A former work colleague of mine used to say, perhaps a little too often, that “Everyone’s got a price.” Though it’s been years since I last worked with him, I find myself reminded of that every so often.
What I came to learn, though, is not that everyone has a price, but everything – doesn’t matter what it is, everyone and everything has their price, that will be paid in the end.
And so it is with innovation. I’ve come to realise that even innovation has a price that must be paid, that for every single thing I examine and try and improve upon, a price comes for that view.
It’s almost sad in a way that it’s the case, that looking to take something and make it better comes with a cost, but that’s life, I guess.
The price of innovation is restlessness, of being unsettled – and even of being a perfectionist. That’s the price I find myself paying for innovation, but as will become clear, that’s often worth paying, and it’s just the main – not the only – cost.
I find myself restless a lot. I can’t settle, unless I’m working on something – I’ve been described as a workaholic in the past, for example. Even something like watching television can be a struggle at times due to its passive nature – I’m not interacting with it, I’m not making something happen.
I’m always subconsciously looking at how to improve things, and it’s a burden at times, because you get to the point where you can’t ever just accept that something is what it is, and that it’s satisfactory being what it is. Hence, the point about being a perfectionist – that’s the ‘vibe’ of innovation taken to its extreme, where you take the view that it must be perfect before you’re happy with it, that continual tweaks, gouges, polishes and buffs are necessary to keep innovating.
It can get to the point where tunnel vision sets in, where micro-innovations creep in, such that you spend more time/energy/resources trying to innovate than any benefit you’d ever get back from it.
That’s one of the hardest things I found about my position as a self-declared innovator – knowing when to stop paying the price of innovation. I’m happy to put up with the restlessness and the unsettled feelings, because these fade away when working at innovation, and of course the good feeling of completing something innovative pushes the jaded feelings back. But micro-innovation and its cousin micro-optimisation often drag you down into a rut from which it is hard to escape: the price becomes too much.
In the projects I’m involved with currently, I’ve been watching some cases of micro-optimisation, where hours have been spent in rooting out very minor performance changes, minor changes that ultimately made a difference of a staggeringly small magnitude. The same time could have been spent reviewing much bigger issues in workflow, and achieved much greater savings than would ever be recovered from even many micro-optimisations; in short, I actually believe the person involved is buried too deeply in tunnel vision, and ignoring the bigger picture – I guess for them, the price is worth paying.
It’s times like this when you have to set goals. No just “Improve to nth degree” but “Improve X attribute by Y amount”.
Or be satisfied with “I’ll make a note and do it better — next time”
I tend to be the same way, but not so much ‘Innovation’ as ‘Elaborate Constructs’.
Take the Preview Machine at work. I began with movie previews, then added some game previews, then some music videos. After that, instructional/educational videos and infomercial-like stuff. Somewhere in there I added the “Monthly previews with DVD/BR Cover art” slideshows.
Things like that tend to expand until they collapse under their own weight (1 upping myself till it becomes unwieldy) or are stopped by an outside force (DAMN YOU SONY!)
*nods* Otherwise you’re forever chasing the ever-smaller improvement and the law of diminishing returns kicks in.
As for elaborate constructs, I can certainly see that; I’ve seen so many software packages over the years do just that, though invariably through attempting innovation rather than being elaborate for the sake of being elaborate.
But it’s still a symptom of this – ever trying to beat yourself or improve what’s there, and often without a goal in mind. In the case of the Preview Machine, was there a goal to be reached, other than doing something cool?
A few general aims.
1) Keep it relevant .
A new release yesterday becomes today’s $13.88 and tomorrow’s ‘maybe in the bargain bin’.
2)Keep it interesting.
If you’re working 4-8 hour shifts at least 4 days a week, you’ll memorize a 20 min selection fairly quickly. Not only that, I see some customers more often than some people that work there.
3) Make it informative.
In removing the unfun, I tried to get the Release Date slideshow in every 15 min or so. It beats pointing out the sign 3-5 times a day.
The other goal was to try and fill a 4GB Flash card, then once I had more than enough to fill it, tweak the video settings to get more total time..
Some good goals, and I get the distinct impression that while it lasted, it was quite an interesting way of keeping it fun
Getting back to the original topic a bit – the ‘price of innovation’. When tweaking the vids for size, I *wouldn’t* go back and re-save the older ones. Even if they were 4-5x larger than they could have been.
The TV in question showed only a marginal improvement when set to 720p and more often ran at 480 – the default when the device turns on when power is restored (it shuts off automatically at night, and during the day when the alarm is shut of to change stock).
It was a ‘going forward’ improvement as redoing the old titles grew more irrelevant as the weeks went by. In most cases, it would have been faster to re-find a copy of it on YouTube rather than converting a 1080 vid down. It’s a case where the process needed an overhaul – naming getting them from YT in the first place vs. Official High Rez Trailer sites.
If a 720 copy was available on YT, I did go with that, GIGO and all that, but ‘sufficient for the application’ – which is the phrase that sometimes is overlooked. It would have been a different story if the purpose was to highlight the qualities of the TVs or the advantages of Blu-Ray (the latter of which the current Sony previews try to do, and fail miserably).
Yeah, resaving the videos just to gain a short term benefit is probably a step too far, knowing that they would be phased out in short order; a form of planned obsolescence as it were, and with the ability to improve upon it for the next iteration.
GIGO may be true of most computational operations, but here it isn’t; there’s no point – as you found – in adding more detail that can’t be used effectively.
As far as Blu-Ray previews, very few of them are particularly effective anyway, and when they are effective, it’s usually not because of the quality of the Blu-Ray itself, from what I’ve seen, but the deviousness of the store selling it – I know one store that when it normally offers comparisons, it has a Sony TV with Sony BR player, playing a BR disc, with HDMI cable, and the same player connected to other TVs through composite or SCART cabling which cannot produce the same crispness of image.