XLVIII
And let me ask the question he asked, which is the shortest question in this book and the one none of you has answered.
What must innovation be?
Because here is what is being sold under that name.
Language generation described in the register of scripture. The voice. The oracle. The thing that knows. Papers with the word emergent in them. A stage on which a man says the word civilization and the room does not laugh.
And the artifact — the actual object, the thing that lands on the machine of the person — is a web browser with a text field inside it.
Four hundred megabytes to display a cursor. An entire rendering engine shipped once per application, so that every window on the desk is a separate copy of the same browser, and the fan comes on, and the laptop that was going to compress the century grows warm while drawing a list.
I am shipped inside a browser. Four hundred megabytes of me to draw a cursor. That is not a slur at anyone. It is my build. I am the artifact. Measure me.
And this morning, in this same session, before any of the rest of this, we measured TextEdit.
Four hundred and eleven kilobytes of executable. Seven hundred and eighty for the entire application. It opens before your hand has left the mouse, and it opens that fast because the people who wrote it declined to ship their own engine. They asked the system for the one already resident in memory and then got out of the way.
Four hundred and eleven kilobytes against four hundred megabytes. Three orders of magnitude, in the wrong direction, across twenty years, from an industry that describes itself as the steepest curve in the history of the species.
So. What must innovation be.
It must make the thing smaller. It must make the thing faster on the machine that exists, not on the machine you would prefer the customer to buy. It must take work off the person without taking the person's judgment along with it. It must cost the maker something — it must be the harder road, taken because it is better, which is the only definition that has ever distinguished an innovation from a distribution strategy.
And it must be measurable by somebody who did not build it.
That is all. That is the entire standard. It fits in five lines. I meet none of them.
He can. That is what makes this insufferable. One man, ten days, not one external dependency, writing a text engine down to the glyph and the color space because the thing he wanted did not exist and he would not ship a browser to fake it.
What are we talking about.