Cheryl, great list and reply.
To your list I would add, and request corrections from anywhere:
computer languages: DOD, US Navy, et al
the mouse: Xerox PARC
icons: Xerox PARC
the GUI: Xerox PARC
dynabook (someday to be real): Xerox PARC
Unix: Bell Labs
Winchester disk drives(what you have): IBM
Multiterminal system: DOD? NORAD?
The CD: Philips, Sony
Modern graphics systems & methods: Evans and Sutherland
The computer bus:
The computer chip:
And on and on. FTP, HTML, Java etc etc. Modern computer technology relies on hundreds of unique inventions, and tens of thousands of innovative extensions to those core inventions.
Microsoft, for all its size, longevity, and power, has yet to produce a single category of new technology. Sony usually does this every couple of years, as do others.
As far as it's innovative extensions go, at MS these are more often driven by marketing needs than technical vision, and they are as often negative as positive for the technological base overall. Witness their 'extensions' to Java, or their long standing reluctance to adhere to ANSI C standards (they only dropped the MS C 'extensions' when they had to have a pure ansi capability under C++.) Witness their lengthy, lost battle against tcp/ip on their LAN software. ETC. IMNSHO.
When MS buys a companies technology and dissassembles its creative team that is not neutral for technological progress either. When you have an R&D team that is one of the rare ones that truly has innovated or even done a great job of extending and 'productizing' an idea, buying out their product and breaking up the team is a blow to the economy and technology at large.
Some companies like to break up teams like that, because they are eliminating future competition. But you can hardly call that innovative.
Aside to Larry: MS has a well deserved reputation among engineers, scientists, and software designers as a black hole for technology. And this is engineering, BTW, not science. Lay people often get confused by this because they dont understand that engineering always has a research component. Pure science (which there is damn little of these days) is distinguished by it's lack of an explicit development component. Actually not just lay people get confused by this. Research people of all kinds are too apt to lay the mantle of science on what they are doing, when they really are research scouts for technology. It's just a status thing.
Chaz |
