Does Your Organization Need To Emulate the YouTube Instant Creator?

YouTube Instant creator Feross Aboukhadijeh, created his amazing solution in just under three hours of coding, and then worked on the UI for a few more hours and the next day posted his work to his Facebook page. If you haven't already done so, take a look at YouTube Instant, it's an application that solves the problem of effectively and instantly searching YouTube in a fun way. What's better than starting to type your search term and have YouTube Instant almost immediately load the closest corresponding videos while you are honing down your search term? It's really fun and ties the beauty of media with fun and almost instant feedback.

While this is an amazing feat there's actually a bigger question that we must all ask ourselves as a result of Aboukhadijeh's YouTube Instant - how long would it take your software company to create something similar? Could your company really do this in a couple of days, or would the typical bureaucracy of most companies make a 2-3 month or longer timeframe more realistic?

Is your company conducive to "in the trench" software development or is everything so process oriented that you could never come close to such an achievement in a time-frame anywhere similar to this?

My takeaway from this is that while you can and should have effective process and structure in your company you should also allow for rogue guerilla software project so as not to stagnateyour staff's creativity and vision. If you're not already doing this then you stand a good chance of having someone else create your "next great thing" and having it to market much sooner than you.