Bill Gates on Innovation

So a few days back, I wrote a post attacking a piece that talked about stifled innovation.

And I stood up and defended a lot of MS work. Well, lo and behold, here's Mr. Gates himself singing some of the same tunes: Bill Gates on Innovation | WebProNews (Printable Version):

Anyway, tablet computers, is there somebody else out there doing tablet computers? IPTV, is there somebody else out there doing — by definition what we do is the baseline. Everything Microsoft does is the baseline, and what we don’t do, that’s what’s innovative I guess. (Laughter.) And by that definition the other guys do all the innovative things.

It's obviously a slightly different take, but he's really got his finger on something: MS generally doesn't get credit when it does new stuff. So for the most part we look at MS and just see all of the common, everyday old crufty stuff that we figure is there.

Look, I'm not a Vista nut, but I also haven't counted MS out of the software world.