Microsoft and invention

Father, It has been two weeks since I last posted to my blog on ZDNet, which is a lie, because I did post something last Wednesday, but you know what I mean. God has surely been punishing me. I was all set to move house last Thursday, but I had the misfortune to live smack in the middle of the brush fires that have scorched the northwest part of Los Angeles over the past five days. I could stand on my front porch and see flames licking the summits of the hills that overlooked my apartment. Ash fell like snow while we moved furniture out to a truck brought by movers who were (understandably) four hours late. That meant that I got to experience what it's like to sit in LA rush hour traffic with a moving company that charges by the hour (and extra for driving time). Thankfully, they recognized that I didn't cause the brush fires, and thus shouldn't be charged extra for the wait.

That got me to thinking about the nature of invention, specifically at Microsoft. Okay, to be precise, I first started thinking about it after John Le'Brecage stated in a Talkback post that Microsoft "innovates" but does not "invent."  Essentially, he claimed that it is "well known" that Microsoft invents very little, though they "innovate" by putting it all together in a nice little package and slapping the Microsoft logo on it.

I disagree, and think Mr. Le'Brecage misunderstands the nature of "innovation" and "inventiveness" in the software industry. I also think it's an instance of a double standard. Every time someone gives me examples of the "inventive" things done in the non-Microsoft world, they appear to be the same sort of thing Microsoft does, which is move the ball further down a soccer field millions of miles long.

I know Microsoft invents quite a bit. I'm privy to many things that Microsoft has invented with respect to IPTV, and I could tell you about them, but that would probably get me bricked up in a closet in Bill Gates office and forced to live on a diet of saltines and red kool-aid. Those inventions, however, get wrapped up in a huge amount of stuff that Microsoft didn't invent.

Lest everyone suddenly point at me and go "ah-hah, see, Microsoft just steals ideas from the software industry," I'd challenge you to name a software product that is NOT built on the millions of little ideas that add up to the software environment upon which we write our software. Oracle makes a great database, but they didn't invent the concept of databases, much less stored procedures, SQL, batch processing, extensibility interfaces, or many of the technologies that go into the Oracle database. That doesn't mean Oracle doesn't invent anything. It just means that they, like EVERY entity in the software industry, are beneficiaries of a mountain of ideas without which modern software would be impossible.

Java is great technology, but did Sun invent the concept of a Virtual Machine that runs a self-describing byte stream? Firefox is a great browser, but did they invent tabbing? CORBA has some interesting attributes, but did the folks at CORBA invent the concept of component-based programming?

Within each of those products are lots of small "inventions" that are unique to them, and make once product different (and sometimes better) than another. No piece of software, however, is COMPLETELY inventive. Invention is incremental, which means you "invent" by making a slight improvement to the pile of slight improvements that stretch back to the dawn of the computer age.

That being said, there is one area that I think Microsoft is particularly inventive, and an area that open source will have a hard time matching due to the structural nature of the movement. More on that tomorrow.