Microsoft’s Uncreative Character
Part 3 of my three-part analysis of what Microsoft is all about.
Bill [Gates] is basically unimaginative and has never invented anything, which is why I think he’s more comfortable now in philanthropy than technology. He just shamelessly ripped off other people’s ideas. —Steve Jobs
Microsoft — both in reputation and bulk employee base, which tend to reinforce each other over time — is a company of uncreative geeks. An uncreative geek is:
typically male
a competent programmer
good at logic problems
good at memorizing lots of little arbitrary facts, like computer commands and procedures (and workarounds)
uncreative, uninventive, unartistic: (a) he’s not good at it, (b) it makes him uncomfortable because he knows he’s not good at it, so he mostly avoids it, (c) it diminishes the value of what he already knows; i.e. he knows the current system, but he doesn’t know the new system.
typically oversensitive to criticism
When he sees a new movie, a new app, a new idea, he immediately thinks, “No big deal; I can do that too,” — but it doesn’t fully occur to him that “doing that” means thinking up the idea in the first place, not just figuring out how to recreate the same thing that someone else has already shown you in finished form.
He’s comfortable keeping computing the way it is. What he really wants is more pixels, faster processors, more memory, more storage, faster networks — but everything else to stay essentially the same. He finds creative, inventive people threatening, because those people make him look bad and create new things that he doesn’t already know; things that dilute the value of his current skill-set. Creativity is risky; the uncreative geek wants the security of doing what he already knows. What if you try to create something good, but you wind up creating something that isn’t very good? What if you create something and it flops? What if you create something and people don’t like it and say bad things about it — wouldn’t you have been a lot better off not creating it in the first place?
When the uncreative person starts creating something new (or even starts recreating someone else’s creation), he wants to start reaping the rewards of his efforts right away, which means telling other people what he’s working on now. But what if you tell people you’re creating something, and then you’re never able to deliver? In early 1983, dismayed that there was no even approximately arcade-quality rendition of Robotron: 2084 for the Apple II, I set about making one. And I told my friends I was working on it. Sure enough, they were impressed, and thought I was cool for doing that. But I soon regretted telling them anything when, a few weeks later, they asked me if I was finished — and I had made almost no recent progress on a project that wasn’t even 10% complete. I quickly moved into damage control, telling them that I had determined that it was just too hard to make it work on the Apple II (possibly true, but I’ll never really know), and abandoned the project entirely. I chalked it up to experience: Keep your projects under wraps until you’re really ready to show something. Most people (yourself included) have no real idea how long it will take and hard it will be to bring a project to decent-quality fruition.
Unable to create something new, or unwilling to take the risks associated with doing so, the uncreative geek prefers to jack around with the computer itself, and its OS, as if the whole thing is an amusing, interesting toy for him to play with. Quality, third-party apps and games are also something for him to play with — to copy freely, to share with duly grateful friends. In the mind of the uncreative geek, the king of the computing hill is the uncreative geek. When he programs at all, he’s writing utilities, or programming languages. The important stuff. Not a game. Not a word processor. Those are just fodder for casual piracy. Really smart people modify the hardware of their computer, and tinker with the OS, and create meta-ware: tools for other computer geeks to use.
[W]hat is the App Store except a cleaved out and sanitized portion of the web? In fact, people accustomed to the freedom and “flow” of the web go into anaphylactic shock when they realize that they must submit to the slings and arrows of the outrageous fortune of Steve Jobs when they want their iPhone app to show up in the Apple app store. ... Thanks a lot, Steve. —Chris Messina, The Death of the URL
Uncreative geeks particularly disklike Apple’s iOS App Store because:
It ruins casual piracy, by making it easier to acquire apps legitimately.
It’s an opportunity for creative programmers to shine, and (if they earn sufficient revenue from their creations), go into creative overdrive as full-time developers of iOS apps.
It completely locks out the activity of making funky system mods. Write an app — a real app — or just go away.
How many commercially viable apps has pro-Microsoft, anti-Apple stalwart Paul Thurrott written? I’m guessing zero. All that guys like him ever really wanted to do was to become an “expert” in the minutia of a kludgy computer system, then be respected and admired for that, because the typical user has to use that kludgy system whether he likes it or not. They didn’t want to be classified as fossils because that minutia isn’t needed any more. They didn’t want to watch tons of creative people come out of the woodwork and make big bucks by writing slick apps. That’s their worst nightmare. They genuinely hate Apple and the transformation it represents.
Melinda Gates told Vogue in a recent interview that the couple’s three children try to have “as regular a childhood as possible,” but that doesn’t include Apple’s ubiquitous iPod digital music and video player or its cellular companion, the iPhone. “There are very few things that are on the banned list in our household,” she said. “But iPods and iPhones are two things we don’t get for our kids.” —Zach Spear on AppleInsider
The huge success of Microsoft in the late 1980s and ’90s, I suspect, is the last, great gasp of old-style, 1960’s & ’70s, geek-oriented computing. Steve Jobs gave us a glimpse of the coming change with the 1984 Mac, and Bill Gates managed to pervert that into the much more geek-oriented Windows OS for a couple decades. But Jobs came back and did it even better this time, and made sure that Gates et al. couldn’t mess it up this time (though they sure tried).
Steve Jobs will go down in history as the person who did the most to facilitate the transformation of computers and their third-party apps into the world of the polished, the automatic, and the intuitive. Bill Gates will go down in history as the person who did the most to try to stop it.
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