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

[Peter Jay Salzman]

On Fri 30 May 03,  7:16 PM, Shwaine <shwaine@shwaine.com> said:
> 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...

that's what [OT] is for.  :)

> the whole pet supplies
> on the 'net thing being innovatitive is really not so much so. It was just

the smartest person i've ever had the pleasure to know was a physics
professor i had in my undergrad years.  he would ride on anyone who used
the word "just".  it was his pet peeve.  john was very fond of saying
that any sentence with the word "just" is false or misleading.

> 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.

reading your email, i would say you suffer from the "just" syndrome.
sometimes it's really hard to think critically while disregarding
things we take to be incontrovertibly and patently true (like what we're
familiar or comfortable with).

pete

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