Baron VC

I pray for the day that Microsoft falls. It’s the same with Google. It’s not out of bitterness or hate but simply because I want to see all the great technology they’ve got locked away in their dungeons unleashed onto the world.

Just look at Microsoft Surface. Looks a bit familiar. Kind of like a large coffee table version of iPhone’s touch screen. Will this ever hit the market? Nobody knows. When it does, the market buzz will probably be all but gone. If it does, it’s likely that it will only be available in a terribly integrated add on to whatever operating system they’re pimping.

Like IBM, Xerox, Bell Labs, and many others before and after them, our modern day equivalent of these technological powerhouses are companies like Google and Microsoft. Smart people like working with other smart people more than anything else and smart people usually carve out their own environment of freedom and creativity. Smart people also don’t know how much they’re really worth nor do they care. A lot of smart people really don’t care if their products hit the market or not.

It takes a really good shakeup of the mothership’s fortunes to let these people loose. An economic downturn perhaps? This is equally amazing when you think of all the crappy web sites that try to pass as startups getting multi-million dollar funding on nothing more than empty promises.

There’s probably a whole universe of interesting projects that we haven’t even imagined before gestating and taking shape within the confines of Microsoft or Google. Yet, we probably wont ever see these technologies see the light of day either.

Notice that I haven’t included Apple in the picture. I’m sure they’ve got a hefty R&D group going but something tells me that all the innovation Apple does is focused on technology they plan to release in the short-term. Frankly, I don’t see the point in heavily investing in technology that will never see the light or day or will some day earn profits for someone else. It sucks your treasury dry while the brilliant technology languishes in some obscure lab tucked away in a major tech company’s campus.

Microsoft Surface Hits The Ground Running