[a_p]

> We were once great at innovating in the physical world...But recently, software (and mostly Internet software) has been the focus of innovation, and its importance is probably still underestimated—there are compounding effects to how it’s changing the world that we’re only now beginning to see...But innovation in the physical world (besides phones and computers) over the same time period has been less impressive.

Actually, I would argue that the opposite is true. Software hasn't really had any important innovations (using David Wheeler's definition, which is from a CS/EE perspective, and which is linked to every couple of months on HN[1]). The software required to run a smartphone isn't significantly different than the software needed to run a similar application on a desktop. On the other hand, the hardware on a smartphone now and a desktop from the 90s is different. We take hardware advances like reliable capacitive touchscreens and maybe this storage advance linked to on HN today [2], and Moore's "Law" for granted, but "putting more transistors in a circuit" and increased hardware capabilities were the bottleneck to producing today's technology, not new software techniques.

The reason that people associate software with innovation is because it has become the latest tech buzzword. When a word is overused in this manner, it is hard to have a conversation about it because the definition has been degraded to include pretty much anything. The granting of patents to trivial software ideas gives companies a claim to innovation that they do not deserve.

Rayiner's comment on this thread:

> The long-hanging fruit is gone, and all that's left is hard engineering.

will soon be true for computer hardware, and eventually "Moore's Law" will be broken. When software does not become significantly faster each release cycle, it will be more apparent that hardware is responsible for today's advances as opposed to software.

[1] http://www.dwheeler.com/innovation/innovation.html

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5911347

[sliverstorm]

When a word is overused in this manner, it is hard to have a conversation about it because the definition has been degraded to include pretty much anything.

When you can picture someone using the word against itself, I'd say that's when the bell tolls.

E.g., "Our greatest innovation for this product has been not worrying about innovation, and focusing on incremental improvement"