Hi Mary,
Look at how the last round of innovation got started. IBM spent tons of money on R&D. They had Nobel Prize winning scientists on their payroll. They had beautiful facilities (I visited a number of them). But it was Steve Jobs and Bill Gates that took them to school and made the Internet possible.
Let's not so easily give away the accomplishments of others... <g>
It was the (collectively speaking) universities of the United States that developed the Internet, almost totally funded by DARPA. IBM, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates had nothing to do with the development of the Internet. Even the nation's leading community colleges were on the Internet long before Mr. Gates and Mr. Jobs saw any commercial potential for the Internet.
Where Mr. Gates (and Mr. Jobs) did excel though, was in realizing the potential for small, home computers. To this end, Mr. Gates was able to acquire DOS from IBM. The latter saw no potential in this "toy" computer language, while Mr. Gates envisioned a vast market of home computer users, deploying their computers for such tasks as financial record keeping and entertainment (much like Alien Invaders or Pong, not the relatively sophisticated games we see today).
The networking of home computers via the Internet was a vision of the colleges. Very few viable commercial leaders saw any real potential usage for the Internet, and viewed it as a university-based "distraction". It was the United States military that envisioned the usage of the Internet to share information (initially communications) between distant locations, and it was the universities that made those communications possible.
The commercialization of the Internet didn't occur until the early '90s, long after the initial groundwork was completed. What Jobs and Gates brought to the table was money, which enabled large-scale deployment of applications across a large body of home-based users. It wasn't until after Microsoft (and to a lesser extent) Apple Computers made their hardware Internet-friendly that other commercial enterprises saw any value to the Internet. Long after colleges and universities had "home pages", and long after languages like HTML (and GUIs) were developed did the rest of commerce jump into the Internet fray, more so from an irrational fear of being left behind rather than any innovative effort on their part.
Even though some universities in Europe and Asia were involved in the initial stages of the development of the Internet, most of them regarded their participation as a curiosity rather than as an innovative development. They simply failed to recognize any potential. Remember that back in the early design and development stages, small home computers were a novelty, definitely not the norm, and most definitely not popular with anyone other than computer "geeks". Remember bulletin boards? They were the dial-in precursor to the networked Internet.
So, while we can heap reams of accolades upon Bill Gates and Steve Jobs (and Mr. Wozniak sp???) for the development of home-based computer systems, collectively they are an afterthought in the development of the Internet.
KJC |
