Comment by kevinalexbrown

At first, I really agreed with this piece. I think it's an awesome point that the overuse of the word innovative deflates its meaning, just like calling every programmer a "hacker" or saying "let's do this 'the hacker way!'" makes it less meaningful, or calling every member of the military a 'national hero' is maybe a little degrading to purple-heart recipients.

But on a second reading, this article really uses a straw man. Comparing a facebook and a few cherry-picked innovations from Bell Labs is a little disingenuous for a few reasons.

The most obvious comes from the fact that there were a lot of people working at Bell Labs. See that first picture? Halls so long they ended in the vantage point? There were a lot of ideas that never quite made a splash in the 70 years of Bell Lab's heyday.

The second part is that the innovations of Bell Labs may not have been lost, but transferred. There's still quite a lot of research done in this country, although most of hit has slowly been shifting to universities. I'm not sure if this is better, but no one can say there isn't tons of cool stuff being done for the "understanding" and not the short-term profit. I think there should be more, but that's not the point. While we're cherry-picking, I might point out brain machine interfaces that let monkeys (and soon humans) control prosthetic limbs directly from their brains, nano-scale machines a few molecules large, quantum computers. These things are anything but short-term profit focused, and everything but falsely innovative.

Finally, the real straw man lies with the fact that Bell Labs has the benefit of hindsight. We now know the transistor was an incredibly useful invention. Before we knew what we could really do with computers, it wasn't quite so obvious. It might end up that facebook doesn't turn out anything more innovative than extremely well executed social networking, but that's going to take more than 8 years to find out.

Don't overuse innovation, but don't become so narrowmindedly awed by the past that you don't take part in the tumult of things that might (or might not) share the same sentences as the transistor when someone write an article in 30 years wondering why we don't have the same pizzazz as those Silicon Valley entrepreneurs at Google.