Innovation and why Apple is tight-lipped
Really funny how the press makes such a huge deal out of Apple’s secrecy around their product announcements, calling it “paranoid” and so forth.
Actually, it is extremely prudent practice.
Innovation is hard primarily because it is extremely difficult to ask the right questions. Bear with me on this. This is something that I preach to all the incoming grad students [people are always asking me to give this talk] — the point of the Ph.D. program is to train people how to ask questions. If a [research] question is asked appropriately, figuring out how to answer it is simple. If you frame a research question appropriately, you can hand that off to anyone, a grad student, an undergrad, and that person should be able to figure out what experiment to run, how to set it up, what data to collect, how to present it, how to analyze it, how to draw conclusions.
The hard part is framing the question.
Seriously, that is the entire point of the Ph.D. program: forcing students to learn how to ask questions well. Now let’s skip to innovation in an industrial setting. I claim that it is precisely the same deal: the hard part is framing the question.
Let’s say you have been tasked with the following: come up with the next-generation compute system. Though that sounds concrete, there is no well-framed question there, because it is not at all immediately obvious how to solve the problem. This kind of open-ended problem stumps people — even extremely smart and talented people, as we all can point at brilliant designers who have nonetheless put out computers or phones or devices that underperform, are hard to use, have numerous security flaws, or exhibit any combination of these problems.
The hard part is framing the question.
As soon as one designer solves a long-standing open problem, why is it that suddenly everyone rushes in with a me-too solution? Because that one designer managed to frame the question appropriately, and once the fact is made public “company X announced Y today” the question has been framed: aha — they solved the Y problem! Once you know the right question, solving it is trivial. If you tell a competent engineer what problem you have solved, he can figure out the solution in a heartbeat.
Really, this is no exaggeration. We solved several switching problems that had faced the electric guitar industry for decades — decades. People could have solved the problem decades ago, but had not. When we told people who had been in the business for 35 years what we had done, they didn’t believe it — said that we could not have solved the problem because it couldn’t be solved. However, as soon as we announced publicly what we had done (without saying how we did it), suddenly a small rash of me-too products appeared.
The hard part is framing the question. Once you have the right question in front of you, answering it is trivial.
That is why Apple doesn’t tell everyone all of the details up front. That is why they don’t want people leaking information. As soon as you know what Apple has done, figuring out how to do it takes a second. Any announcement they make gives their competitors an opportunity to do several years’ worth of technological catch-up in a single breath.
Innovation is fun that way.
