Steve Ballmer: We won't be out-innovated by Apple anymore
networkworld.com
networkworld.com
When you spend all your time talking about one competitor, you're admitting they're beating you. Market leaders don't call our their competitors by name. (See: Coke, Pepsi.)
You won't win the race if you're focused on what your competitors are doing. Focus on the finish line and just get there first.
I still argue that Apple is far less "innovative" than it takes obsessive interest in the packaging of already done things and has the greatest marketing arm of any corporation out there.
"but you can't deny that the man [Ballmer] has passion" Maybe, but I don't think its for interesting product as much as a belligerently competitive business streak. That isn't a value judgement as much as an observation of character. Jobs was a bastard but one driven on what was produced. Ballmer is also a bastard but about as in the box a thinker as one gets for the industry.
If MS can even put up a viabe fight it will be some time in, and will be more to grab the
Already done for whom? If you buy a new product, and it has a feature you've never had before, it's new to you. Like anything else, this isn't subjective: you can count the number of people that have a given feature in their phones.
There is a world of difference between someone doing something new in a lab somewhere vs. someone building something that I can actually use to improve my life. The earlier is only a mere promise of things to come, while the latter is something I can actually count on.
In the context of a computer company, innovation means delivering excellent (and therefore original & novel) design, making the most of the latest technology available. Before the other companies do (if they ever do).
Tl;dr: let's dispense with the fiction that innovation stops in a research lab. It doesn't! (I should know because I work in a research lab. What we produce is only barely tangible, and it's up to others to actually take it somewhere.)
In Apple's was a complete port of their main OS to an ARM platform ready and tested for years.
The board should have been called to account why the NT kernel hadn't been continually tested on ARM, leaving them to build WP7 on CE (but making it incompatible with CE apps due to the off screen buffer replacing GWES/Gdi) and the abandon the product.
Surface looks great, the public stance is Ballmer owning it to the shareholders, failure should come with consequences at that level.
Is technology somehow good for its own sake, or is it good because it makes individual people better off? My view is the latter. Therefore, the answer to the question of who should get moral credit for bringing a technology to life is: everyone that had a consciously played part in making it so that person X could have thing Y in their lives.
I am making a distinction between participants. What you are saying implies that its those because it makes something "better off" but I could say that about a lot of things that are not novel either (i.e. vaccination of poor populations that can't otherwise afford it), so innovation doesn't necessarily mean (or in my mind have to be) marketable to large numbers (i.e. novel new treatment for a niche disease).
Innovation != "bring a technology to life" (take it to market), its proving/crafting something truly novel.
Whether it makes it to wider usage doesn't make it any less novel, nor does successfully selling non-novel ideas at scale make that success any less valuable. I simply refuse to conflate the two.
“It’s sad to say, but the science and technology are the easy part,” Williams said at the recent conference. “Development costs at least 10 times as much as research, and commercialization costs 10 times as much as development. So in the end, research — which we think is the most important part — is only 1 percent of the effort.”
"Most important"? That contradicts the rest of what he said in the very same quote!
Every link in the chain from a new idea to a happy customer is important.
Don't get me wrong. Surface looks good. But what is the impression after a week of use? Does the cheaper model compete effectively with the $400 iPad2? Does the more expensive model compete with an Ultrabook?
Really. Innovation is about competitiveness as much as ideas. And if the Surface is over priced without being as useful, then Ballmer's comments are embarrassing.
Since, of course, there is a near 0% chance of them not being out-innovated by apple in every field in which they compete.
I thought the standard line on Apple was that they
don't innovate, they just take existing product
ideas and make them "pretty".
If he never stated it, then how does this "standard line" relate to this article? Do people who state this "standard line" generally hold a high opinion of Ballmer's conclusions and must now reconcile their opinion of Ballmer's conclusions with their "standard line"?
Or do you simply want to use any opportunity to attack strawmen who believe that everyone who buys Apple's products are stupid and gullible sheeple?
But you did get the third part right, about the sheeple...p