"Technical innovation" has been redefined to mean a much lower bar of novelty. And business / commercial novelty is not technical novelty, though I realize that may be hard for the ycombinator gang to agree with.
> That's why "technical novelty" ranks ridiculously low on scale of things that make most successful software businesses these days: if anything technical novelty is more of an albatross on most software businesses than a saving grace.
Not convinced. Why did Google beat Yahoo? Why is Facebook huge while Friendster and Myspace are jokes? At some point - perhaps further down the line than most of us are used to thinking of - technical ability matters.
There's a difference between deep tech research (which truly can be revolutionary) and "revolutionary" consumer gizmos. I don't think the analogy holds.
I have a response to what was the original top comment but now got displaced[0].
In short:
1) If you trivialize any technology nothing is new. Advances happen (mostly) by small steps, not leaps and bounds. According to the article it is more efficient. Seems like a win. Even if it isn't huge or crazy different. Is the lack of novelty because of: their tech? Our understanding of the tech? Something else? Who cares? If it is different it is different.
2) So what if it isn't (very) new? According to that wiki article that engine is made by one group. So even if its novelty is simply different enough to bypass a patent or in house knowledge, so what? More competition is good. What's the point here? We love monopolies? Only one company can make one type of thing? Type being at the abstract level, not detailed?
I'm not sure how either of these is helpful. Maybe you're saying something else, but it isn't clear to me.
"Regrettably, we now use ["innovation"] to describe almost anything. It can describe a smartphone app or a social media tool; or it can describe the transistor or the blueprint for a cellphone system. The differences are immense."
I cannot agree with this more. We may not be able to re-create the environment of Bell Labs, but I'm hoping to see more in terms of actual science (and it will be at the nano-scale) in the future, rather than seeing so many people create yet another social app, claiming that it's "revolutionizing" an industry.
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