According to a blog story from the Boston Phoenix, “Google abandons master-plan to archive the world’s newspapers“: Google told partners in its News Archive project that it would cease accepting, scanning, and indexing microfilm and other archival material from newspapers, and was instead focusing its energies on “newer projects that help the industry, such as Google One Pass, a platform that enables publishers to sell content and subscriptions directly from their own sites.” While the ending of any innovative project, especially one that shares historical information with the public is always sad news, there is a positive side to this. The positives mentioned in theRead More →

I’ve stolen the title of this post from Shawn Rider’s article “Why Nintendo Gets It” because the title explains the whole point of this post and because of the parallels between Google and Nintendo. Nintendo gets it because they understand that games are about playability more so than technological innovation and because they understand that innovation can beĀ  evolutionary or sustaining as well as disruptive. Evolutionary or sustaining innovations build incrementally on existing structures, but disruptive innovation changes the whole landscape. The 8-bit NES to the Super Nintendo was an evolutionary or sustaining innovation, largely technological, but that technology enabled longer and deeper games. TheRead More →