My post about Google's view of Innovation = Vision + Constraints, led to rebuttals by James Governor and one by David Heinemeier challenging how constrained Google development really is.
A comment by Chui Tey on James' blog, presents the issue from a consumer's POV. He calls Google an "attention broker". We all have limited attention. Google has helped dramatically lowered attention needs for research. Google Maps for directions etc.
Extending that to the enterprise, vendors would do well to define innovation in terms of stretching customer budgets. The average Fortune 500 CIO has a $ 50 m a year budget. Optimizing that more requires much more constrained thinking than if you are CTO at Microsoft with a $ 6 b R&D budget or Oracle with a $ 1.5 b budget. Constraining how much your systems integration partners charge to implement, how much pain your next release causes - are just as important.
We can argue about how constrained or not Google's development methods are. In the end the consumer's constraints are what matter more. Attention or budgets. I do not hear too many complaints from CIOs about Google - yet.
