“Innovation” has been thrown around so often in technology circles that to some, it’s a four-letter word.
At one tech company, innovation can mean bringing a dazzling new product to store shelves. At another, it can translate to a tiny new button on a Web site. That’s why, executives say, the word itself has been overused and devalued.
Still, new cutting-edge products mean everything to a successful tech company.
Executives from eBay, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, and others were here at SDForum’s first Corporate Innovation and Research Fair on Friday to talk about their techniques for staying creative. Each company has its own style, with some strategies that overlap. But they all acknowledged it’s not easy to innovate, especially considering that large corporate cultures can be a curse to fresh ideas.
Max Mancini, eBay’s senior director of Platform and Disruptive Innovation, went so far as to say that Silicon Valley venture capitalists wouldn’t make so much money on start-up investments if tech companies were better at developing new products.
“Venture capital firms thrive on inefficiencies in large organizations,” said Mancini, who spoke at the gathering held at the Computer History Museum.
His counterpart at HP added to the idea by saying that demands from Wall Street and senior management can stifle innovation. “If you’re a larger company, there’s high probability you have creative people (in your organization). But creative people get impatient,” said Rich Friedrich, director of HP’s Enterprise Systems and Software Lab.
That means that these companies either must invest billions in research and development units, or bake in policies to ensure that people dream up new products. Google, of course, asks engineers to spend 20 percent of their time on pet projects. Microsoft, in contrast, employs more than 800 researchers in labs around the world.
A bottom-up style
Roy Levin, Microsoft’s director of research in Silicon Valley, said that one reason the labs have proven helpful to Microsoft, including bringing products like Windows Media to consumers, is their bottom-up style. The labs’ researchers pick projects themselves and collaborate with each other. They’re also not beholden to profit-and-loss goals or managers, he said.
“Every time you introduce (managerial) hierarchy, you introduce barriers to collaboration; and collaboration is key,” Levin said.
But once a technology is ready, transferring it to a product group or bringing it to market can be highly difficult, he said. That’s why so-called technology transfers are “a contact sport,” he said. Researchers must travel a lot to get new ideas and prototypes in front of the right people, Levin said.
eBay’s Mancini said that the auction company does two big things to promote creativity. The first is operating a technology platform that mirrors the eBay framework so that its engineers can experiment with new tools. That way, developers can test products outside of the company’s rigid software development process, he said.
The other method is to invite third-party developers into the fold through application programming interfaces. He said that in the last year developers have created an estimated 12,000 applications for eBay, producing as many as 60 percent of the listings on the site. “That’s innovation we probably couldn’t afford,” he said.
“Innovation is about the ecosystem, either removing barriers internally or allowing third parties to help meet the needs of your customers in ways you can’t afford to do (or have the time to do),” Mancini said.
Similarly, HP’s Friedrich said that one of his company’s strategies is to partner with outsiders on projects. “All of the innovative people don’t work for your company,” he said.
HP, for example, teamed up with DreamWorks years ago to work on technology for life-like animation and “cloud” services that were used to produce the movie Shrek. Last week, HP also teamed up with Intel and Yahoo to create six large-scale computing centers that would allow outsiders to test technology.
Cloud services are one of several areas of research for HP, which invests about $3.6 billion annually in R&D, Friedrich said. It’s also looking at projects in sustainability and managing data. On a broader level, HP is trying to shift the company from a hardware maker to a software company; and it’s doing that largely through acquisitions.
Oracle’s Marie-Anne Neimat, vice president of development for embedded databases, also pointed to acquisitions as a way to evolve, beyond Oracle’s multibillion dollar annual investment in R&D.
“It’s new blood,” she said.
Finally, some technology companies have turned into venture capitalists, too.
Ike Nassi, SAP’s executive vice president of research for the Americas and China, said it recently started a venture capital incubator. It solicits ideas from internal employees and external start-ups; and if it’s a good idea, SAP will help form a new business unit, fold the start-up into an existing product line, or spin it out as a new company, he said.
“If you have an interesting idea and don’t want to go the VC route, we provide seed funding,” Nassi said.
That’s similar to other technology companies. Intel, Google, Motorola, Amazon, and Comcast run venture capital units either formally or informally.
What about the word innovation?
“It’s completely devalued,” Nassi said. “The thing we need to look at is managing risk–whether placing an investment on this versus that, and what’s the payoff of that investment.”
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in General, Ideas, Internet | No Comments »
Mozilla aims to make Firefox 3 a record breaker. It wants the release of the next version of its flagship open source browser to be accompanied by a record for the most software downloads in a single 24-hour period*.
Download Day – as Mozilla dubs it – will begin the minute Firefox 3 is generally available and continue for 24 hours. Ahead of this release, expected in mid-to-late June, Mozilla has set up a website (spreadfirefox.com/worldrecord). This encourages people to organise Download Day parties, to run around collecting sign-up pledges at their university or place of work, and to place Download Day buttons on their websites.
Firefox 3 is based on Gecko 1.9, an updated layout engine. The browser features a cleaner layout, better bookmark handling and more stability. And it’s faster.
RC2
Mozilla decided to release a second release candidate for Firefox 3.0 at a meeting on Tuesday, in response to the discovery of 10 performance and stability bugs. The alternative would have been to patch these potential “showstoppers” after the browser shipped. But another round of testing is the safer option – not least from the standpoint of public relations. This will probably set back the official launch by five days or so.
Last November Mozilla hit back at claims that multiple bugs in its forthcoming Firefox 3 browser would be ignored in order to meet release schedules. At that point Mozilla was grappling with 700 bugs marked as “blockers” (i.e. a flaw serious enough to justify delaying a release, or at least merit a closer inspection).
Skip forward six months and we’re at the point where the browser is in fine-tuning to eliminate the last few high-priority bugs.
In a development list posting on Tuesday, Mozilla’s lead developer Mike Beltzner explained the strict patch acceptance policy for Firefox 3 RC2. “Just because we’ve decided to product another release candidate does not mean that we are accepting new patches – only those which fix issues that have been identified as required fixes for RC2 will be accepted, and even then your patch must come with a risk assessment and tests,” he writes. “Many of the issues to be fixed in RC2 have already been patched, reviewed, approved and landed.”
* Mozilla is trying for a record in a new category, according to a representative of the firm. That means it doesn’t have an existing mark to better. The open source browser outfit aims to secure over 1.6m downloads over 24 hours.
Firefox will be available from multiple locations. We must assume the bandwidth and server capacity will be in place to service the rush.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Ideas, Mozilla, Software | 1 Comment »
With all eyes on what Microsoft is doing in the online-advertising space, it’s easy to give short shrift to the datacenter and back-end infrastructure that is powering not just adCenter, but all of Microsoft’s various Live services.
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer reminded Wall Street analysts earlier this week that the cloud infrastructure is key to how Microsoft goes forward with Software+Services (S+S). During his February 4 Strategic Update in New York, Ballmer told analysts:
“And a lot of the things that we have been investing in, in terms of cloud platform, which themselves have no direct business model but come to market as servers, as desktops, et cetera, it will require reasonably significant investments to start commercializing that cloud platform….
“What’s the future of Windows, what’s the future of corporate desktop value? Each and every one of these businesses, on top of a consistent cloud platform, transitions to have additional revenue and profit opportunities, based upon this transformation to the cloud.”
There are lots of components beyond just the racks of Windows Server boxes that are keeping Microsoft’s online properties up and running. Some of the other pieces that have come across my radar screen (thanks to tips from various sources who requested anonymity):
* AutoPilot: The management system for Microsoft’s Windows Live Messenger and Live Search services. Word is Microsoft is extending AutoPilot to handle every Windows Live service, as well as some other members of its Live and Online families. AutoPilot performs tasks like network monitoring, power monitoring, performance monitoring, analysis, etc. It also will enable Microsoft to use commodity hardware in deploying its datacenter infrastructure.
* Bedrock: The core shared publishing platform for Live
* Shuttle: The feed-management system for Live. I’m not sure how this fits (or doesn’t) with Microsoft’s FeedSync, which is one of Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie’s pet projects.
* Fuse: A SQL Server diagnostics/monitoring system
* Cloud DB: The project via which Microsoft is scaling out its back-end structured data store. Cloud DB will be the storage platform for many of the Windows Live services and applications. The team is working to make SQL Server more fault tolerant, scalable and highly available.
Microsoft officials have been playing up their desire to combine their datacenter assets with those from Yahoo in order to maximize network effects as one of the primary rationales for Microsoft’s proposed Yahoo takeover. As others have pointed out, Yahoo’s back-end infrastructure — which is as involved and complex as Microsoft’s, no doubt — is powered heavily by Linux and other open-source software.
Sounds like a daunting task to combine the two. Maybe Microsoft should just let Yahoo’s datacenters run Linux and use that as another way to study its competition…
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Hardware, Ideas, Microsoft | No Comments »
