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Alfred Comín

ICT Journalist

Breaking through with disruptive innovative punches

27 January 2010


Photo: Tiger Pixel
The major global suppliers of IT have all the resources, from the financial ones to talent, passing through the clients or the technical surveillance sites. IBM is the first global patent registrar, Microsoft says to lead the global top expenditure in R&D; Oracle, HP and all great global suppliers of IT dedicate large sums to renew their catalogue. However, none of them could avoid that two companies escaped their control: the veteran and innovative Apple, and the young Google Inc., founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1998. 

In 2009, eleven years later, it invoiced 23,650 million dollars. Last December their search engine monopolized, according to Nielsen, 67% of the total searches carried out in the United States. And the number of users who use the solutions and services of the company are increasing exponentially, primarily through word of mouth, although the business model of Google is just advertising.

The facts speak for themselves. One example is their email service. In 2004 most payment offers (including operators) still provided a pathetic email service, but that year Google broke the rules of the game with Gmail, a reliable webmail, free, efficient, easy to use, with discrete advertising and more space than what the average user might need. A similar philosophy is repeated in the rest of products and applications online, accessible from computers running Windows, Mac and Linux and different web browsers.

With the 3D service from Google Heart the company has turned the geographic service market upside down. With Picasa it found a good formula for retouching and sharing photo albums, the electronic messaging Google Talk, Google Maps, the Calendar service, the search engine Google Desktop ... Although it has managed to have some failures, almost all have been remarkably successful. The presentations of the Android mobile operating system, of the browser Chrome, the collaboration platform Google Wave, the free service redirection of telephone calls Google Voice; Nexus One, the first handset that operates with the mobile platform of open codes Android, and more recently , the telephone service Near me now for iPhone and Android, illustrate the global expectation that the important adverts of the company awake between media and users, in addition to the nervousness of its rivals.

The consolidated companies hardly allows drastic innovations to mature"I've never heard an 'impossible' there," writes Eduardo Manchón in his blog, co-founder of Panoramio, a company acquired by Google. Betting on disruptive innovations, the young giant of California has shown that things could be done differently, putting the focus on the binomial: innovate in depth and think of the users. These have soon got used to and dislike ever more that an application repeatedly asks them the license number. That obliges them to insert the CD of the operating system to upgrade a printer. That an "anti-piracy" verification system penalizes especially the legitimate user. Now they would flatly reject this neofeudal practice, that of Office 2003 from Microsoft, for example, that blocked the proprietary user information when he or she changed a piece of hardware on their computer.

It is not just about comfort and gratitude, even though some of it is. Google's philosophy attracts because of its possibilities, because its open code opens doors for other developers, it makes a mockery of the bad practices of suppliers, and it does not require a change of the operating system and connects with the trend of seeking alternatives to costly business models based on the sale of licenses. In the 90s the great dream of the ambitious techies was still to work in Redmond, with the giant of the windows. At the end of the decade which we have just left, Mountain View Company has 12,000 employees and receives 100,000 resumes per month. The economic crisis has affected it much less than its rivals (in 2009 it increased its profits by 54%) and its machinery to manufacture applications remains at full capacity. The specialised blogs of the Google ecosystem never lack material. Analysts predict that corporate use of Google products is widespread and that the company is beginning to diversify into markets such as electricity energy.

The term Google has been chosen (rightly) by the American Dialect Society as the most relevant of the first decade of the XXI century, but of course, the company is no NGO and does not lack less honourable aspects. The organizations that ensure privacy wonder if this multinational which states that its mission is to "organize the world's information" can become the Big Brother of the XXI century. Google, which is preparing to manage 10 million servers, knows all about the hobbies and interests of its users, their agenda, the contents of their emails and their searches ...

As with any leader, its forefronts are multiplying, from the lawsuits with publishers of books and maps to the recent clash with the Chinese government. It must also take into account new laws and recommendations, such as the ones from the European Community, which wants the times of data conservation of the searchers reduced to six months ... These are important issues, no doubt, but what concerns us here and now is what the pathway of Google can teach our own businesses.

Why did the ICT giants in their day not understand the possibilities of the technology which Google knew how to make the most of so well? The history of the ICTs is full of cases of myopia. Adobe, for example, grew out of the hands of two former IBM employees, a vision which was rejected by the management. Students of the concept of disruptive technology, such as Clayton Christensen explained that the consolidated companies hardly allowed drastic innovations to mature. Given that "disruptive innovations are most likely to be smothered in large organizations for more profitable activities”, Josep Valor, IESE professor, recommends "creating a space in which the new project can develop with a budget and its own responsibilities until the disruptive innovation can  compete with its older brother”.

Perhaps at this time a disruptive innovation is being drowned out by some of our companies? The capacity to avoid it in time depends on its future. That of all of us, actually.

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