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Comcast has a technical support person on twitter.  John Dvorak TWiTed that he is responding to people individually.

I blogged an HBR article a while back, questioning, among other things, how innovative Google really is.  Some news stories today, highlight some overlooked areas where Google is doing some interesting, potentially innovative things:

• App Engine — NYT article today talks about Google’s plans to move App Engine into the enterprise space by opening it up to 10,000 developers.  It’s a small launch, limited to apps written in python in the beginning, and it’s a late entrant to a field where SalesForce and Amazon have experience, if not dominance, but it’s a real move, based on another innovation:
• GFS — not news, not surprising, and I can’t tell if it’s good or not, but Google File System can fall under the umbrella of innovation, or innovation-friendly.  (Taking control of the infrastructure.)
• SalesForce alliance — NYT article briefly describes how Google is tying its Office apps into SalesForce’s suite of offerings to compete with MSFT.  Whether Google’s productivity apps on the web will win out over MSFT’s client or server based apps is the big question, but I have to acknowledge that the apps are lightweight, clean enough to hook into other software, and scalable.

I don’t think this makes the HBR article less silly, however.  The examples above are reminders that there are other things going on at Google beyond the usual gmail, Google Earth, ad serving, and blogger acquisition that most articles talk about.

Google’s ability to develop them and wait years to monetize them, however, still comes down to cash flow.  This still means we have little to learn from Google about innovation.

There’s probably not an agency or tech-UX company that hasn’t talked several times about adopting Google’s 80/20 rule. In the search for ways to become innovative, this is the one technique everyone seems to know and understand, at least at some level.

But, it seems like most attempts to pursue this idea suffer an early death in the face of billable reality: we need our agency folks to be billable, or we have too much work to do to hit our next set of goals. As a result, the implementation gets watered down (do what you want, but make it billable to the client), shrunk (90/10, 95/5, monthly brainstorm), or transformed into good old-fashioned pluckiness (after you work 50 hours, you can spend 10 more hours in the office on whatever you want). The simple fact is, devoting 20% of your workforce’s time is very hard to do unless you’re fabulously profitable, are tasked as an innovation engine (in which case the ratio would be reversed), or have incredibly patient money.

This month’s HBR has an article about what companies can learn from Google about how to innovate. I’ve been reading HBR on and off for about 20 years, and I seem to remember articles in this format — Summary of fabulous results, A look inside, Summary of what they do, What it means to you, Sidebars with tips and reminders of how to make it work — for Miscrosoft, 3M, Sony, P&G, Toyota and a dozen others. This one, though, pains me. While Google is fascinating and absurdly successful, I have a hard time buying into the premises of the article: that Google has a track record of creating successful products, that their R&D engine can be reverse engineered.

Start with the first paragraph, which has the line: “Not since Microsoft has a company had so much success so quickly.” Feels right, at first, but what do we mean by “so much success”? This is hard to parse, but Microsoft’s innovation success involves a wide range of products in the pre-internet days: operating systems, Office, programming languages. These are products that went on shelves and which people bought and used in large numbers. Whether you believe that MSFT innovated these products or coopted ideas and stitched them together doesn’t matter: it was a lot of complex software to code, debug, ship, and support — and the masses bought and used them.

I don’t see the parallel with Google. Outside of search, which apps have had meaningful market penetration? Gmail is a small, small fraction of Hotmail and Yahoo mail users, Google docs is a smaller fraction of Office users, Google Reader isn’t even a fraction of an established market. In terms of innovating new products that succeed in the marketplace, Google is still 80% (or more) search. Don’t get me wrong, I dig their stuff. But to lump Google’s proven success in search and unproven success in their interesting projects to MSFT’s proven successes in OSes, productivity software, and development languages is misleading. (And I think it’s worth harping on the programming languages. Visual Basic has millions of user/developers who build cool things for themselves and others and that’s a community not as web-notable as the mashup types, but arguably of equal or greater economic significance.)

Anyway, I have a hard time believing that Google, at this stage, has much to teach other ordinary companies. Google’s revenues, margins, and dominance in search are so massive that they have a cushion no other companies have. When the HBR article cites “Practice Strategic Patience”, the authors make a fair point that Google has a clear mission that ties its acquisitions of YouTube, Picassa, Urchin, Keyhole, and others into a coherent strategy. But the paragraph that follows is the kicker:

With such a farsighted mission, the short-term profitability of a new offering doesn’t seem to matter as much to Google as it might to other businesses. The company’s managers are strategically patient. CEO Eric Schmidt estimated that it will take 300 years to achieve the mission of organizing the world’s information. His 1200 quarter forecast might invite smirking; still it illustrates Google’s long-term approach to building value and capability. Google, unlike many companies, can afford its broad broad mission and collection of innovations simply because search-based advertising is a fantastically profitable product that provides cover for many unprofitable ones. The company certainly care about accumulating customers, but its executives believe that over time the model and the money will take care of themselves. at a 2007 Bear Stearns conference, Schmidt put it this way, “Ubiquity first, revenues later . . . If you can build a sustainable eyeball business, you can always find clever ways to monetize them.”

This acknowledges, in classier language, what I wrote up top, but there’s a rush past some key dynamics that make me wonder if there’s anything we can learn from Google. If it weren’t post-IPO Google, referring to a 300 year goal, and saying don’t worry about revenue let’s get people would be seen as a revisiting of dot-com silliness. Another hard-to-relate-to dynamic is the short-term profitability one. Not only do most companies lack the revenues and profits to acquire a YouTube without monetizing it, but most also lack the capital to acquire companies without incurring debt. Most companies would have to borrow and pay interest . . . so what are we to learn in that reverse engineering?

The article has a table of factors to help companies figure out how to emulate Google. The intro reads “If your company aims to improve innovation capacity, consider emulating these key attributes that have contributed to Google’s success.” The list of factors is interesting, but are they useful or new?

1. Strategic Patience — haven’t we always known this? The challenge is balancing the quarterly needs against the multi-yearly demands.  The Google is answer is to make so much money that your quarterly needs are covered and then some.
2. Infrastructure built to support innovation — Yup, but how many companies are actually doing infrastructure or analogous work?
3. Ecosystem that enables architectural control — yup, if you’re big
4. Innovation built into job descriptions — begs the question doesn’t it?(* see English language pet peeve below)
5. Cultivated taste for failure and chaos — true, this is the one point that I think we should dwell on. Learning how to be smart, wise, informed enough to manage a culture that experiments and fails, and which lets go to innovate is something that is still tied to Google profits, but which Google does seems to take seriously and approach intelligently.
6. Use data to vet inspiration — yup, but aren’t we all number-crunching these days? More important, though, Google is testing to see which works better, not what constitutes a viable product. GMail is optimized within its idiom and its small audience, but are they using to data to grow the audience substantially?

Don’t get me wrong, Google products are cool and some of them excellent, but it’s a mistake to say they’re profitably innovative. They’ve created an idea factory, built on very smart people, and have an interesting formula for advancing the current core business, the long-term core goal, and cool stuff. But I’m not sure this is a model we mere mortals with less than billions in market cap should be looking at.

(*) Begging the question is a horribly misused phrase in today’s language . . . to the point that the misuse is probably the use, but I’m terrible at letting those things go. The original, and to my mind more interesting, meaning of “begging the question” was not a fact that raises a question so powerfully as to beg it. Instead, “begging the question” was the proof of a proposition by invoking the proposition itself as a premise. In the instance above, question is begged in the sense that we want to know how to make innovation part of our culture. The answer? Make it part of people’s jobs. Doesn’t take you very far.

An opinion piece in AdAge seems kind of all over the place, but might spark a wave of anti-innovation writing. The article is pretty straightforward: innovation is one tactic, not a strategy; it’s not even a core tactic, just one.

There’s also the famous Peter Drucker quote, “The business enterprise has two — and only these two — basic functions: marketing and innovation.”

I would simplify that quote: “A business enterprise has only one basic function: build a brand that can dominate a category.” Early on, innovation can help a company build that kind of brand. Consider: instant photography and Polaroid; the plain-paper copier and Xerox; the microprocessor and Intel; wireless e-mail and BlackBerry; the athletic shoe and Nike.

But when a category matures, the situation changes. Take the automotive industry. The significant innovations in the auto industry — the V-8 engine, automatic transmission, power steering, air conditioning, seat belts, air bags, etc. — took place decades ago.

What makes a powerful automobile brand today is not innovation, but a narrow focus on an attribute or a segment of the market. Reliability and Toyota. Driving and BMW. Youth and Scion.

Seems questionable, but at least aguable. But then the argument drifts:

Most brands don’t need innovations; they need focus. They need to figure out what they stand for (or what they could stand for) and then what they need to sacrifice to get there…. It’s sacrifice — not innovation — that builds brands.

Don’t innovate, go after segments, build and dominate a brand attribute, get focused, and make sacrifices, quite a lot of chasing in an article that starts with Peter Drucker, but the conclusion wraps it up:

As the Sharper Image story illustrates, innovation is not a strategy. It’s a tactic that needs to be used in support of a company’s branding strategy.

Feels like a hammer flailing about for nails — anything to say brand work is all that matters.
The upside of the article is that it might spark a bigger backlash. Backlashes are interesting double-edged phenonomena. On the one hand, they force the backlashees to put sharper points on their thinking, shore up weaker parts of the argument, and in general go deeper and justify claims. On the other hand, backlashes tend to turn the object of attack into trends that are passe. For some, the innovation conversation will be over, cuz the debate is turning on itself.

Two Jobs lines about the limits , or the limiting effects of, customer research:

It took us three years to build the NeXT computer. If we’d given customers what they said they wanted, we’d have built a computer they’d have been happy with a year after we spoke to them - not something they’d want now.

You can’t just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they’ll want something new.

The book Just Enough Anxiety argues that effective companies can have both too little and too much anxiety.  It also argues that there are other things that need to be balanced:  confidence and humility, optimism and hard-headednes.  The chart below describes five virtues that organizations have and that leaders should strive to balance.

1.  open heart
2.  confident humility
3.  realistic optimism
4.  open mind
5.  constructive impatience

I’ve been in shops where ‘big swinging dicks’ are all confidence and energy and have no openness or humility and shops where any kind of criticism is seen as emasculating or anxiety producing.  I love the way the (press about the) book tries to find a balance.  Good creative shops need their people to have some level of anxiety:  am I doing the best work possible?  is this work good?  But they need to do so without crippling themselves.  They also need to be capable of believing and convincing others that their work is the best work possible, while still being open to new ideas or post-release improvements.

In the spirit of openness, I am struggling with keeping my impatience constructive.  

i <3

Yesterday there was a snowstorm and I needed to rent a car. When I went to Zipcar to pick up my CD-only car (why isn’t aux in standard yet?), my card was fried, so I couldn’t rent. They quickly and politely cancelled my order. I had an iPhone moment and Google-mapped an Enterprise rental about 3/4 mile away. I call to confirm that they were open and had cars available and then made the long, sloshy walk.

I don’t want to write a narrative . . . When I get there, everyone who speaks to me shakes my hand and quietly repeats my name. The woman who handles me asks a couple questions about what kind of car I need, walks me out to the lot and shows me what’s available. When I mention an aux in, she has me wait under the awning and finds two cars that have it. The manager comes out, apologizes for interrupting, shakes my hand, mentions that we spoke on the phone and quickly gets out of the way. I pick a car and we do the paperwork.

I consider people to be a painful neccesity of life, so I’m not big on the kind of counter chat she had for me. But I’ll give her this, the annoying stream of tips on saving money on the insurance and using the GPS was mitigated by the fact that it didn’t slow down the processing of the paperwork even a second. She even gave me a web-site like status: “only two more things to do before I take you to your car for the quick check.”

Once the paperwork was done, she showed me the clear clipboard with the ruler for measuring meaningful scratches and the circle for dents. We checked the car, shook hands again, and as I pulled out, the first woman at the counter, who was returning to the office with lunch, waved and told me to have a safe trip.

If you want to build a powerful brand experience that people will talk about, care about and remember, well, you should probably read Seth Godin or Lew Carbone. But if you crave loosely-argued, questionably connected irreleventia, or can’t get enough XO, stick around.

While working briefly with some environmental groups, I became convinced that the best way to reach red (or at least non-green) America was through their garages. Real men love their tools and their tinkering. Americans profess to love ingenuity and entrepreneurialism. Environmental solutions are “Popular Mechanics” all over. Ecogeek is a blog that hits some of those notes (while staying just this side of Edward Abbey).

Below is a clever solar collector, which is cheap, cheap, cheap. Rather than having to spend money on creating optimally curved mirrors, Solar Bubbles inflates a bubble where the top is clear (allowing sunlight in) and the bottom is reflective (collecting the rays). The curve is created and maintained by the air inside. Balloons aren’t exactly manly Black & Decker workmate style, but this is so much more appealing than talking about breaking the oil addiction.

Another idea on the blog this week, is a revolving door that transforms the turning of the doors into power.

What I love about this post is its honesty:

Mostly, it’s just a demostration project though. The power generated would likely not be enough to ever pay for the device and many revolving doors are already heavy enough without the added resistance of a generator.

Still, it’s hard not to find the idea pleasant.

It’s a healthy attitude about innovation, recognizing the importance of exlploring dead ends, the iterative nature of invention and design. It’s also a good demonstration of sensibility and intelligence within a community that usually doesn’t get credited for having any.

Interesting Microsoft move pre-reported by TechCrunch this morning:  Bill Gates will announce (or has announced) that (verified) students will have access to MSFT development tools for free.  In a program called Dreamspark, students can get the entire Visual Studio line, Expression, Windows Server, and Game Studio.  It’s a smart way to compete with open source, build the community of developers who work with and prefer Windows, and build brand loyalty at a formative phase of someone’s career.

Channel 8 did an interview with Bill Gates about this initiative which turned into talking about software.  Despite outsourcing and the commoditization of certain development skills, Gates is still quite bullish on the importance of programming:

[People can use MSFT dev tools to] build a career around or build fun software for themselves.

The skill of design, skill of knowing what good code looks like … will be around for the next couple decades.
There’s nothing more fun than thinking about software . . . software for the poor (there’s a lot more work that needs to be done), software to make jobs more interesting, software to help peofle design things in new ways … if you think about the sciences today they’re really driven by software … biology has so much information that it’s really software people who are gong to help find patterns and organize that information.