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Technology Stocks : MSFT Internet Explorer vs. NSCP Navigator -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: cheryl williamson who wrote (14274)	11/19/1997 4:25:00 PM
From: Reginald Middleton	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 24154

VBA is innovative. I don;t see any other Web servers with crash protection. I could probably go on, but why should I? Like I stated to Charles, MSFT is a FOR PROFIT company. Therefore they want to make money. Companies DO NOT get paid for making innovations. Do you want proof? Let us examine your list. Virtual Memory Wang - innovated itself right out of the number spot in its category by missing the paradigm shift of its industry. ISAM IBM - did the same thing as Wang, too busy innovating and not enough time paying attention. PC networking Novell - Uh Huh, from a monoploy to an also ran in less than two years. Too bad they can't sell as well as they innovate. PC spreadsheets Visicalc (I think) - YOu have to think about it because while they were busy making the spreadsheet, the reat of the industry was busy SELLING improved copies of the spreadsheet. Now compare these companies to MSFT. It appears to me that the company that discovers these technologies are inventive, but they are far from innovative if they can not improve on them and make money form them. Making money is the reason why the for profit companies invent the technology in the first place. If anything, the companies that improve on the technology to the point of capturign dominant market share and profiting are the truly inovative ones. As a subtle reminder, the inventors of a technology are rarely the ones that reap the financial benefits from it. This is due to allocation of resources. Those that start from where the inventor left off are in a far better position to turn that invention into a stream of cashflows. Hence Visicalc led to 1-2-3 which led to Excel. Let us not forget "PC Windowing Apple" - this is not true, for they got the idea from someone else, but look at where Apple is any way. They failed to commoditize their product, hence had market share snatched away.

To: cheryl williamson who wrote (14274)	11/19/1997 4:46:00 PM
From: Charles Hughes	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 24154

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