Re: Innovation

["Bruce R. McFarling" <ecbm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, 03 Oct 1997 08:48:07 -0700, Paul Henry Rosenberg <rad@xxxxxxx> wrote:

>Arnold's points are all good.  But I'd like to go a bit further.  Mason
>has confused things even more than Arnold allows.  Bill Gates wrote the
>first BASIC that ran in a microcomputer.  It was an amazing feat of
>programming and encouraged the hobbiest market tremendously.  But NO ONE
>wrote a significant piece of business software using that BASIC.

>What's more, Gates wrote BASIC well BEFORE he founded Microsoft, when he
>was still a college student.  It was NOT the product of a small company.

	Is this saying that the most innovative period of Gates / Microsoft
undermines the argument that smaller companies tend to be the source of
more innovations than large comapnies, because Gates was a college student
when he wrote the first microcomputer Basic?  Gates originally started out
selling punch-tapes of Basic for a kit microcomputer and *therefore* this
undermines an argument that small companies are more innovative than
big ones?  How can you get smaller than a one-person, part time
venture to turn the kit microcomputer hobby into a source of income?


Virtually,

Bruce McFarling, Newcastle, NSW
ecbm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx