I got a note from a guy a few days ago who said he had an idea that would transform Microsoft, and he wanted me to introduce him to Bill Gates. I don’t do that, but it got me thinking. Given that both Apple and Microsoft are based on ideas that came from outside, there is irony in the fact that both firms now have a massive wall between them and outside ideas. You’d think they would have worked on a way to allow ideas to flow in like water, particularly since both are taking criticism for not being innovative enough right now.
Your origin story is missing the origin. Almost everything the two Steves saw at PARC on their famous day visit wasn't invented at PARC. Personal computing as we know it was invented at MIT, by grad students working DARPA grants. The effort was called Project Athena. They came up with the mouse (distinct from the digitizing tablet), personal workstations and the desktop metaphor, wysiwyg document production, network shares, you name it. (The main thing they *didn't* invent was the WWW, which came from a government lab in Switzerland.) Modern laptops and tablets were described in a series of science fiction stories written at MIT, "The Dynabook." Some of the people who worked on Athena moved to Xerox to continue their work when the grants ended.
There's been a huge effort to rewrite the history of the computer business. The focus has been to credit the marketing companies with the inventions, and recast the moneymen as inventors. Almost everybody believes the official story of Bill Gates the self-made man. Hardly anyone knows he was born into an "old money" family. His grandfather owned the biggest bank in Washington State. His mother had the classic occupation of the moneyed class, she sat on multiple corporate boards, including IBM's law firm's. People like that don't send their kids to Harvard for an education, they send them there to network with other moneyed families, like the European royalty of the last few centuries. That was why he "dropped out," he'd made the connections he needed.
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Apple, Microsoft and the Innovation Delusion
Posted by: Rob Enderle November 25, 2013 05:00 AMI got a note from a guy a few days ago who said he had an idea that would transform Microsoft, and he wanted me to introduce him to Bill Gates. I don’t do that, but it got me thinking. Given that both Apple and Microsoft are based on ideas that came from outside, there is irony in the fact that both firms now have a massive wall between them and outside ideas. You’d think they would have worked on a way to allow ideas to flow in like water, particularly since both are taking criticism for not being innovative enough right now.