Scoble on Microsoft

I find the debate pitting innovation and the individual programmer interesting, and Scoble makes another foray with his post today on why Microsoft makes him cry (I cry over Microsoft, too, but it’s usually things like this).

Anyway (and I really don’t hate Microsoft - I grew up with Macs and Windows PCs in the house, so I have a certain nostalgia for both), it’s got the usual things about innovation and money (”Could they have done this at a Silicon Valley startup?” Scoble asks “I doubt it” he answers). Nevermind that Linux, to be more specific, Linus’s kernel that became Linus’s Unix, had no money in the beginning. There was no traveling to exotic locales and creativity meetings with creativity people. Yet innovative it is, as well as good old Richard Stallman’s GPL, which gave Eric S. Raymond and Bruce Perens the whole idea for open source, which seems to be working out pretty well.

Not to sound too defensive, but I do think that there’s a certain Wired-type gadget fetish going on with these types of arguments, where one (Scoble, for instance) talks about crying over a technology and then teases it and says how revolutionary it’s going to be (mentioning the MS Surface, which is just a table with a touchscreen - something we should’ve had years ago), and it’s really going to be something extremely expensive and unattainable (not that that’s always bad) and will end up in the pages of Wired and Robb Report as something that every millionaire should own. Great. Grand. Whatever. (And I’ll certainly revisit this post when Scoble (or MS) unveils this grand, tear-jerking invention, the hard work of two guys battling it out in the big company, just trying to change the world. *cough*)

Update: Scoble has pictures from his visit. A nice building and all.

Another update: TechCrunch on Scoble’s post, and Scoble on TechCrunch.