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

[Shwaine]

On Fri, 30 May 2003, Micah J. Cowan wrote:

> 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. :)
>

Not to nitpick on a really off-topic thread but... the whole pet supplies
on the 'net thing being innovatitive is really not so much so. It was just
an extension of mail-order pet supplies. So really, the only 'innovation'
was having an online version of the mail-order catalog, which may or may
not be innovative depending on your viewpoint. I see it as a logical
extension of the mail-order catalog rather than an innovation.