In a recent Windows IT Pro (News - Alert) editorial, Rod Trent makes a bold claim: The latest IT “innovations” are basically just pretty new editions of ideas that were invented long ago.
He takes the recent craze over mobile device management (MDM) solutions as his main case in point.
With the rise in smartphones and the bring-your-own-device (BYOD) trend, there’s been an increasing number of vendors offering ways to lock down corporate data that frequently travels with workers on their smartphones. Mobile device management has been the primary solution for locking down this data, creating a space on mobile devices that are controlled by the enterprise even if the device overall is not.
“In the beginning, there were a handful of startups that helped revolutionize remote management and pioneer mobile device management (MDM),” noted Trent. “Eventually, those startups were acquired by larger vendors who wanted desperately to enter the MDM race, finally honing in on what we all already knew – that mobile is the future of computing.”
He has written that now most big vendors offer MDM solutions, and they basically all are the same as the pioneering MDM that came before. And the pioneering MDM that came before wasn’t even that revolutionary, just a small iteration of the policies that enterprise has always tried to enforce on workers who went mobile with company-sponsored laptops.
“Creativity is lost,” he noted. “We live in a time with little or no innovation. The latest blockbuster movies are just remakes of old stories. Sometimes they get slightly creative to put a twist on the original story, but most times it's simply a remake with better special effects. And, truly isn't that where we are in the tech industry? Most of the cool things we have now are only slightly enhanced versions of what was envisioned and created 20 years ago.”
While this is an interesting argument, and I admit that I’ve had similar thoughts from time to time as I watch companies such as Apple (News - Alert) trot out “innovations” that really are just refined versions of what’s been on the market for awhile, it is missing the point that most innovation actually is iterative and always has been.
Yes, the iPhone (News - Alert) has many of the same elements as the Windows Mobile smartphones that were available years before Apple got into the mobile handset business. And yes, “apps” are really just an easier way to download software to smartphones, something that has always been a part of the smartphone world. But let’s not downplay the innovative power of the iteration.
Apps, for instance, make it dramatically easier to add and remove smartphone applications. And while you can break down the meaning of an app and say it just is software, that would be to miss the point that the app iteration has changed how software is developed and consumed in a big way.
The loss of perspective that can come from smoothing over of the transformational effect of iterative improvements can be carried to almost all tech innovation.
For instance, take Opengear (News - Alert) and its out-of-band management solutions. Its out-of-band management portfolio could be reduced to just a second channel for interacting with devices in the field, as ostensibly it is a backup for when the primary communication channel goes down.
But really, the Opengear solutions do much more than that. They not only deliver backup communications to remote devices that often are relied upon for critical information, they also deliver remote management that can enable companies to readjust how remote field equipment is serviced and updated.
Instead of sending a tech out to a site whenever there is a problem, with an Opengear solution a company can fundamentally change how these devices are serviced, in addition to easily modifying how these devices are used. This is iterative, but it also is transformational.
While it makes for good copy to say that there’s no real innovation any longer, such smoothing over of the transformational effect of iterative innovation misses the larger impact of such innovation.
Edited by Rory J. Thompson