Monday, November 22, 2010

Will Saletan Is Wrong About Kinect and the Future of Innovation

While I'm in the business of talking about Slate's Will Saletan, let's examine this tweet: "Microsoft yields to the unpredictable creativity of the collective human mind. http://j.mp/d0KTB5 This, not R&D, is the future of innovation"

Follow the link, and you'll find this morning's Times story about how hackers are taking Microsoft's new Kinect technology and taking it places that Microsoft didn't expect. Some of those places are really cool. But Saletan's wrong to cast the future of innovation in either-or terms. It was a big huge company, Microsoft, that created the foundational technology and the people at home who are taking it new places. That would suggest that the future of innovation isn't just in big research labs or in somebody's home office, but in both places, building off the possibilities revealed by the other.

No comments: