people are in to Apple, consuming technology only when Apple decides its time to make it. Most people are in the Microsoft space, buying a computer or laptop when someone tells them they need it and always buying Microsoft.

It will be interesting to see how Open Source plays in to this wave. It is my bet that Open Source will increase the rise of "toys" making more and more new and nerdy products, but the advantage and power of the big players is so that they will almost always take technologies spaces and hold them. Look at Windows, Microsoft's Vista was perhaps the greatest failure in IT history, and still they hold the PC OS space against Linux and Mac OS X, despite having a shit product that was desperately out of date until Windows 7.