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Linux is the first thing that comes to my mind when I think innovation. Not necessarily because it is the top of class, but because of what it's technology and
by moosey 8y ago
Linux is the first thing that comes to my mind when I think innovation. Not necessarily because it is the top of class, but because of what it's technology and licensing allowed in the rest of the world. Or, I think of NIH and all of the medical technology that it produces.
I don't think that corporations are particularly innovative, nor can they necessarily be, as they are actually hamstrung by the profit requirement, and by the fact that we externalize far too much when it comes to economics: for example, we would probably innovate far more with battery technology, nuclear tech and renewable energy if the true ecological costs of burning fossil fuels were born by the industry.
I simply think that true innovation arises from the scientific method, and that we should start applying that to the administrative and management structures that run our corporations, as I think that people in those spaces are overpaid to guess about how to run a company. Corporate innovations that arise primarily from marketing and a shiny exterior are anything but, and are a dark pattern for me.
- devoply 8y agoAll of Google is built on Linux. Without Linux Google would not exist. Neither would Facebook. They would all run Microsoft stack, pay Microsoft billions for licensing... and then probably be bought by Microsoft.
- disgruntledphd2 8y agoTo be fair, if there was no Linux, Google/Facebook would definitely have ran either Sun or HP boxes. But Sun wouldn't have been bought by Oracle, which would have been nice.
- malvosenior 8y agoLinux is innovative and shows how all innovation doesn't have to come from capitalism. That being said the iPhone is arguably just as innovative if not more so and that has been proven nearly impossible to compete with outside of capitalism due to the need for massive coordinated investment to create the whole thing. Also, Linux is Unix for commodity hardware. That hardware definitely was not created via open source or free collaboration. It was created at a scale only possible by corporations or possibly nation states (chip fabs...).
- moosey 8y agoThe iPhone is an incremental update. The marketing surrounding the iPhone is the actual "innovation". Not all major innovations need to be completely revolutionary, but there are far better evolutionary actions that we have taken that might be considered truly innovative and revolutionary. A good example would be the creation _and widespread adoption_ of the MMR vaccine.
- malvosenior 8y agoThere was plenty of actual innovation with the iPhone. It was the first consumer capacitive touch device, it invented a whole host of new UI concepts and inter-app integration that wasn't available on other devices at the time. I agree that there are plenty of good examples of incremental innovation (which the iPhone may debatably be). It's a very well known and obvious example of meaningful innovation (society is different post-iPhone) that demonstrates the point I was trying to make which is: not all innovation can happen at a grass roots level.