Gmail was pretty revolutionary. Just out of curiosity... were the biggest obstacles more technology/product related or "human" (eg. making it an official Google product)?
The fundamental point around "incrementalism" makes a lot of sense.
Even government is largely incremental these days... the margin of winning the presidency seemed so small that it probably boiled downed to a series of micro-optimizations. If you buy that... why would a great micro-optimizer run the country any differently?
And even with technological progress poster-child Apple... the big outstanding question is whether Tim Cook will end up turning the company in to a micro-optimization that converges toward it's current local maxima?
But maybe it's all just cyclical... once all the low hanging fruit is picked over 1000 of times, the world at large will naturally be forced to be less incremental.
The Marc Andreessen scenario aside, sounds like the right direction for some future of consumer direct marketing... rather than the $s going to an intermediary... it should ultimately transfer to the consumer (assuming said marketplace is sufficiently designed to minimize the aggregate effect of people trying to hack the market without ever consuming).
(former MySpace and former .NET team @MSFT)
Let's just say the Microsoft stack probably didn't kill the beast… ASP.NET certainly didn't help though.
It's too bad that all the tech built around .NET will be lost to the annals of MySpace, MSFT should acquire the company just to open source the whole thing for the benefit of .NET.
Regardless, it's fair to say starting a company on "the Microsoft Stack" today would reflect questionable judgement. Are there any recent ex-MSFT founders on it?
The default assumption is that business implies objectivity and logic... at least that was my perspective as an engineer.
However, in practice it seems more often than not... lasting business leaders are highly disposed towards emotion (both towards themselves and others). Combine that with the fact that it's a small world when it comes to relevant leaders... and trading rationality for trust may not burn in the short term, but seems like a bad trade in the long run.