Random thoughts

Innovation. A word that gets thrown around a lot these days. Used to describe anything from software to teaspoons. But why do we do it? Why do we feel the need to innovate? Is it arrogance? Is it fame? Money?

No.

It is because we can. It’s because it is human nature to be unsatisfied and unsettling. We don’t do it because we need to. We do it because we can’t resist. The world was working just fine without cars or microwave ovens. But we owe our current lifestyle to the few select that thought that it would be cool to be able to move around faster or warm your leftovers in 20 seconds.

But the thing with innovation is that it is tricky. It takes courage to innovate. You must be able to stand up and continue after you fall. Innovation is a game. You create something that challenges the status quo and you wait for its next move.

Opera Unite is one of these things. A venture into the unknown. The most accurate description of Unite is the one that the guys at Opera came up with. The Internet’s unfulfilled promise. If you take a step back and examine the history of the web it starts to make a lot more sense.

The first web browser, called WorldWideWeb, was not only a web browser, it was also a “web editor”. So Tim Berners-Lee, the guy who designed the web as we know it, envisioned it as a place where, not only you can find information, but also affect it. For reasons unknown the idea of a read/write web died out. But so strong was the need to communicate, that the concept emerged along with Web 2.0. It is easy now for anyone to share their thoughts and family photos through a multitude of social networking sites. But you have to go through the gatekeepers. You see, only if you are willing to trust your personal information in the hands of strangers you can experience the web as it was intended.

Opera is the first meaningful attempt to give the power back to the users. Like every innovation, it is a bold move and as such it faces the danger of fading into obscurity. Will it succeed? Frankly, I don’t know. I sure hope so.