Sunday, April 20, 2008 1:08 PM
I was thinking more about the "Are we innovating or just porting" session we had yesterday here at Alt.NET conf.
The discussion was around why the Java community has created so many tools for their development, and yet the .NET community has just seemed to slap an 'N' in front of it and ports it over.
We then discussed what products have come from the .NET space to help enable our own software development, instead of relying on the Java space to provide these. We did end up identifying a list of products from the .NET space, which we patted ourselves on the back for by the end.
I made a comment about how we shouldn't just focus on the open source/free products that are available and ignore the for-profit tools that *have* been innovative (i.e. ReSharper). I started thinking about this idea of innovation and being innovative...and I started to question more and more why we were associating innovation in the discussion with open source/free products.
I saw an add from IBM a few years ago.
[Edit Here it is...]
[/Edit]
It's an older guy with a younger geek, and he's showing the older guy his online avatar in a virtual world game.
"It's *innovation*" the younger one declares. The older guy eventually states:
The point of innovation is to make actual money.
I remember when I first saw this ad, my socialist Canadian upbringing made me scoff at this. Why not consider the beauty of creating something for the benefit of mankind and having that be the reward for the work? And birds sung and butterflies flew by...
But now...now I'm not so sure. A buddy of mine who was in that same session pointed out that innovation typically emerges when there is a visible need. Right now in the .NET tools space, maybe we just don't have many *new* needs right now? There were comments in the session about how silly it was for people to write NEW IoC containers or NEW ORM tools, because they've been done.
EXACTLY!
So if we're looking for true innovation within the .NET space, we need to look at
a) What are the emerging tools that are fixing current pain points in our development.
b) Identify which issues we've already found fixes for and which items can be innovated around
c) Understand that not all innovation will come from open source, but that may come out of for-profit organizations...and this ISN'T BAD!
So what is the area that we as a community can innovate on? What things can we be making improvements to? There was one tagline that the IBM commercial ended with, and I really like it:
Stop Talking, Start Doing.
D