Granted the chat control issue, is unfortunate on the privacy front, however I wouldn't call it a hindrance on innovation.
IMO, often innovation happens because it is motivated to work around rules and regulations. So in many cases regulation and rules are what drives innovation. People want to hack the system and thus have to innovate. A completely hacked and open system doesn't really inspire new ideas, because the old ones just work fine already.
Because innovative != ethical!
Hopefully it would stifle innovation that depends on tracking users and platform lock-in. I think there would certainly be space for innovation beyond that, possibly with even better conditions for competition as it would be easier for users to move between platforms.
Discord is a small improvement on already existing ideas. The number of users has nothing to do with “innovation”. Unless of course you think toilet paper is “innovative” because it has more users than Discord.
I agree with you in general, and when there is purposeful blockage of innovation, that is certainly worth pursuing.
At the same time, though, i'm seeing literal pursuit against innovation.
I'll note WhatsApp specifically. Before WhatsApp, sending an SMS to my grandmothers overseas cost $0.25 per message. Domestic SMS were $0.10. My college networking professor testified to the atrocity of markups by the telcos (http://content.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1921373...) which were something like 5000%
Worse, there was no guarantee the message actually arrived. There was no double-checkmark GD, so you had no idea if it arrived. If it didnt arrive, both carriers would claim nothing was wrong, and just reaching customer service would be an hour on hold; you still got charged. Good luck calling grandma overseas, it would be a $50 for a one hour call unless you signed up for yet more un-cancellable international calling plans.
We could argue that WhatsApp should have worked with the carriers and created something interoperable, but i'd argue that the status quo before WhatsApp was downright criminal exploitation of the masses, especially the poor. WhatsApp created a new system, perhaps not using standard protocols, but it works. It has worked 100% of the time for me AFAIK.
Have you considered that the real opposition here is not from any customer but rather from the status quo of older companies unable to retain monopolies?
If "innovation" means selling my details without my concent or hosting my details on insecure infrastructure, then I welcome their inability to innovate. Thankfully though, it doesn't and they still can innovate.
I think it's pretty easy to argue that such an intent could be described as "stifling innovation", if it's preventing people from trying new things because of the overhead associated with an impact analysis and continued maintenance of e.g. responding to data requests indefinitely.
Alternately, really any visual screen space, including an icon, can be an acceptable target for innovation - its when the technology used opens avenues for other things to be done by unscrupulous or malicious actors that it becomes a problem.
People introducing new functionality need to be incentivized to focus on sand-boxing it in some way before we accept it as a web-standard tech. Barring that, limiting functionality is preferable. But business is business, so adequate measures are generally not taken, either out of cost-saving, or deliberately.
Also, these types of irresponsible practices now constitute an indispensable core of how large modern web-apps work. They exist in a moral gray area, where it can be argued that problematic practices are outweighed by their net benefit to user experience, and misuses of the technology can be blamed on malicious outside actors who have found a loophole. If you build a giant information weapon, you are also culpable for any of its misuses, no matter how unintended they might be.
I currently don't see a way of changing things without some kind of regulation, as problematic government interference can be. The incentives here are possibly too strong for the market to sort it out, at the current state of public awareness. Current efforts in the US seem to be focusing on pressuring companies to self-regulate, but they have still have little real incentive to do so.
Another complicating factor may be the rate in which innovation arises in the tech sector - most burgeoning industries spend some time in a regulatory wild-west, but as the issues become known, laws gradually catch up and a status-quo is reached. Now, its possible that by the time any technology has matured enough to have a widespread regulatory harness applied to it, another technology has already superseded it, and the regulatory void is renewed.
Yeah, not innovation-crippling. That's why we now need to be paranoid on every row of data that we might be collecting which might be illegal due to the "visionary" EU regulations and focus on legality of everything, instead of well, coding a productive, useful service like the good old days.
If this isn't the literal very definition of innovation-crippling, I don't know what is.
I would argue that technology that is better designed to make nefarious purposes harder to achieve, rather than just dumping features onto the user, is innovative.
User protection is also a feature, one that's usually way more valuable than convenience but that we only appreciate when it's gone and it's too late.
It's not necessarily a matter of privilege, we're all potentially at the risk of having an account hijacked by a rando, or having a device stolen, or having a relationship go sideways to a crazy point.
Innovation isn't the only thing that leads to success, not by a long shot. Polish, ease of use, a large feature set, security, and any number of other factors can have just as big an impact on users as innovation.
People don't use Google search because it's innovative, and people don't use Facebook because it innovated and people won't make their decisions on Google+ based on its innovations.
In all seriousness? I get the popular mythology that "competition breeds innovation." I'll get to that later.
Im more concerned about a diverse ecosystem. In nature, homogenous cultures succumb to disease rapidly and die off.
Can you imagine if IE were our only webbrowser just how vulnerable we'd be on the open internet over the years? Partially because of the beaurocratic mess of a company's management.
But mostly? Just because of being a monolyth, all illicit exploit development on the WWW would be concentrated on a single webbrowser. (With much of the app-verse feeling some of the effect, for being built on top of some of the same libraries.)
Terrible how "HackerNews" needs some reddit troll to bring up how diversity of codebases makes the web stronger, rather than just mourning the indie browsers.
Preventing innovation: a gang of hackers makes a new browser that utilizes the 100 cores in 2018-era laptops perfectly evenly, unlike existing browsers that mostly burn one CPU per tab. It’s a ground-up rewrite, and they do heroic work to support 99% of the websites out there. Make that 98%; webkit just shipped a new feature and everybody immediately started using it in production websites (why not?).
Notwithstanding the other points made, how is rapid adoption of new features, and a competitor's ostensible inability to keep up, preventative of innovation?
An innovation is a new way of doing something. A cell phone maker actually owning the store where applications are sold online was new and successful or we wouldn't be having this discussion.
Really, how many applications would the iphone have if AT&T or Verizon controlled what was allowed to be downloaded there?
I do not understand why a rebranded geocities website to give everyone their own personal webpage, a 140 maximum character length bulletin board website, and glorified touchscreen bookmarks for websites are still considered to be examples of innovation. Facebook, twitter and apps have been around in some form since the beginning of the internet.
Lab-on-a-chip technology has the potential to be the science fiction equivalent of a medical tricorder. Every doctor could have one and give instant patient feedback. Yet the expectation for this start up is to get it perfect from the beginning. They may lose all their VC's money but I bet that DARPA would still bankroll them.
Lots of interesting ideas in the talk. I think the biggest thing stopping companies (and even startups) from experimenting is some measure of success. As soon as you find something that's sort of working, it is hard to continuously experiment with any other products and features, but that is sorta the key here. Don't fall into that trap.
Keep innovating, because that's what people are expecting from you, otherwise there's no difference between the 800lb gorilla in the room and you.
Also, if you keep challenging the people you're working with to come up with new and interesting ideas, they're going to be much happier.
There is a clear hostility toward digital products. If a physical product that shows up a screen in the air (holoscreen) to Skype another person, all people would suddenly scream: OH, that's innovation. Yet Skyping through an LCD screen gives the same result.
If BMW or Tesla design a futuristic looking key for a car, we call that innovation and cool. But a nice designed interface, is just another interface.
If some scientists burn a whole lot of money* to analyze DNA data, we call that innovation and science. However, when app ABC tries to connect people and do some social work, we call that another social app and a Facebook clone.
Please stop the hostility. Creating a new API library or writing code that does something new is indeed "Innovation". It's certainly not getting to the moon, but it's still a very little bit of innovation.
The new Internet enabled me, from a small third-world country to create a sizable income (at least comparing to my country per capita), learn a "LOT" and build a viable business.
Internet put aside, I have no chance of making even $1000/year in my country. That, and the fact that I started from exactly nothing (family computer) is for me this decade "miracle". The innovation in payments, digital products, advertising... have improved access to wealth and mobility.
I guess, the problem of the majority of people is access to wealth. There is too much wealth around (look at the majority of jobs, they are about moving wealth and not creating it e.g. doctors, lawyers, gov., traders, brokers, middle men...).
Access to wealth will improve the life of the average person more than accessing the moon. The Internet offers an unmatched opportunity to access wealth.
Please innovate in HTML, JavaScript and Servers.
* I'm not nitpicking on data scientists or any body, just to give an example.
IMO, often innovation happens because it is motivated to work around rules and regulations. So in many cases regulation and rules are what drives innovation. People want to hack the system and thus have to innovate. A completely hacked and open system doesn't really inspire new ideas, because the old ones just work fine already.
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