Innovation is a Process, not a Destination

Here’s another example where the the theory that startups and platform companies need intellectual property to do business doesn’t seem to apply. I just noticed today that MapQuest has unveiled a beta of an ajaxy web-based map feature. They’ve basically copied Google Maps, which I raved about last year. It appears that Yahoo! Maps also recently unveiled a clone of Google’s map interface. Microsoft and Rand McNally appear to still be behind the times.

I’m very surprised that it’s taken them this long. The concept behind Google’s draggable maps is not complicated. Indeed, a lot of the code is right there in the page source, where anybody can look at it. Writing the server-side code to support it isn’t trivial, but it’s hardly a mammoth undertaking. It’s possible that the problem was that it requires beefier servers (or better load balancing, or whatever) to handle the increased load from serving up more images, but this is Microsoft, Yahoo, and AOL we’re talking about. If anyone has the resources and know-how to build scalable web sites, it ought to be them.

What does this have to do with the startups and IP issue? It seems to me that this is a perfect test case of his hypothesis that companies can “simply take any ideas revealed and implement them.” There was very little mystery, in the abstract, about how Google’s mapping feature worked. Yet it took two of the deepest-pocketed companies in the computer industry 20 months to implement the idea, and a third is still working on it. In Internet terms, 20 months is forever. Mapquest has been bleeding tech-savvy customers like me that whole time.

What I think is going on (and this is a guess–I’d be interested in other hypotheses from readers) is that it’s often very difficult to replicate innovation from the top down. The software development process at big companies tends to get slowed down by bureaucracy, and as a result it’s slow and expensive.

What this means is that even a small company with no intellectual property at all will have substantial bargaining power over a large company facing a decision about whether to build or buy a particular bit of technology. They can build it themselves, but that’s likely to take a couple of years and cost millions of dollars. More importantly, a company that’s copying the innovations of others will always be a step behind. They can copy this year’s latest innovation, but by the time they release it the state of the art will have moved beyond that point. A company that imitates rather than innovating will never be on the cutting edge.

I should mention that I’m mostly ripping off Mike Masnick, who has argued for years that innovation is a process, not a destination. The reason a big company buys a smaller, more innovative one isn’t because they want to get their hands on any given bit of technology. Rather, they buy a company because they believe the company will help them stay on the forefront of innovation going forward. That’s equally valuable with or without intellectual property rights.

Update: It looks like Yahoo Maps actually released an interactive map last year. I don’t use Yahoo’s map site so I didn’t notice. On the other hand, Yahoo appears to have cheated by implementing their interactive map with Flash rather than with ajax. Flash has more overhead and doesn’t integrate with other browser features quite as cleanly. So it appears that only MapQuest has managed to replicate Google’s specific technique, and it took them almost two years to do so.

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