Like good people we all heartily defend the right for “innovators” to enjoy the fruits of their labors, and earn back, with profit, the time, effort, and resources they expended to bring about said innovations. But something about our system of determining “innovation” seems slightly. . .off.

Let’s take an easy example: Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web and arguably responsible for the most beneficial tool in all of modern history. The idea itself is no longer as revolutionary as it once was (after all, WWW 1.0 was rather plain compared to today’s “Web 2.0”) but without his foundation, there would be no Google, eBay, Amazon, etc. Truly, if ever a man deserved reward for his labor, Sir Tim does. And he has, for knighthood aside, he has been granted several awards and countless other accolades that add up to millions of dollars. Here’s the kicker, though: how many trillions (yes, trillions) has his invention wrought for others?

Think about it. Currently, Google, a company that exists almost completely within the sphere of Sir Tim’s innovations has a market capitalization exceeding $100 billion. It’s two founders are both worth approximately $14 billion apiece. Surely Sir Tim should see a few of those giga-bones tossed his way, eh?

Nope, that’s not how innovation seems to work. After all, in the real world, an innovation by one is used to drive the innovations of another, and the latter does not owe the former anything more than a “hey, thanks for the sex” and maybe a quick peck on the cheek before the next time they call. And really, that’s the way that is should be, because what innovation can there really be whenever everyone’s busy paying off the last guy who had a good idea?

Sir Tim not only understands, but approves. In fact, he chairs the organization that is probably the most responsible for keeping the Internet open and free for innovation: the World Wide Web Consortium, the only true standards group for the web. Without the effort of him and the many people who work with the W3C, the web would have long ago fractured into a feudal kingdom of competing browsers and standards, with vendor lock-in for all and freedom for none.

Thankfully, that hasn’t happened, and we all benefit from one of the greatest innovations in human history. On the flip side, there are those that benefit exorbitantly in dollar amounts, with little innovation to show for it. Let’s take an obvious and by this time well-worn example, but perhaps with a different spin: Microsoft.

Obviously, by now anyone’s who’s read here has picked up on my ambivalence for the Redmond giant. However, this does not invalidate the points I’m going to make.

If one traces the history of the operating system, starting way back when an “OS” consisted of little more than a kernel, compiler, and linker, one quickly notices that its evolutionary path is relatively smooth. There are few instances of sudden, innovative bursts that herald the dawn of a new computing era; instead, it’s almost all uphill struggles to lay the groundwork to a system that can manage to edit a text document and print it without crashing. Furthermore, one finds it’s sometimes very difficult to exactly delineate what ideas originated where. With the multitude of competing OSes and concurrent development, there are more than a few instances of the same idea being produced at the same time by several companies at once. What this reveals is that the innovations produced are almost never of the revolutionary, world-changing variety (you know, like Sir Tim’s) but of the subtler, so-obvious-everyone’s-doing-it species. So, my question is, why do we pay more for the trivial “innovations,” and practically nothing for the truly great ones?

Microsoft is notorious for claiming that each new edition of their software is “revolutionary.” (Look up some of their old adverts, they literally scream it). Oh, and since it’s so revolutionary, it costs a tidy sum, too. But with the lackluster release of Windows Vista, they find themselves coming under withering criticism that this new OS is nothing more than a shiny upgrade to their old one. Of course, Vista is does sport some new features, a nice touch here or there, and some serious reworking of the security. Individually, nothing to write home about (and rather long overdue), and collectively, taken with its serious driver issues and support faults, an overall dud.

But the commercials that quickly followed Vista’s release painted it as nothing short than an awe-inspiring ambrosia. Steve Ballmer fell over himself in crowing about the “innovation” wrought by his company, though conveniently ignored that nearly every single “innovation” had already existed in one form or another in compteting systems for months or even years. For all of this users could reward Microsoft’s time, energy, and investment with a minimum of $109 (but hopefully more like $399) for a licensed copy of their “innovative” product. If everything pans out for Microsoft in the next five years, they hope to reap a profit of no less than $135 billion dollars.

What it is fascinating today is that now, Microsoft is the one that plays up the “innovation” card when speaking about their “intellectual property” and defending their atrocious record in software development. With the same token, they vociferously attack Google, Apple, Linux, or whatever competitor seems to be the most threatening at the moment and disparage their lack of “innovation” (however it’s determined). Google, for one, is building up a massive empire almost completely linked to two innovations: a usually excellent search algorithm, and most importantly, an ad-matching and serving algorithm that lines their pockets with advertising dollars. Microsoft, of course, can barely contain their rage over the fact that someone is actually obtaining higher profit margins than them, using a (gasp) royalty-free medium such as the Internet, and (gasp) not charging users for a beneficial service!

Obviously, an operating system is far more complex than a search engine, but that’s not the point. The use of “innovation” as a marker of determining the value of a product fails when applied to Microsoft, and coincidentally, although it can be argued to succeed in Google’s case, Google doesn’t charge for it most beneficial use (searching). Think of it in these terms: Windows is almost required to accomplish any computing task, unless you happen to work in a corporate environment or are part of the growing rebellion away from Microsoft products. For this product that is produced on, at best, weakly “innovative” terms, the use this product costs more in many cases than the benefits one recieves from its use. A grandmother on a pension will rarely earn back enough in its use for email, web surfing, and scanning baby photos to have benefited from the exchange, whereas an open source OS such as Linux would have gave her the same benefits with no costs. In contrast, Google (using Sir Tim’s innovation) serves up answers to billions of search queries, for no cost more than ignoring the adverts on the right side of your screen. Some of those answers are worthless, but many are priceless, because they fulfill the searcher’s quest to find whatever it was he or she was looking for, never mind what exactly it was.

The fact that it takes an OS to ever reach Google’s site is irrelevant, because if it wasn’t for Microsoft’s near monopoly it is likely that the average user’s OS of choice today would be a free one anyways. We have long ago passed the point where Microsoft’s dubious innovations should have earned their fair rewards, and the primary reason that things have persisted as such is because of their marketing practices. In fact, it can truly be argued that Microsoft’s greatest innovation is not in software at all: it’s the genius they displayed in marketing the OS over the hardware it ran on.

Overall, it is apparent that Microsoft’s marketing acumen may very well end up being it’s undoing. There’s only so many times that a company can trumpet the virtues of their latest product before people begin to believe it, and when they do, the next time you begin to toot your horn they wonder why they should bother upgrading. After all, they’re already using the “revolutionary” Windows XP. What makes Vista so much better? It’s not like Ford tells its consumers to get rid of their 2001 model cars because the ‘07 models are here. Microsoft is going to have to convince the buyer that their old products were really not as innovative as they claimed (which they weren’t) but their new product won’t suffer the same fate.

All of these points considered, “innovation” can not continue to be abused as a means of interpreting value of software products. In the computing industry, the innovations that end up benefiting the most (and driving growth) are the ones that give rather than take in regards to cost versus benefits. So rarely do these revolutionary steps occur that they make the trivial steps that are passed off as “innovations” actually seem like they are. Once the entire timeline is compared, however, the evidence is overwhelming that software is very much a gradual accumulation of self-generating improvements, rather than any true evolutionary leaps.

As such, using “innovation” as an argument to support a monopoly fails to gain much traction, both in the court of public opinion and in the knowledgeable consumer’s wallet. The greatest innovations are the ones that truly benefit everyone; the rest are just idiots defending their idiocy with a label that garners the most sympathy.