A general rule of marketing is "The more noise they
make, the less they have to crow about." Who makes the most noise
about "innovation"? I bet you can guess....
Every day I get virtually snowed under by blizzards of press
releases. (I'm not sure that email is better than paper, because I
could burn paper for heat, or compost it. Happy red worms like
paper and break it down fast.) A few of them actually have
something to do with Linux and FOSS. The rest are horrid
collections of buzzwords, broken HTML, political foamings, spam,
and irrelevant whatevers.
For a long time the favorite buzzword was "paradigm." Remember
all those paradigm shifts? There was a bit of humor value because
none of them used the word correctly. (Wikipedia has an excellent article and
definition.) But it got boring after the thousandth dopey
repetition. Finally it died out, as these things do, and its
replacement was "innovation". Now there is a perfectly good word
that does not deserve to be abused in this fashion, but marketers
are ruthless and without conscience when it comes to word
abuse.
Let us turn again to Wikipedia to learn what innovation is:
"In
economics the change must increase value, customer value, or
producer value. The goal of innovation is positive change, to make
someone or something better. Innovation leading to increased
productivity is the fundamental source of increasing wealth in an
economy."
I'd say that disqualifies 98% (I'm being conservative here,
mustn't be too harsh) of everything in proprietary tech that is
touted as "innovative".
Windows 7 Starter Edition? If you count advances in crippleware
as innovative then it qualifies. (What do you call an advance in
going backwards?)
Though it has slimmed down considerably; Vista sucked up about
15 gigabytes of disk space without giving you any actual
functionality, and Windows 7 has been whittled
down to about 5 GB, still without any actual functionality. In
comparison, my main workstation runs Kubuntu, which occupies about
8 GB. That includes KDE3 and 4, Gnome, IceWM, Fluxbox, and several
other graphical environments, OpenOffice, KOffice, and other office
suites and apps, games, all kinds of audio, graphics, and video
editing apps, a big wad of file-web-mail-terminal-VoIP servers, a
complete build environment, several kernel trees, astronomy apps,
and dozens of other apps I installed, tested, and forgot about. The
one thing I'm missing is a feeling of deprivation.
Trusted Computing? The concept is rather innovative, in a
Bizarro world kind of way-- instead of fixing their
malware-friendly junkware, Microsoft wants end-to-end control of
all computing. I'm not clear on how this will fix anything, but I
give them a few points for big brass chutzpah. Which, when you peel
away all the noise, is the only thing Microsoft really has going
for it.
Anti-virus/anti-malware software for Linux? The first few times
it made me laugh. Now it's annoying. What's innovative is getting
people to buy it.
Buggy, weird-looking vendor-created OEM Linuxes on netbooks? Oh
please, make it stop. Hire some high school kids, they'll do a
better job. How do these things make it out the door? It doesn't
take deep guru voodoo to spot when most of it doesn't work.
This one is fresh so it's still funny: Diskeeper is thinking of
releasing Linux and Mac OS X versions of its filesystem
de-fragmentation software. Please, someone show them a little mercy
and tell them that Linux doesn't use gormy Windows filesystems. And
that Ext, XFS, and JFS all have their own utilities for measuring
non-contiguous blocks, and re-organizing them if they really need
it.
And finally, you might have noticed the new waves of FUD and
astro-turfing that are all variations on this: "I really love Linux
and have used it for years. Everyday. Really! But it's still just
not good enough, especially for The Masses, and the command-line is
evil and scares The Masses away. Not me because I'm a guru, but
those other people over there." Innovation in scare tactics? Nah,
just the same worn-out warmed-over baloney.
Well that's all the hilarity I can handle for one day. Have a
great weekend, remember to give thanks every so often to the fine
people who make FOSS an everyday reality, and please share your own
nomination for "best" "innovations."
