You know an article is going to run downhill quickly when it starts off like this:

Innovation: it's the ultimate source of advantage, the undisputed heavyweight champion of the economic ring. Innovation is what every organization should be ruthlessly pursuing, right? Wrong. I'd like to advance a hypothesis: awesomeness is the new innovation.

Reading further, it seems that Umair Haque's entire definition of "awesome" stems from his exposure to (and liking of) Apple products. What he hasn't quite figured out is that Apple is a niche vendor; they sell to the high end, completely ignoring the low end. That's a deliberate strategy on their part, and a profitable one - but not every potential customer in the land is able to buy at that high end.

Which is why people do actually go into Best Buy to buy the lower end mp3 players. Or why those of us with more brains than cash price shop for USB drives between Amazon, Target, and Best Buy - and don't even bother looking at the same product at the Apple Store.

The article is worse than that though; Umair seems to be stuck in a place where everything that could be invented has been invented already:

Innovation relies on obsolescence. Innovation was a concept pioneered by the great Joseph Schumpeter. And to subscribe to it requires us to accept his theory of creative destruction. Gales of innovation make yesterday's goods and services obsolete. Yet, that, in turn, means that the price of innovation is recession and depression. The business cycle might never be vanquished - but it is getting more vicious with every decade. In an interdependent world, obsolescence is what's obsolete.

So... should we return to the IBM view of the world circa 1960, where "perhaps 6 mainframes, total" are needed in the world? Or shall we hold onto our Macbooks and Netbooks? Should we all be happy with dialup rather than WiFi? I mean heck, all that copper is still there, and lots of poor phone company techs are losing work due to that innovation. Maybe we need to abandon electronic bill pay as well, so that the legions of underemployed (and likely soon to be unemployed) mail carriers with nothing to do can go back to carrying piles of bills and correspondence? After all, do we really need email?

The world Umair wants to live in would be a gray, unhappy place. Personally, I'd rather have the innovation - because without the innovation of MP3 players, you never get to the awesome of iPod Touches and iPhones.