Comments on: The Dangers of Re-Use: How MashUps Can Stifle Innovation

By: Anthony Kuhn

Anthony Kuhn — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 21:03:16 +0000

Rob:

I have to point out the obvious: you yourself have fallen into the trap of re-use and mashup, as related in your post. “Do as I say, and not as I do” usually only works on 3 year olds. I cross-posted on your piece to http://blog.innovators-network.org The Innovators Network is a non-profit dedicated to bringing technology to startups, small businesses, non-profits, venture capitalists and intellectual property experts. Please visit us and help grow our community!

Best wishes for continued success,

Anthony Kuhn
Innovators Network

By: Shane

Shane — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 04:38:35 +0000

Maybe I missed something but how exactly do mashups stifle innovation? Because the man in the street can make one without formal training? Isn’t the tone of that argument somewhat elitist (a la Andrew Keen), that is if you don’t understand the technology to a deep level, you can never hope to achieve anything with it? That’s the take-away message I received anyway.

I would argue that it’s not the resulting mashup that is the innovation, rather the ideas behind it such as open APIs, information streams like RSS and enabling/aggregating tools like Pipes. The potential is there, even if it isn’t always obvious in the application.

I’ve responded to this on my own site if anyone is interested but I’m prepared to concede that I may well be on my own on this one.

By: Steve

Steve — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 04:00:06 +0000

Excellent points Rob. I encountered the same issues years ago when working on VMS and UNIX teams where scripts were heavily used. When junior developers joined the team and were learning VMS and UNIX shells, some people would simply give the juniors a list of scripts to run. Sure, useful in some instances, but when you’re mentoring a junior developer and want them to become skilled in using command shells, there’s no substitute for getting one’s hands on the actual shell commands; the commands “masked” by the scripts. I would insist that junior developers spend time understanding at least the basic shell commands before running all those nifty scripts. This would accelerate their learning of the shells and give them a quicker ability to write their own scripts and comprehend the internals of some of the scripts they were using. Yes, perspective is the key and knowing when it’s important to understand the “stuff” under the hood.

By: John

John — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 06:25:55 +0000

Before starting my own business I worked with one of the big 5 consultancies and I was continually amazed at how little their “expert technical team” really understood about how the tools they used worked. For example the “web” team didn’t know what HTTP was and had never heard of CGI…

There’s a lot to be said for reuse, but as you say you still need to understand what you are reusing.