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Comment by barrkel | Hacker News Reader

the Google process reminded me of the time, more than 20 years ago, when I interviewed at Microsoft. And we saw how well that worked

Microsoft from 1992 onwards? I guess we did; 20x increase in adjusted share price; in OSes alone, the release of Windows 3.1 (IMO the breakthrough move to GUI on PC, away from DOS), NT 3.1 (the original seed that grew to NT 3.51, NT 4, Win2K and all current kernels), breakthrough success of Windows 95. Looks like it worked pretty well, and made a lot of people very wealthy.

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> Looks like it worked pretty well, and made a lot of people very wealthy.

The same could be said of [Insert great company here]. The same could also be said of many criminal enterprises and a variety of industries that were abusive before regulation and reform. Conclusion: The ability to say this is of no particular worth in determining if an enterprise is or isn't evil.

EDIT: Downvoters: see grey-area's granchild comment. I find it incredible to be downvoted for observing that a statement is essentially neutral.

Evil? This isn't a conversation about making moral judgements, why are you dragging moral constructs into it?

The suffering caused by many kinds of bozo managers is evil, though there are also the depredations of well-meaning bozos.

Much of life is livelihood, so I don't think morality can be or should be precluded from such discussions.

From the article:

All of the great companies I have worked for (Apollo and Sun in various incarnations) or heard about (DEC, PARC, Bell Labs and the like) started around a core of incredible people. These were people who are or were legends in the field.

Since the article talks of success and greatness in moral or intellectual terms, the conversation should not just be a simplistic comparison of money earned... that's not a measure of greatness.

> Since the article talks of success and greatness in moral or intellectual terms, the conversation should not simply be a simplistic comparison of money earned... that's not a measure of greatness.

That's an excellent paraphrase of my evidently controversial comment. (And it's arguably better because it avoids use of the emotionally loaded word "evil.")

"Legends" is partially dependent on luck (being in the right place at the right time). The stories of the "legends" are told, in part, because of their successes. We hear the stories about the right people in the right time/place. We don't hear about the right people in the wrong place.

If you are legend material, you'll, eventually be in the right place at the right time.

Odds are wherever you are has a greater chance of being the right place.

An event horizon means there is no going back, not that you are actually in the black hole. Although Microsoft may have continued to put out innovative products and create shareholder value after 1992, the company is now run by a textbook bozo. It must be depressing for people who actually know a thing or two about computer science.

Maybe Microsoft discovered a process of getting out of an event horizon. The work they're doing right now is very interesting.

They bought Kinect, other than that I can't see any real innovation in the last 5 years. Consider there is plenty of talk about surface, but they where talking about it before the iPad came out and it's still little more than a tech demo. Bing is not bad, but it's interface is on par with Duck Duck Go and hardly the 'revolution' in search they were hoping for.

That said, they do seem to keep refining things and that's a path to great products. But, innovation is more than just doing a mash-up that meets everyone's expectations without any 'wow' factor.

>They bought Kinect

And Apple bought FingerWorks, which means there was no real innovation from Apple in iPhone multitouch technology, same with Siri. Or does it?

There is a lot to getting research technology into a usable, affordable and marketable form than just buying it and copy pasting the code.

There is a lot. But that still doesn't explain why Microsoft has canceled some actually interesting projects just because "they weren't Windows" -- the Courier comes to mind.

We must have very different definitions of innovation, or even success. So you're saying the Windows Phone and Metro isn't at all innovative? How do you figure?

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