Innovation and the ability of "Failing forward" with a Business and Human perspective

Great post by Till Grusche of Frog Design, FailForward: Why Successful Innovators Have to Learn How to Fail explains us how to better think the innovation process.



While I full agree on teaching failure better and adopting the “design-as-a-process” from the early start, the "Google Wave" example highlights that a "corporate failure" may be a sign of good business management, but may have a dramatic impact on employees.

My opinion on Google Wave is that is was only "half a failure". Great idea, great concept, but beta-level prototype that suffered from bad ergonomy and bad visual design. They hadn't enough time to improve on it.
Many people believed in it (see the reactions after the termination announcement).
For me, it was killed *too early*, viewed as a failure according to "Google standards".


The problem is that it had a terrible impact on true inside innovators: Lars Rasmussen (Maps, Wave) left to go to Facebook, as did many. And this led recently to a general 10% salary increase at Google to stop the bleeding.
The price to pay for killing "cool" projects, I guess.

How good is this, in the end, in term of business and employee inspiration?

Clearly the Google Wave case demonstrated to many employees that Google wasn't the good place where they could innovate on high-risk projects anymore.

Finding the right moment to fail is a very delicate tradeoff...

Seems like the "Forward" in "FailForward" failed for them {;-))

Update on iOS legal conditions

Thanks to inquiries started by the FTC and the European Commission, Apple have relaxed developer restrictions.

What's funny is that I'm sure this will benefit a lot to their business.

As I mentionned a few months ago, this has indeed turned into a fantastic opportunity for Android.
More Android phones are now sold in the US than iPhones (for many other reasons too).

With iPhone OS 4.0, Apple has officially turned into an evil tyranny

If Apple was a carmaker, an Apple car would look like this :

• its wheels, windshield, wipers would only be Apple's authorized ones -- ok, for security reasons, we understand this
• all the luggage or strollers you put in the trunk could only be Apple's approved models, sold through their shops

This is the current situation on your iPhone and iPod. Not a model of freedom!
But with iPhone OS 4.0, things are getting worse:

• providers of wheels, wipers or strollers have to throw away their factory machines and buy Apple ones.

I love my iPhone, and I sincerely think that my MacBook is great hardware.
But freedom is more important than business or convenience.

To sum up the story of Apple's last SDK (software development kit), Apple has published new legal conditions along their iPhone OS 4.0, especially the paragraph 3.3.1, which, in plain english, has the following consequences:

1. Apple forbids any editor to issue an intermediary tool that can be used for iPhone app development, especially the libraries that ease cross-platform development (you write your code once, it works on iPhone, Android, Blackberry, etc.)
2. Adobe was supposed to release its Studio CS5 on April 10, that accomplishes exactly this - write once in Flash, deploy everywhere. This is undoubtedly an evil anti-competitive move from Apple.
3. Other editors are harmed, for instance Unity Technologies that could die because of that.

Even on the worst days of Microsoft anti-competitive practices, they never went that far. They never forbid an application to run on their platform, as Apple has done with Adobe Flash or Google Voice.
Remember how angrily people were shouting at Microsoft at that time, for far less than what Apple is doing now.

I'm an iPhone fan and I often tout the merits of the device to my friends. I will not anymore. I cannot promote a dictatorship.

I am shocked, Apple went beyond any acceptable limit. This is a question of freedom. And I want a free world for my kids, not the walls Apple is building around us.

What will be next ?

People that Apple does not like will be banished? 

People that criticize Steve Jobs will be deleted from Apple's world? 

People that have not the good political views will be chased down?

With a monopoly, this would be illegal. I consider iPhones as an almost-monopoly on high-end smartphones.

Fortunately, developers are rebels in nature. They hate orders and love freedom.

Apple development environment is old-fashioned and complex - proprietary language (Objective-C), incompatible with what most developer use, and on Mac only.

I think this will turn into a fantastic opportunity for Android, since they are very developer-friendly, run in Java, on Eclipse IDE.

Apple products may be magical, they are nothing but a magical jail.

Let's break the chains.

Change your mind Apple, don't try to format ours.

Update on video & video-conferencing

Google just announced that Adobe Flash will be built in Chrome 5, Google's homemade browser, natively.

At first glance, it could appear as a victory and the confirmation of Flash ubiquitous future.

However I think this is the high price paid by Adobe after being set aside by Apple in iPhones & iPads.
They have lost part of their autonomy, to survive Apple's slaughter. They had little choice.

Many websites have started restructuring their services without Flash. Thanks to Apple's stance, Google has been able to impose its conditions: integrate Flash plug-in deep into Chrome, which means taking control over it.

But this is also a high price paid by Apple for competing with Google on smartphones and future tablets.
The crisis burst into flammes when Apple rejected Google Voice application for iPhone.
Google was more on Apple's side at first, promoting HTML5, CSS, SVG & Javascript as a built-in replacement of Adobe Flash.

My analysis is that Google firmly believes that web standards built into the browser are the right solution (without Flash - I agree).
However they have with Flash a fantastic opportunity to boost their competitive advantages over iPhones & iPads.

In the meantime, this puts Apple in a difficult situation...
I look forward to seeing Apple's counter-attack, what a great suspens!!

Video & video-conferencing on the web & smartphones: the nightmare of incompatibilities

Flash brought us YouTube, DailyMotion and generalized streamed video, on 99% of PC browsers (through plug-in).
The latest version even handles webcams and desktop sharing, wonderful!

Meanwhile, Apple brought us the wonderful iPhone and a generalized mess about video.
Their iPods & iPads don't even have cameras.

Back to bad old days?

In the "video case", Apple underlines that a right solution for video on smartphones must be built-in and highly-efficient.
Perfectly right.


Let's take a look at the "video landscape" today:

* Adobe Flash:

On every PC browsers, as plug-in.
Video through FLV files (MPEG4 equivalent), can be served by any web server.
Captures webcams easily. Allows video-conferencing through browser
(e.g. adobe connect, dimdim.com, ...)

Available as PC applications with Adobe AIR rich-client platform.

Not available on iPhone, prototype on Android.


* HTML5:

Built-in on HTML5 browsers (Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Opera,... all but Microsoft IE - may become available in IE9). Progress has been slow for years because of Microsoft IE supremacy (innovation in this field was contradictory to their interests).

Problem with video format: Apple favors MPEG4, which suffers from licencing restrictions.
Firefox & DailyMotion favors Ogg which is free, but still marginal.
No consensus on encoding format in W3C. Adoption is therefore limited.

Available on iPhone & Android

On webcam side, ability to capture has just been added to the HTML5 spec and will take months and propably years to widespread.

For PC applications, you need to embed a browser.


* Java (Sun, now Oracle):

Dramatically late on these matters. JavaFX lags years behind.
No proper way to provide webcam capture in Java application (JMF is just pre-historical)

The only hope would be to embed HTML5 browser within Java applications (or be able to communicate between browser and applets). But even on these paths, they're moving very slowly as far as now.

Not available on iPhone and very limited on smartphones, generally speaking.

Special notice: Oracle could however decide someday to enter the arena seriously, which would be an amazing complement to Java on the client side.

They could buy the Mozilla Foundation (Firefox & Thunderbird, whose revenues depend too heavily on Google), for instance...

* Misc:

-- Silverlight : all the cons of Flash without the pros (limited availability)

-- Skype : good for person-to-person conferencing, but hard to embed in any application.



As you see, the current divergence makes things very complex on video broadcasting.
Try to watch on your iPhone a video posted on Facebook: impossible.
Try to watch on Firefox an html5-mpeg4-video: impossible.
Try to watch on Safari an html5-ogg-video: impossible.


The right path seems clear: built-in video capability in browsers with licencing-free encoding format + ability to capture webcam straightforwardly.

Unfortunately, we are years away from this.
Except if Adobe manages to impose Flash to everyone, which is very unlikely and is not ideal for smartphones.

The current situation dramatically limits innovation.
So frustrating!!