IT innovation ain’t what it used to be

Have we in the field of information technology run out of ideas?

A few weeks ago I presided over a lively discussion about whether the PC or the iPad is a more suitable platform for user innovation.

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I suppose I should have included other tablets as well, although the alternatives are mostly second-rate iPad wannabes that show little or no original thinking as to what a tablet should do. What would have been the point?

The discussion (and the absence of original thinking among other tablet manufacturers) got me to thinking about IT innovation. The more I thought about it, the more Prozac I needed. As far as I can tell, there isn’t any and hasn’t been for quite some time.

What’s he talking about? Has he been asleep? We have open source. We have cloud computing. We have the whole smartphone and tablet revolution. He must be desperate for attention to start trolling like this!

Hey, I heard that. So let me explain why none of these qualify as IT innovation. Doing so calls for a brisk walk through the history of information technology and the true innovations associated with it.

A brief history of IT innovation

First off, a little clarification of terms. By “information technology,” I mean the use of computing tools in business, and by “innovation,” I mean a technology, strategy, or approach that created the ability to do something new and significantly different from anything that had been done before.

With those definitions in mind, here’s a brief overview of IT innovation through the ages:

1. Programmability: This, the first IT innovation, is the basis of everything that followed. It is what makes a computer a computer. Depending on your preferences, this either started with ENIAC or the Jacquard Loom.
2. Storage and management of structured data: This is another fundamental of information technology and is the reason why it is called information technology. This shift began with the earliest commercial mainframe computers. The current state of the art is the result of a series of innovations that started with flat files, progressed to indexed systems like VSAM, and from there led to hierarchical, codicil, and relational database management systems (and, perhaps, “post-relational” database management systems, although the jury is still out on these). When the subject is records, fields, forms, reports, or any of the synonyms now in vogue, we’re talking about managing structured data.
3. Electronic publishing: Replacing Linotype machines that arranged lead type with electronic systems was a big deal even when the result was film used to create printing plates for offset presses.
4. Word processing: The storage and management of unstructured data got its start with dedicated word processing systems. They changed the outcome of typing from immediately producing words on paper to presenting those words on a screen while storing them for later editing and printing.
5. Electronic spreadsheets: While there were some intellectual forebears, Dan Bricklin’s VisiCalc just might have been the most innovative concept in the history of information technology — truly like nothing that had existed before.
6. Visual programming: There was a time when the battle cry was, “If it has syntax, it isn’t user-friendly.” While visual programming has lost some of its momentum, its heritage still lets us do in minutes and hours what used to take days and weeks.
7. Personal empowerment: While a few truly innovative ideas were first implemented on personal computers — the electronic spreadsheet is a prime example — the PC revolution mostly amounted to taking ideas that already existed and porting them to an inexpensive, independent environment that let individual end-users take advantage of them without waiting for IT support.
8. Personal information management: The notion that computers could and should be used to help individual human beings keep track of the small stuff was brand-new when Borland introduced Sidekick.
9. Electronic mail: Combine the PC and the Internet and what was the first and biggest game changer? The ability to send messages directly from one user to another without all the annoying intermediate steps like addressing and stamping an envelope — and without all the waiting associated with them.
10. Electronic communities of interest: Sparked by electronic bulletin board systems and newsgroups, for the first time technology allowed people interested in the same subject to interact with each other as individuals, unbounded by geography and time zone differences.
11. The WIMP interface: Standing for Windows, Icons, Mice, and Pointers — and more charitably called the GUI — the notion that ease-of-use and visual appeal have independent value was new when Xerox’s PARC Labs invented it. (Also new, but not such a good idea, was the idea of inventing something important and then letting everyone except yourself make money from it.)
12. E-commerce: In the realm of business, e-commerce globalized supply chains while pretty much destroying what had been a growing movement within the world of business sourcing of placing a premium on quality and trusted relationships, replacing it with near-pure focus on price.

I’m sure there are a dozen ways to pick apart this list of a dozen innovations. Feel free to replace it with your own (and post the result as a comment below).

Today’s so-called innovations

Here’s what matters: The current celebrated innovations — smartphones, tablets, and the cloud — are either consumer innovations (remember, “information technology” is about using computing technology in business) or porting one or more of the dozen innovations I listed to these new platforms.

Don’t agree? Take some time to browse through the business section of Apple’s App Store. You’re looking for something you can do on a tablet that you couldn’t do on your laptop or that is so clumsy on a laptop that it needed a new platform to be practical.

Here’s my list: Electronic-ink-based note-taking and e-readers. Everything else I’ve found — and I’ve looked pretty hard — seems like the same old ideas implemented on the new platforms.

The cloud has been just as disappointing. The closer you look, the more you’ll understand that mostly, the cloud consists of old innovations that have been repackaged to make them available through the Internet. The cloud’s most important “innovation” is parallel to the personal empowerment the PC enabled in the early 1980s: It makes many existing innovations available to and affordable for the SOHO marketplace.

This isn’t necessarily a small thing, and if you like to bandy about terms like “disruptive technology,” it’s entirely possible the SOHO market will turn out to be the incubator that lets the cloud mature into the game-changer so many pundits have declared it to be. But that’s a different subject from the current lack of innovation, which leads to the question: What’s holding us back?

Here’s one factor: The true next-level innovations might be solutions to seriously hard problems. For tablets, we’re talking about problems like accurate handwriting recognition. For the cloud, we’re talking about challenges like semantic search.

But innovative new applications built on existing core technologies? Maybe we really have run out of new ideas. I sure hope not, though. Because writing about the same old ones over and over again stopped being fun a long time ago.

This story, “IT innovation ain’t what it used to be,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Bob Lewis’s Advice Line blog on InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.