"yeah but the large companies create the talent that then goes off and creates."
There is not much support for this claim.
Marc Andreesen was a physics experiment programmer at a university when he wrote Mosaic (with one or two other students). No big company was involved.
Bob Frankston and Dan Bricklin, who did Visicalc, were not working for large companies.
Bill Gates was a student at Harvard, with Paul Allen.
Even Wozniak and Jobs were not supported by large companies. Woz was a relatively low-level engineer at H-P, doing work completely unrelated to his hobbies (blue boxes, etc.). Jobs was a technician...for Atari, IIRC, but possibly for H-P for a while. (A friend of mine went to high school with Wozniak, and in fact designed part of the Apple II. He decided not to join Apple as it was forming. An engineer I worked with at Intel had taught electronics to Woz in high school.)
What other inventions/breakthroughs should we look at? The first kit computer? That was Altair, and neither the designer at Altair (whose name escapes me, but he's a big name) nor the editors at "Popular Electronics" were company people.
How about Gary Kildall, inventor of CP/M and, arguably, predecessors of MS-DOS. A professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey.
Or what about Michael Dell? A student at UT, operating out of his dorm room. (I bought one of his first hard disk kits, circa 1983-4, when his company was called "PCs Unlimited.)
What about GUIs? This one I will say came out of a big company, Xerox, except that where they worked, PARC, was a small, renegade operation. And most of the principles--Alan Kay, Charles Simonyi, Bob Metcalfe, etc.--came from academic or hacker backgrounds. And in many cases they had already done their idea work before getting to PARC. But, of the examples listed so far, I will chalk this one up to "company-sponsored."
Yahoo. This one came out of some Stanford graduates.
Cisco. This one also came from some Stanford people (Len and Sandy) who used work they'd done on networking, with Stanford's blessing.
Sun Microsystems. Yep, Stanford students again. (McNealy was an MBA, Bechtolsheim was in engineering, Khosla was also in B-school, IIRC, and Bill Joy was from Berkeley.)
And so on. Most of the innovation in high tech in the last 20-25 years seems clearly to have come from young people: students, grad students, researchers exploiting something they'd developed earlier, etc.
I don't see much support for the notion that innovation comes from those sitting in meetings and writing progress reports for large companies.
--Tim May |
