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April 29, 2005
Innovation curves
Innovation curves: I've still been spending a lot of time searching and reading commentary on last week's announcement from Adobe and Macromedia. One recurring theme that makes me stop and wonder is this: "Rivals are a good thing because they force innovation. So now that two of the biggest design companies have merged, who fills the gap?" This theme usually occurs in posts which focus on "GoLive vs Dreamweaver", "AfterEffects vs Director", etc... on existing products and technologies. The question I keep wanting to ask when I hear this theme is "How much more innovation would you expect in graphics tools in the future?" Just about all these comparisons involve tools which have had ten years of engineering built into them... some of them, like Illustrator, Director, FreeHand, Photoshop, have about twenty years of engineering built into them. The rate-of-change in applications usually follows a curve, with the fastest changes in the first few versions. Me, I'm mostly looking at the *next* ten, twenty years of development, and the innovations in tooling that will be needed for this new era beyond the desktop. Since the mid-80s FreeHand has innovated the new features, with Illustrator trying to catch up as best it can, but do people really think these would see linear growth indefinitely into the future? Computing services are becoming pervasive throughout the environment -- the innovations will come in things we don't yet see -- looking to the past is useful, but not when it prevents seeing the future, too.... [comments off for potential SEC complications]
Posted by John Dowdell at April 29, 2005 03:58 PM
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