Schumpeter’s theory of creative destruction is kind of like evolution…it is amazingly difficult to directly observe during the process, but the aftereffects are impossible to ignore (if you believe in science!)  So yesterday I got all excited when a little bit of creative destruction reared its little evolutionary head in the localisation industry.

By way of introduction, first lets talk a little bit about localisation.  The industry as it exists today is fairly young, perhaps 30-40 years old and with a few exceptions (PCs, the Internet, the Web) has been relatively devoid of radical innovations.  So what we have today is a lazy industry that has for the most part relied on incremental innovation and is primed for displacement.

I was at a conference a few months ago and participated in a group discussion exploring the future of localisation.  During that discussion I suggested that the entire industry was under significant threat from Facebook based on the work they were doing at the time on crowd-sourced translation of their platform.  Most of the traditional industry representatives in the room discounted the idea citing performance and quality control issues.  Too bad they hadn’t heard of Foster’s S-curve discontinuities, because if they had perhaps they wouldn’t have been so quick to dismiss a temporarily inferior technology (B) when their own technology (A) was approaching a prolonged plateau.

Which brings us to the topic of todays post. On Tuesday Facebook announced they were opening up their crowd-sourced localisation platform (Facebook Connect) to the entire world. And funny enough they actually have patented the technology. Regardless of whether the patent will hold up under scrutiny, traditional localisation players need to accept that the rules of the game are changing.  They only need to look at companies like Polaroid, Montgomery Ward and Xerox, which for a period dominated their respective industries only to topple to smaller more agile rivals that were able to out-innovate lazy industry incumbents.

~Steve