dirtyDogStink

Geeks and business myths

Wednesday, October 04 2006

I just finished reading Ron Garret's Top ten geek business myths (via Scoble) and there is a lot of truth in what he says, although I must disagree on a few points...

Microsoft is probably the canonical example of a successful business, and it has never had a single brilliant idea in its entire history. (To the contrary, Microsoft has achieved success largely by seeking out and destroying other people's brilliant ideas.)

Whoa Nelly! Hold on a second here. Honestly, after reading this statement [in the second paragraph no less] I had a hard time taking this guy seriously. The words above are those of a [insert-big-company-here]-hater, not those of an objective business person. Give me a break and put aside your personal feelings for a moment so we can have a mature, objective conversation. No ideas? Have you checked out the Microsoft Research site lately? Let's see, there is TouchLight, i2i, Code Thumbnails (.pdf), soap, MyLifeBits and many, many more. With more than 700 researchers all over the world, Microsoft puts more time, effort and resources behind research than most tech companies in the world.

...using Lisp is vastly more productive than using pretty much any other programming language, but successful businesses based on Lisp are quite rare. The reason for this, I think, is that Lisp allows you to be so productive that a single person can get things done without having to work together with anyone else, and so Lisp programmers never develop the social skills needed to work effecively as a member of a team.

Once again I question Ron's ability to think outside of his own experiences and biases. To be honest, I cannot comment on Lisp as a programming language or how it compares to C, C++, .NET, Java, etc. because my programming experience is limited to .NET. What struck me in this statement was that he comes off as a Lisp fan-boy instead of an objective programmer discussing the pros of a language. Now I'm finding it even harder to take him seriously.

I realize that I'm focusing more on my points of contention with Ron's post, but other than the two things I note above his article is a decent read. The basic take-away from it is that just because you're super smart [aka: a geek] with a great idea doesn't mean you will automatically succeed. There is a lot more to succeeding in business, with which I whole-heartedly agree.

~tod