Innovation is needed in everything!!
Aregon23 pointed out the new beta version of Google maps on his blog. I spent an hour playing the cool interface that lets you pan and zoom from a country to street level. Truly amazing.
This brings up the question of innovation. In the late 90s, Google was a disruptive technology in the then sleepy search industry; they still continue to refine and redefine existing tools for simplifying life, eg., Google scholar, etc. Innovation is needed in creating better products in all spheres - the water tap, the brick, the mouse, the roof, the chip, ...everything!!
This is what Prof. Christensen talks about, when he says that you need innovation to spur growth in markets or create new ones. This article reminds me that I need to read his books ....
3 Comments:
Haha Swoop is it geekdom that drives us engineers to appreciate innovation so much? If I find something that I find particularly innovative, I cannot help but make time for it regardless of how busy I am at that time.
Google maps is a case in point. PowerYogi had left a great comment on how it works and since then I was completely hooked. I spent last evening playing around with it and trying to break it. :) Hilarious to find someone else try the same.
10:48 AM
I liken it to art appreciation. Anyone can look at a painting and say that it is a great piece of work. However, a fellow painter can appreciate the shadows drawn by the artist, the subtlety of texture, the choice of colors, to truly create a masterpiece.
10:53 AM
Swoops - art appreciation, eh?
Aregon, try googling for 'google maps' - it doesn't quite break anything, but I think the summary text for first result is hilarious. If the search engine cannot grok google content, what to say of 3rd part sites! I feel that google is slowly losing out on it core strength, i.e. search while expanding into other technology. See there is still some room for smart business guys like us to come in and preach 'consolidate, conserve and conquer' :-)
I switched from yahoo to google because I got more specific results; can't say the same any more. Anyway, about the maps feature and about google technologies in general, the thing that interests me more is the amount of time they spend on usability. I can wager my Jolt cola that the user interface was not designed by programmers. Take for instance the address field in google maps - it is a single line, making it much more convenient than the street-city-zip format that is the convention.
9:48 AM
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