From GigaOM: The New New Incrementalism

A funny thing happened on the way to the coffee shop this morning.  I read this GigaOm posting before getting in the car and was thinking about Calculus the whole way.  Basically, I was trying to figure out if Web2.0 was the derivative of Web1.0 or if it was the other way around.  Talk about some nerdy car conversations.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that we have reached our “Planet of the Apes” (POTA) moment in time, and we have to decide what we, as technologists and entrepreneurs, are going to do about it.

I find this discussion apropos given Om’s reference to Jeff Nolan’s posting on the issue.  Jeff makes the point that many of the companies that are around today are simply drafting off the perceived success of a few gorillas.  How appropriate, then, for me to make a broad leap to comparing our point in time to the Charlton Heston film, later re-envisioned with Mark Wahlberg.  The book was much better, and more nuanced than the films.

In POTA, men find themselves on a planet where apes rule the day.  The underlying sub-text, which makes itself clear as the film progresses, is that the apes really never progressed beyond that men they replaced.  Man got lazy and the apes took over.  The mental capacity of the ape was such that they were very good at mimicking what they saw man doing, but had little capacity for original thought, and thus couldn’t extend.  As such, the entirety of the civilization had little to offer in terms of advancement.

The tools that we have for development have had a perverse retarding effect on our advancement.  When development was hard, only the truly committed could push out product.  With the democratization of the development platforms, the script kiddies have invaded the ranks of the entrepreneurial set, with countless (brainless) me-too offerings.  There are, obviously, exceptions to the rule, hinted at by Nolan, and referred to as gorillas.  Yes, there are some folks doing cool, new stuff.  However, there are legions of imitators.  We are past the point of derivative work, and getting to the point of mindless incompetents.

So where does this leave us?  Where will the truly innovative thinking come from?  To be honest, I think it’s going to take a very hard platform to develop for in order for the creative thinking and quantum leaps to emerge.  Microsoft dominance of the Internet came from their embrace and extend strategy, but what you see today is many people simply embracing.  If they extend, they are extending their own services, which were derivative to begin with, with API sets to allow for further derivation.  Oy, the recursion is hurting me.

The difficulty of development is the only thing that can save us.  It pushes out the imitators.  That, or one of the big boys releasing a completely new, and radically different platform.  As it stands, if I see one more social platform that is ad supported, or social/casual gaming community, or video/photo sharing service, I quit.  Well, I  won’t quit, but I am going to start re-embracing my inner nerd and spend time looking at the stuff only guys with long beards would want to see.

To all the entrepreneurs out there, this is your wake up call.  Embrace your inner nerd, and go find a very hard platform to work with that does something that isn’t easy.  Hadoop perhaps?  I hear rumors that Microsoft is launching some new datacenter programming tools beyond what they are talking about publicly.  Say what you will about Microsoft, but as a platform company, they have enabled many, many billions of dollars of value to be created in their eco-system.  That’s more than I can say for Ruby on Rails and the Web2.0 set.  Amazon’s services remove the pain of maintenance so that you can focus on the hard development work.  Even Google’s money maker, AdWords, is firmly rooted in the Web1.0 world.  They have made money for their platform partners, but I would argue the lion share went to marketers, not developers.

Yes, this post is a abrasive, but, like Om, I have lived through several of the tech swings, and I am shocked at the decline in original thinking.  When the marginal cost of copying is so low, there’s almost an element of a lottery attached with creative thinking.  There’s no guarantee that being first, and innovative, will be a leg up for success.  Risk is no longer being rewarded.  This is the same problem with hedge fund guys - very little risk in joining one, but the rewards are completely outsized…but that’s a post for another time.

One more thing to ponder: the irony of the derivative film not being as good as the original is left for the reader to think on.  Further, wrap your mind around the derivative film not being as good as the original book, and your head might just explode.