Misunderstanding the Innovators Dilemma

Don Dodge, in saying Microsoft Will not Fall into the Innovators Dilemma, compares Google Apps for Your Domain to Office Live, but he misses Christensen's point on how successful businesses gets stuck making only incremental innovations.

The real technology disruption here is that Google Apps for Your Domain (and Google Docs, the free version) use HTML as their native format, not Microsoft's crufty legacy format, nor the equally crufty XML data-dump. Writers who use Word every day, like David Weinberger and Teresa Nielsen-Hayden, get stuck trying to make it behave and judging by the comments on both those posts they aren't alone. When my friend Maf was working on Microsoft Office, he summed it up by saying "every time I tell someone I work on Word they tell me it's far too complicated, then ask for 3 more features".

Most people use Word because it is the default - they have to use it because others do too. They do not use its advanced features, they just type stuff in. Fifteen years ago, I was a keen Word user, and spent hours working out how to do well-laid out tables in it, and carefully constructing style sheets so that they behaved right. Nowadays I do those kinds of things with HTML and CSS, which are open technologies that anyone can implement and use.

HTML is now the default document format, and an easy wysiwyg editor for it is long overdue. GMail's automatic conversion of attachments to a hosted document with version control is just the kind of 'worse is better' disruption Christensen documented so well 10 years ago.

Oh, and by the way Don, Nintendo Wii is the disruptive innovator in consoles too.

Technorati Tags: HTML, Innovators Dilemma, Word, writing

Missing the cage

When Rosie and I first came to the bay area in 1992, we visited San Francisco Zoo. One of the exhibits there were polar bears, and we watched one pace out a looping walk, his feet hitting the same spot each time through, one leg swinging out over the edge of the moat on each circuit. He was completely accustomed to his cage.

Reading Ars Technica's commentary on Airport Extreme's IPv6 support reminded me of this. Apparently, if you use this device, your computers can route across the world again; people can connect to them from anywhere, just as the internet was designed to behave. That's what the 'inter' part of the name is about.

That's right, if you enable password protected services that are off by default, like ssh and ftp, on your Mac, the new Airport base stations actually route them, instead of requiring further buggering about with port mapping and explicit protocol translation through packet sniffing to get them to behave as they were designed. This gives Iljitsch van Beijnum a fit of conniptions, because he'd apparently rather rely on the illusionary security of a firewall then actually securing his machines services. Lets hope he doesn't own any laptops.

Technorati Tags: Apple, internet, security, Wifi

Begoogled

I joined Google this week, and am busy getting my head round its fractal complexities. Rosie wondered if I was begoogled (somewhere between bedazzled, beguiled and besotted).

Then, naturally, she googled 'begoogled' and found this blogpost, which uses it to mean something else.

Rosie then clicked on Chalicechick's Buy me stuff, I'm cute wishlist link, and, as she scrolled through it, became rather concerned.

What Rosie saw was this list, and as she progressed, she was increasingly worried about how much this random blogger girl had in common with me.

"Glenn Gould? Homeschooling? Ealing comedies? Father Ted? Roger Waters? Groundhog Day? Extreme Programming? Who is this woman?"
"I'd better not tell Kevin about her, he might fancy her more!"

I had used Rosie's Mac to buy something from Amazon, so when Chalicechick bookmarked the link to edit her wishlist instead of the permalink to it, Rosie got mine instead...

Technorati Tags: Amazon, bego, geeky, Google, wishlist