Sometimes Innovation is no More Than Doing Something Old ... Better

Take the recent launch of Apple's new Macbook Air. You could hardly avoid the collective swooning of the press over what is must surely be the one of the most striking laptops ever. And you'll pay handsomely to be the first to open its ultra thin cover at your neighborhood Starbucks.

Innovative? Of course: Apple continues to school the electronics world in the art of industrial design. But beneath that beautiful sculpted aluminum and glass is a deeply conventional device.

What's really new about the Macbook Air? Not much. It's super thin. But it works like virtually every laptop sold during the last ten years. Apple won't be able to keep them in stock.

Quick! What was Wang Laboratories primary contribution to the PC era? You probably didn't say SIMM computer memory, but they were first to bring the technology to market before being overwhelmed by Toshiba and NEC. Winning a patent suit against the two companies in August, 1991, didn't help: Wang filed for bankruptcy the same month.

Google wasn't the first search engine. Once upon a time, companies like Altavista ruled the search roost. But Google did it better. When is the last time you used an Altavista search page?

Once upon a time, computer word processing meant programs like WordStar. Then along came Microsoft, and new office product created (ironically) for Apple. While these are lots of new office suite options these days, the corporate word processing standard remains MS Word. The power of doing something better.

What is the power of doing something old like talking, better? Find out what your customer communication style says about you at Fast Company expert blogs.

Comments

[Eric Eggertson]

If better design was the deciding factor, we would all be using WordPerfect today. It was hands down the better word processing tool on the market.

Microsoft was better at leveraging their dominance of the operating system market, and using that to secure purchases of Word (and Office suite) by corporate IT shops. Millions of office workers were forced to give up WordPerfect and the hundreds of easy-to-create templates that let them automate and control their documents and forms.

[Valeria Maltoni]

I almost forgot about WordPerfect! You are highlighting another issue: better is not always in absolute terms. In the case of Google it means less cluttered; for Microsoft, more ubiquitous; for Apple, most elegant in addition to other qualities.

And timing is a factor, too. Is the market ready for change? It happens the same with PR. What gets noticed and what is truly news can be two different items altogether.

[Joe Raasch]

This is partly about consumer choices as well. Maybe even a chicken/egg metaphor?

One can't argue that a microwave meal from a box is better than even the most basic home-cooked meal with fresh ingredients. Yet, which one is a multi-billion dollar industry?

Ultimately, we have choice and vote with our purchases.

Marketers choose too. Should a product be acceptable to millions at a small margin, or appeal to a much smaller, enthusiastic group, at a higher price? Indeed, choices.

[Valeria Maltoni]

What happens when the person making the call is not the marketer? What happens when the decision looks good on paper, but it does not meet the reality of the marketplace?

Who makes the choices also matters! Good food for thought (a propo of chicken/egg), Joe.

[Michael Haberman, SPHR]

Valeria, very good food for thought. I used that spark for my HR blog to muse on an HR department being considered "innovative" just by doing the "old" adminstrative work it has always done .. better. Thanks for the spark.

[Joe Raasch]

And worse Valeria, when choices are made and consumers 'fall' for them - making choices that have brought us the meal in a box.

That's the answer: integrating marketing along the decision line.

I like Michael's view of innovation: just doing the right things, better. THAT is real innovation!

Ciao,

Joe

PS - isn't that Mac Air gorgeous? I have computer envy.

[Valeria Maltoni]

@Michael -- it is possible to do the old thing in a new way, too. Glad you are finding inspiration and action!

@Joe -- can't want to sit down with you. I know it will be a stimulating conversation. I love my Macs. I brought the MacBook to Italy and my mom had computer envy : )

[mvellandi]

Ahh, the joy of incremental innovations. While I like 'better', we should ask for whom is it so? While in purely technical terms, aesthetics, or functionality a product/service isn't the absolute greatest...if it's strategically designed or sold for a unique market segment, it now becomes essentially 'better' to those folks.

[Valeria Maltoni]

I like to remember that when you change the way you look at things, the things you look at, change. In other words, true. Many products would never go to market if they had to be perfect before doing so. Specific is better than generic, in some cases.

[Carolyn Ann]

"Better" in the case of Microsoft wasn't that MS Word was so much better - a number of companies (Lotus, Wordperfect, etc) were just that bit worse than the "integrated" approach that MS took.

Cars are another example - the US auto industry (like the British and Italian ones) didn't suddenly get worse in the 1970's. They just didn't get any better, and then they got worse - and it became quite clear that they much worse when the Japanese cars kept, well, running. And then the aforementioned car companies steadily got worse and worse - their management was for nought.

The British bike industry is another example. They didn't get worse, they actually got a little better during the 1970's. But the Japanese bikes didn't leak oil, were technically "cooler", and incorporated more advanced ideas - they were that much better than their competitors.

In the 1990's the Italian motorcycle industry discovered that the best way to compete was not to compete against the big Japanese firms - you simply competed for consumer dollars as a lifestyle product. Prettier designs, more exotic technology (quick - hide the maintenance bills!) and a very personal statement of identity (I'm a customer of Ducati, therefore I'm individual, and other nonsense. Except it works!)

So you don't actually have to be better than your competition - your competition just has to be a little worse than you! It's not the same thing, although it seems that way. Think about it in terms of military strategy: "your" soldiers can be better trained, but if they're not better led - "you" will lose. (I offer the American Revolution as an example, and the Boer War, the Crimean War, the American Civil War, and so on and so forth.

Apple looks like it's getting complacent, again. Steve Jobs is dismissing ideas he really shouldn't be. But their main competition - MS - is actually (at this point) a little worse than Apple. The Apple ad campaign has been a bit lackluster of late; instead of emphasizing how "cool" you'll be with the Mac, it's taken to a not very subtle "bling" - my laptop is thinner (and therefore cooler) than yours! Etcetera. Instead of being a date with a supermodel at Starbucks, or the tool of the genius, it's, well - suburban. (Not very innovative, mostly the same, homogenous, David Byrne pointing to an endless line of garages and asking "who's to say that isn't beautiful?" - Me. I can say it isn't! - and so on.)

The new thin MacBook isn't innovation - it's a continuation of a theme. It's bling, but in a pseudo-sophisticated tux. The guy trying to develop a heads-up display that works as a contact lens? That's innovative.

Carolyn Ann

PS Sorry, I'm tired, so this rambles a bit...

[Valeria Maltoni]

It's good to take the opposing view -- that is also innovative. Look at what the alternatives are and how you can be better at solving the customer's problem: nicer design, a bike that does not leak, a car that runs all the time, an operating system that requires less maintenance and hogs less memory to run, etc.

The companies that gain a decidedly large lead are those that decide to solve the problem better *and* do something unexpected.

[Joe Raasch]

"So you don't actually have to be better than your competition - your competition just has to be a little worse than you!"

That sounds like a familiar strategy in many companies. This keeps them focused on the competition, not on their customers. Which keeps armies of marketers and consultant employed to find a way to stay 'a step ahead of the competition...'

Sigh.

What if there was a way to not have to compete, or compete a LOT less? Spend on R&D and clients, not on chasing the competition?

The book, "Blue Ocean Strategy" (Kim/Mauborgne) at http://www.blueoceanstrategy.com/ gets close to this ideal. Example: Yellow Tail wines. This company chose to ignore their industry and the standard oenophile and focus on why people were not drinking wine. Success! They have a loyal following and have destroyed many previous barriers to enjoying the product.

[Roger von Oech]

The innovative element of the Air is not its slim size.

I think what people will be talking about a year from now is that the Air was the first to introduce "wireless client/server" to the home or home-business user.

What they've done here is on a par with moving from 5.25" floppies to 3.5" in the mid-80s, and eliminating floppy media altogether in the 90s.

[Valeria Maltoni]

@Joe -- market-driven innovation takes into consideration the needs that are going unanswered in the marketplace. I really liked the Yellow Tail case study in "Blue Ocean Strategy".

@Roger -- with the introduction and take off of Software as a Service (the famous SaaS), wireless client/server starts being very appealing... to some. Admittedly, I now have a bunch of floppies that are totally useless, but the information on them still valuable.

[Carolyn Ann]

But isn't Yellow Tail still competing for the customer? Whether they justify their product in terms of lifestyle, or any other measure - it boils down to: their products are next to other wines in the liquor store. And the customer makes the decision to purchase based on factors that Yellow Tail can't really control.

There's a brewery in Delaware, Dogfish Head, that brews some excellent beer. They make a decision to not compete with Coors, Bud, etc. Heck, they don't even compete against Sam Adams - but what they might not realize is that I purchase their beer on a whim. It's either their Pale Ale, Sierra Nevada, Brooklyn Lager or Sam Adams. I reduce all their competitive analysis to "what do I fancy?" (Right now, it's a Brooklyn Lager :-) ) It doesn't matter to me if they compete against Coors or not - when offered the choice of Coors or water, I'll take water: I don't like Coors' politics (or his manipulation of the political process), and I won't provide any of my money for Pete Coors to use. And I can't stand the beer.

So whether the company thinks it has chosen a different market to compete it - it's still got the problem of getting me to part with my dollars. And that ensures everyone is playing to the same tune; it might be a different band, but the tune is the same.

I'm sorry, I cannot agree that the MacBook Air advances the idea of the wireless client/server paradigm. (Work in computing long enough, and you grow to hate that word.) If it forces that idea, I'd be surprised if it has a long shelf life. The Air is the same idea Apple has touted all along - develop a product that is better than anything the competitors offer, make it sleek and futuristic and desirable - and charge for the privilege of owning one.

My apologies, Joe. I didn't mean to imply that as the only way of competing! I was tired, and I didn't take as much care as I probably should have.

Carolyn Ann