[OT] Innovative [was Re: [vox] SCO suing IBM over their Linux activity]

[Micah J. Cowan]

On Fri, May 30, 2003 at 04:31:27PM -0700, Peter Jay Salzman wrote:
> of course, we're all jaded now and ecommerce is extremely blase, but i
> maintain that the person who first thought of selling dog food on the
> net was innovative.

I hear what you're saying, but I'm not sure I'd qualify it in such
granularity. I would call the first person to sell *anything* via the
internet "innovative" (IIRC, there was someplace you could order pizza
over the net, and I think that was before the Web), but being the
first person to sell a particular class of items wouldn't seem
innovative to me. If you took that to the highest-granularity version,
we'd be calling the first person to sell a pizza with *anchovies*
innovative, and the first person to sell a pizza with anchovies for
*$5.50*... even though they fit the technical definition in the
dictionary, by introducing "something new into the environment", I
would reserve the term "innovative" for quality values of "new" above
a certain threshold. :)

Just my $0.02,
-Micah