There is one sure fire way to make the normally quiet and geeky Bill Gates a little peeved — question his company’s record of "capitalizing on the innovation of others." According to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s Todd Bishop, that’s exactly what a blogger, Jonathan Snook, did at a small meeting between the online-citizen journalists of the tech world and the founder/honcho of Microsoft at the company’s headquarters in Redmond, Washington.
This line of questioning, which essentially accused Microsoft of copying other people’s inventions, sent the bespectacled founder into a tirade about how Microsoft does all the stupid things first, and that other companies, learning from Microsoft’s mistakes, are able to build perfect versions of a particular product or service (and subsequently get the credit for being innovators).
Gates declared that what Microsoft does is the baseline for the entire industry, and whatever it doesn’t do is the innovation. And by that definition everyone else is innovating. That’s a pretty innovative, if not a little sarcastic, save/explanation.
But seriously, Gates cites IPTV and tablet computers as two areas in which Microsoft is leading the pack. "Is anyone else doing tablet computers?" he asks.
We understand Gate’s being upset, and he makes some good points in his sarcastic rant about everyone borrowing from each other (with particular attention paid to Apple of course). But we do have to question some of his claims.
