Quote:
Originally Posted by Kickaha
And you're dodging. 
Seriously... huh? When I read The Road Ahead, all I could keep thinking was "Yeah, and... ?" It was all highly obvious, and topics that had been well discussed and noodled over for, in some cases, decades in academia and online. And yet he was seen as this incredible visionary? Pfeh.
Do you have something else in mind? |
Neither Bill nor Steve (by extension, neither Microsoft nor Apple, or Microsoft Research / Apple R&D) primarily come up with new ideas. They don't invent. They innovate. There's a huge (and often misunderstood) difference. Their strength is in taking ideas previously not well-implemented (or implemented at all) and finding a great application for them. Multi-touch as a concept is nothing new. Neither in the possibility, nor in the general idea. It's the actual, real-world, useful, affordable implementations that are interesting and impressive. So you can use more than one finger to manipulate objects on screen? Whoop-dee-doo, what's the point. Wait, you can size photos up just by stretching fingers away from each other? Oooooh!
You want an example of where Bill Gates had the right mind? Here's one: Windows. Laugh all you want. When Sculley, Gassée and all the other vision-less suits of Apple's late 80s and early 90s were busy deciding how they can get the most money out of their customers and whether or not the Apple II is still worth anything, Gates had Microsoft focus on how to provide a GUI operating system at an affordable cost, i.e. make it ready for the mass market. Sure, unethical tricks were used. And yes, the result was quite mediocre, and not well-thought through. We don't need to go through all the FUD surrounding Cairo and all the other wouldn't-it-be-great-not-that-it-will-ever-happen lies. But the fact remains that Gates had the right idea at the right time.
(edit) Oh, and meanwhile, the Unix overthinkers were busy with X-Windows, which even today completely misses the point, focusing on what hardly everyone cares to do (a networking-based UI, the ability to choose between a million and one half-baked window managers, etc.) rather than on what's important.