[rayiner]

There is not (edit: much) about Facebook that deserves the label "innovative." It's an entertainment product designed to sell advertising, no different than the Superbowl or American Idol. That's totally fine, of course, the world needs entertainment and I like using Facebook to send pictures of my kid to her grandparents as much as the next guy. I also loved the first four or five seasons of American Idol (it's gone downhill) and have a Superbowl party every year.

I feel like some people in Silicon Valley have this weird investment in the word "innovative." They have this need to justify making tons of money while essentially working in the advertising business. So they label every little engineering advancement "innovation" utterly diluting the word. But why is that necessary? There is nothing wrong about working in the advertising industry, or making a bunch of money selling people entertainment.

But, comparing Facebook to IBM (or even Microsoft) is absolutely laughable. IBM is pushing the boundaries of semiconductor manufacturing, designing new CPUs, building artificial intelligence, etc.

Google does innovate (Glass, cars, etc), but they don't make any money doing so.

[roin]

You may have some specific conditions for what you consider innovation, but Facebook is a service that dramatically changes how a significant percentage of humans spend their free time, and the implications are huge. Connecting with people, sharing information, etc. The fact that the business model is backed by advertising isn't relevant. By your definition I wonder if TV, film, or even the printing press is innovative.

American Idol was also innovative, and whatever group created the spectacle of the Superbowl and the NFL were also likely innovators. Just because it isn't hardcore technology doesn't mean it isn't innovative.

[chrisweekly]

'There is not a single thing about Facebook that deserves the label "innovative." '

Trolling? Or merely ignorant?

See e.g. http://prestodb.io/

You might not like FB, but to claim there is not a single innovative thing they've done is laughable.

[logfromblammo]

Inventing a new way to turn dog poop into coffee cups is, technically speaking, innovative. Thus, any discussion of innovativeness is not tremendously useful without also considering the value the invention brings to market.

Part of that is necessarily clever marketing, but some portion of Facebook's value has to be real, new tech that makes a lot of people's lives better. If you can't point to any single thing, maybe it's the packaging of a lot of single things that is innovative?

[ars_technician]

opencompute is very innovating in datacenter technology

It's essentially open source for server design.

[Elepsis]

The common Hacker News definition of "innovative" is "company I like."

[lighthazard]

Facebook innovates - https://github.com/facebook

[vdaniuk]

Every single engineering advancement is innovation. By definition[0].

The fact that you are ready to discount Facebook as non-innovatine tell about your personal bias. Even if they 100% advertising business it still requires lots of innovation. Including the task of capturing, analyzing and presenting the largest social graph to hundreds million people. And Facebook has significant open source contributions. Sure, it doesn't produce so many engineering advancements as Microsoft, but saying the comparison is laughable is simply wrong.

And of course, Google makes money innovating. AdWords and AdSense,arguably, are the most innovative ad platforms on the planet. You may dislike advertising all you want but don't change the meaning of words ('innovation') to rant about business models based on advertising.

[0]"Innovation is the application of better solutions that meet new requirements, inarticulated needs, or existing market needs." - Wikipedia

[rayiner]

I'm perfectly happy to operate under a definition of "innovation" in which Facebook is considered innovative alongside Survivor and American Idol. But I don't think that was the operative definition of the person I was replying to, or the definition that is usually intended when talking about how patents are stifling innovation.

[twistedpair]

Props for using a Wikipedia cite. At least when I was in school, you couldn't cite an encyclopedia as a reference, and that was when they cost money and were written by scholars. So lets look at the patent doctrine [0].

The definition of an invention by the USPTO is not simply something new. In a nutshell, it needs to be novel (no prior art), non-obvious to someone skilled in the art, and not a simple combination of existing things. Making a new algo or something run and scale faster is not inherently an invention. Sadly, while a ban algorithms (mathematical forumulae) and the non-obvious requirement are in the patent doctrine, the courts have set precedents in the recent decades to allow the current software patents despite the classic interpretation that these things were not patentable.

Indeed folks are taking this current contorted patent doctrine and conflating "invention" with "innovation", bestowing on their innovative new WordPress theme the greatness of an actual patent. Sadly, much of the difficult stuff going on in the startups would not have been a patent in 1950. But if we want to focus on the "feel good" version of invention, where it's new to you, then there is a ton of "innovation" going on. FB might be scaling and have a ton of technology to do so, but the net result of being able to share cat videos faster than a decade ago isn't pushing civilization forward the same way the killer patents of the 20th century did.

[0] http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/mpep/mpep-9015-appx-l.h...

[marincounty]

I completely agree about Facebook. I thought by now Facebook might morph into something really useful, but no--there just another big, dumb company. A company who felt Snapchat was worth 3 billion dollars. (Yes--I know they played a part in the Arab Spring. I think even the genius in the hoodie was surprised by what took place?).

[randartie]

Based on your comment, I feel like you value tangible things as much more innovative.