I stumbled across this interesting article on software innovation today: The Most Important Software Innovations. It is an attempt to define a list of the most influential open software innovations (ignoring hardware innovations). It uses a relatively arbitrary cut-off point at TCP/IP in terms of networking (ruling lower networking protocols such as Ethernet out of scope). However, I would have to agree with the overall thrust of the argument that there are relatively few real innovations in software, and that many so-called innovative software ideas are simply a recoding of an existing idea. Of course all of us who work in software surf on the wave created by the hardware developments that make our underlying platforms cheaper and more powerful at a remarkable rate, so though this list doesn't include hardware innovation, it certainly requires it!
Posted by mofoghlu at October 31, 2006 02:36 PM