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Comment by tybris | Hacker News Reader

There are many innovative companies like Philips, Amazon.com, Yahoo!, Sun, formerly AT&T, but Apple and Microsoft are not among them. Their core competencies are quality and marketing. There's way more money in that.

Apple did not invent the phone, mp3 player, video player, application store, etc. They just perfected and skillfully crafted hypes around them. Microsoft did not invent the Office suite, IDE's or the hardware acceleration layer, but they did perfect and deploy them through aggressive business strategies.

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>Apple did not invent the phone, mp3 player, video player, application store, etc. They just perfected and skillfully crafted hypes around them. Microsoft did not invent the Office suite, IDE's or the hardware acceleration layer, but they did perfect and deploy them through aggressive business strategies.

Is your claim that a company must invent something from whole cloth to be "innovative"?

No, but that's not how they run their business. You shouldn't expect Microsoft or Apple to be innovative, you should expect them to make a better product than everyone else and/or market it better than everyone else.

Amazon.com did invent Cloud Computing, Philips did invent the CD, Sun did invent Java, Toyota did invent the hybrid, AT&T did invent the cell phone, Xerox did invent the GUI. Those are the companies that run on innovation.

"Philips did invent the CD"

A refinement on the laserdisc.

"Sun did invent Java"

A refinement on C, C++, and Smalltalk.

"Xerox did invent the GUI"

A refinement on Doug Engelbart's work at SRI. (Edit: Though many of the researchers working for him later went to PARC, I find no evidence that Engelbart himself ever did.)

Now here's the real question. If inventing a new type of laserdisc that's five inches wide is innovation, why isn't inventing a GUI-based computer system that costs half as much as a Star and a third as much as a Lisa? If inventing a new object oriented language with C style syntax is an innovation, why isn't inventing a smartphone with a multitouch screen and unprecedented amounts of storage space?

Doug Engelbart was working at PARC (Xerox PARC).

I think you have crossed to arguing about words.

What do you mean innovation.

"Apple did not invent the phone, mp3 player, video player, application store, etc."

That doesn't mean they aren't innovative. It's easy to invent the MP3 player. It's hard to invent the MP3 player that people actually want to use. That doesn't suck.

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