I started reading Sketching User Experiences (thanks Amazon Prime!), and I’ve already found a quote that’s really resonated:

In terms of stifling innovation, good ideas are far more dangerous than bad ones.  They take hold, assume momentum, and therefore result in inertia.  Consequently, they are hard to displace, even when they are well past their prime.

Bill Buxton put his finger on a theme that’s been bugging me recently: some designs that have been “good enough” have stuck with us for a long time, with little follow-on innovation.

First, the iPhone has showed us innovation was still possible with phones and mobile devices.  We were stuck in a design box, and Apple has showed one way to get out of it (e.g. make the screen as large as you can, dispense with buttons, have rich gesture interaction with the screen itself, etc.)

Second, what about Outlook and email readers in general?  Outlook has been good enough for he past decade or so, and nothing has really changed with the way we read email.  Isn’t there a fundamentally better way for me to deal with 100-200 messages/day?

Finally, if you’re a software designer, you should read the Story of Improv, about the team at Lotus (led by Pito Salas) that was designing beyond the standard cell-based spreadsheet model.  It’s a reminder to keep innovating — don’t accept the status quo.