More on Microsoft and invention

From the Talkbacks to yesterday's post, it's clear that there is a lot of disagreement over what, exactly, constitutes innovation (or invention). My original intent for today's installment was to talk about the area of "innovation" unique to Microsoft. After I wrote the new preamble, however, I had a 1200 word blog post, which is simply too long by anyone's standards. So, I've broken it into two parts.  Part one (today's segment) is a definition of invention.  Part two is a description of an area of inventiveness unique to Microsoft. That final segment will appear tomorrow, unless I find something else which needs to be said on the subject (queueing evil laugh track).

Invention is the process of applying abstract ideas and existing technology to the satisfaction of real-world needs in new and interesting ways.  That's semantically dense, so let's think about some examples.

Thomas Edison invented the phonograph. He didn't create theories of electricity, or acoustic theory, or many of the other abstract ideas which served as the foundation upon which the phonograph was built. He also didn't invent technologies used to forge the metal parts used in his invention, or (probably) the technology used to create the wax drums upon which he put his initial recordings. He pulled it all together, however, to create something that hadn't been seen before.

That's an example of a "big" invention, or, at least an easily identifiable one. Now, imagine that the phonograph was a part of a massive system for transmitting audio signals over long distances, recording them, providing answering-machine capability, etc. Also imagine that this other technology existed prior to the "invention" of the phonograph. Last, imagine the phonograph is ONLY useful within the context of this larger framework.

That adapted example is a better approximation of the nature of most inventions. Most inventions are a small piece in a larger puzzle. They are the unusually shaped LEGO in the LEGO house, the unique alloy girder used at the core of a new skyscraper in San Francisco, the shape of a wing on a new version of a fighter jet. They are "incremental" innovation in the sense they are a small piece of a larger whole. Most invention falls into that category, a fact compounded in the billion-LEGO playset that is modern software development.

Remember, however, that invention is all about taking existing ideas and applying them in some new and innovative way to the satisfaction of real world needs (either existing or created by the invention). That definition does not limit "invention" to simply technological invention. Innovations in business process are ALSO inventive, in that they are an integral part of satisfying human wants and needs. That's why I agree with No_Axe_To_Grind that Dell is "inventive." Granted, they are assembling technology they did not invent, but the manner in which they have made assembly more efficient and the process by which they have lowered costs for consumers through their unique method of direct sales is just as inventive as a new design of hard drive that boosts drive capacity.

Microsoft invents lots of things from a pure technology standpoint. I've intimated that many such things exist in IPTV (the Microsoft division I work in), but I consider the Tablet PC (a form factor that hadn't been tried before), .NET generics which escape the problem of code bloat found in C++ templates, and custom SQL aggregation functions written in .NET that are a feature of the next version of SQL Server (Yukon) to be good examples.

Microsoft's unique area of innovation, however, isn't technology-specific, though it is certainly related to it.

More on that tomorrow.