Scott Berkun

Why Google won’t create the next twitter (a critique)

Sloppy logic is fun to throw around and there are certain popular patterns of slop thrown around when talking about innovation.� Someone forwarded a recent post by Scoble that has a couple of them.� My book The Myths of Innovation rallied against how destructive these little wrinkles of fact can be.

In a post titled Why Google won’t create the next twitter, Scoble writes:

The thing is, innovations usually come about when it doesn’t seem like anyone is interested. Let’s go back to 2006 when Twitter was first released. I remember showing it to other people. They thought it was the lamest thing they’d ever seen. See, no one was sitting around and saying “I have a problem, I need a way to blog but I want to be limited to only 140 characters.”

The problem here is the word usually.

There is little usual in innovation.� For any approach to finding new ideas and making them into successful products you can find examples of both success and failure. The Apollo moon landing missions, perhaps the greatest innovation we will ever have, was achieved by a huge government led bureaucracy of 500,000 people, which given how the startup culture often talks about how innovation only happens at start-ups, should have been an abysmal failure.  The microwave, Teflon and Velcro were discovered or inspired by accidents. Name a method or hypothesis for how innovation happens and you can find examples in history that would suggest it is the way to go. Problem is every single one has extremely high rates of failure. There are always too many factors you can not control (the market, trends, wars, competitors, etc.) The word usual is much too strong a word to ever use.

It may seem nitpicky to say a better word would be often,� but this seemingly subtle change makes a huge improvement of accuracy of fact. Something can happen often but not be usual, say a full moon (It has happened millions of times, but only once every ~25 days). But to say something usually happens means it occurs what, 5 times out 10? 7 times out of ten? Which is decidedly not the case in the history of innovation.

Scoble does hit a bullseye with this observation:

Ahh, that seals it, Google is the new Microsoft. See, when I worked at Microsoft I heard this kind of horsepucky all the time too. The executives there would only really get behind things that looked like they were billion dollar businesses and let me know it early and often.

It’s common for successful companies to imagine they can predict how valuable an idea is.� The rub is it’s usually people who were not around at the dawn of that company who have this arrogance.� Anyone there at the beginning of  Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Twitter, The United States of America, life on earth, or even the universe, would know how unpopular and unlikely all the sane successful people around at the time though their ideas were. When the company hits the Fortune 500 many of the people who were there at the beginning leave, and when they do the story of how the company started changes into more confident PR fueled tales of immaculate conception. The culture forgets how uncertain the story of that company was, and more importantly, still is.

Truth is everyone sucks at predicting the future no matter what forms those predictions take. And luck, which I define as the way factors you do not control but depend on play out, has a large role in which ideas take off and which don’t. Many good ideas die and bad ideas win. People who win take credit for luck. People who lose blame luck. But in both cases luck is a major factor in why certain ideas take off when they do. If you accept this it’s hard to make blanket statements about who fails and why.

Peter Drucker rallies for how difficult it is to predict the impact of an idea in the classic Innovation and Entrepreneurship. He points out how some tricks for efficient hamburger construction was overlooked by the world as something banal and kids-play, but it would be the basis for McDonald’s world domination. Some ideas, like fax machines, electricity, cell phones and television bounce around in roughly the same form for decades before the other factors (social, infrastructure, trends) line up to make the idea viable. More ideas, like jet packs, flying cars, AI and video phones may bounce around forever and never take hold.

Scoble gets loose with the facts again, in another popular form:

The thing is to create an avalanche you’ve gotta make it snow one snowflake at a time. Big companies don’t get that part of the equation. Why? Creating snowflakes is SMALL and isn’t interesting to multi-billion-dollar companies.

As someone who consults on and studies innovation, this is not accurate. While many big companies aren’t interested in small, some very prominent ones are (Toyota, 3M, Boeing, etc.). Research and development groups, which most companies have, are often focused on small, interesting experiments.

The problem is how shy these companies are about placing a big bet on what appears to be a very SMALL idea.  Microsoft, and Google, have lots of people with many interesting ideas, but the criteria for placing bets behind them and deciding which ones to kill is exceedingly conservative. And the VPs who make these decisions are often so far removed from the entrepreneurial risk taking spirit needed to make aggressive choices capable of becoming a big deal.

This isn’t the same as failing to make snowflakes. They have snowflakes but are never willing to abandon the the huge mounds of snow they already sell to give those little snowflakes a shot. Which isn’t a surprise given there are billions of dollars of revenue coming in, and only an insane person would risk that much guaranteed income on a cute, but unknown little snowflake. Only entrepreneurs are this crazy, but their spirit is rarely rewarded the larger a company gets.

In some ways I’d go further than what Scoble says. Having a success like any of the companies mentioned in this post is exceptionally rare despite the millions of smart people who have tried.  The likelihood if it happening twice at the same company is so unlikely that to criticize a company for failing to do it is silly. I agree it’s unlikely Google will create the next twitter, but odds are slim Twitter will create the next Twitter too.

If you dig this kind of reasoning and want more, check out the book, as this post is just an application of the much meatier ideas found there.

The Kindle’s place in Innovation history

My innovation hype detector went off in this NYT piece on the Kindle. The offending quote is as follows:

Today’s idea: The advent of e-books and Google’s online book archive mean “2009 may well prove to be the most significant year in the evolution of the book since Gutenberg hammered out his original Bible.”

Anyone who makes a quote like this should be expected to spend at least 60 seconds reviewing the history of books before uttering a phrase such as “…the most significant since”, don’t you think?

Frankly it’s a stupid comparison.  The Kindle is, or is not, awesome based on how it makes reading easier or better, which I’m pretty sure it does. Why drag Guttenberg into this yet again?

Here’s a quick run through of book innovations history to help frame the kindle:

• Movable type – Gutenberg should be taken down a few hype notches. China had working presses for centuries before he was born (around 1000 AD). It just never took off, in part because written Chinese language has hundreds of characters, compared to Germans 26.
• Gutenberg – Deserves credit for the Western, as in European, printing press. He made several very clever enhancements never seen before, but did not invent the book nor the press.  He was also not much of a philosophical hero or idea liberator – as best we can tell he was just a fine craftsman mostly failing to make a living printing bibles.
• The invention of cheap paperback books, Penguin makes books cheap enough for the average citizen (1935). This was a revolution in the U.S. as in made books cheap, portable and part of middle and lower class culture.

If anything I think paperback books are the best comparison as they were a revolution in distribution, access, convenience and portability much like the Kindle is. They also revolutionized the business model for authors, publishers and bookstores, much like Kindle will if it’s success continues.