“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”
Leonardo da Vinci

We’re Web 2.0 fanatics/geeks - we admire the simple innovations. Yesterday, David stumbled upon a site called 25lines.com that promulgates simplicity. The idea is this: Create whatever you want in 25 lines of code. Just code. No library assets, nothing loaded in. Just code. This requires a resourceful and innovative mindset. Just see what this guy came up with (Alvaro Videla ported it to JavaScript, perhaps someone can port this to J2ME?). He won the contest in December. Kudos to Marius from Muzui! This would be a great project for job interviews - make them create whatever they want in 25 lines of code. Often, this will show how disciplined and creative, the person is.

This week an interesting discussion broke out on innovation. It started when Om Malik wrote a Tweet saying  “think google has no big ideas. this morning they announced a to-do-list. FGS. [For God Sake] Remember the Milk MUCH better.” This ‘invoked the spirit’ of Matt Cutts, Ol’ Google vet, who indignantly replied with a series of comments in his Friendfeed, now posted on his blog. Subsequently, Om Malik wrote a post about his perspective on Google’s big ideas.

As the opinionated people we are, we disagree with both Cutts and Malik. It’s not about incremental versus radical innovation, big ideas versus small ideas, corporations versus start-ups. They both assume that big ideas are huge, sophisticated projects. But fact is that the domino effect that Google started, came from search in its simplest form and ended up disrupting a whole industry.

Similarly, when Sydney (Australia) was building its opera house the structure of the shells was a puzzle for the engineers and mathematicians. They made complicated mathematical formulas and scientific test but simply couldn’t get their heads around it. Finally, Utzon came up with a simple solution: He replaced the original elliptical shells with a design based on complex sections of a sphere. Utzon says his design was inspired by the simple act of peeling an orange: the 14 shells of the building, if combined, would form a perfect sphere. (Wikipedia) He took a simple form to solve a complex problem.

An idea isn’t big because of the amount of resources it takes to actualize it - an idea is big when it has widescale consequences to society, technology, or culture. And often these ideas are very simple in their nature. Google should headhunt people like Marius Heil who can create a game in 25 lines… that’s a big idea!