On Sat, 11 Jun 2005 14:32:47 -0700, Warren Ockrassa wrote > I was wondering that myself. Gates hasn't invented anything, ever; > and he's never distributed or marketed anything that had never been > seen before either. He's just got excellent PR.
Permit me to disagree... Bill excels at packaging. By "packaging," I mean taking inventions and figuring out how to wrap them up so that they are very, very popular. He's focused on market share and always has been, above all else -- what will get the maximum number of people to buy product X? To me, he's the Aldus Manutius of software. The Aldine Press, as you may know, was the first great publishing company. What did they publish? Other peoples' writings -- the classics. Aldus' innovation was to create the quarto and octavo, making books appealing to larger numbers of people. In those days, it was very expensive to re-set type, so that each edition contained new errata pages... which tended to become larger than the original volumes, since there were so many bugs, er, typos, in the originals. Does this sound like Windows and service packs? Bill's form of brilliance tends to be underestimated. I used to. But having see so many Silicon Valley companies with good technology fail because they don't put much value on packaging for market share, I came to appreciate what he brings to the party. At the same time, to use a cliche, it ain't pretty. Steve Jobs' sense of aesthetics beats Bill's every time. Apple's insistence on elegance has cost it market share; Microsoft insistence on market share has cost it elegance. I'm glad we have both. Nick -- Nick Arnett [EMAIL PROTECTED] Voicemail: 408-904-7198 _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
