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I'm sort of reminded by this quote by Pablo Picasso Good Artists Copy, Great Artists Steal . Just because you are making a copy of some one doesn't take away th

I'm sort of reminded by this quote by Pablo Picasso Good Artists Copy, Great Artists Steal . Just because you are making a copy of some one doesn't take away that you are either changing or improving on the design or taking it in a new direction...

rbanffy 16y ago
> or taking it in a new direction... Even a cheap, incomplete and buggy ripoff can be qualified as a new direction... I believe Gates' true big innovation was the way he cornered the OEM market into paying the Microsoft tax in a way that made it prohibitively expensive to sell PC clones with software other than Microsoft's. That's one innovation that had the deepest impact in the personal computer, probably dragging evolution back a decade or more.
Samuel_Michon 16y ago
It is uncertain whether Pablo Picasso ever uttered those words. There's no record of it. However, it is certain that T.S. Elliott wrote [1] something along those lines: One of the surest tests [of the superiority or inferiority of a poet] is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different than that from which it is torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest. [1] http://nancyprager.wordpress.com/2007/05/08/good-poets-borrow-great-poets-steal/ http://nancyprager.wordpress.com/2007/05/08/good-poets-borro...
- rbanffy 16y ago
  Comparing Windows with the Lisa, the Macintosh, the Xerox Star or even Smalltalk 80, or MS-DOS with CP/M, you arrive at the inescapable conclusion Microsoft has always been really, really short on good poets.

rbanffy 16y ago

> or taking it in a new direction... Even a cheap, incomplete and buggy ripoff can be qualified as a new direction... I believe Gates' true big innovation was the way he cornered the OEM market into paying the Microsoft tax in a way that made it prohibitively expensive to sell PC clones with software other than Microsoft's. That's one innovation that had the deepest impact in the personal computer, probably dragging evolution back a decade or more.

Samuel_Michon 16y ago

It is uncertain whether Pablo Picasso ever uttered those words. There's no record of it. However, it is certain that T.S. Elliott wrote [1] something along those lines: One of the surest tests [of the superiority or inferiority of a poet] is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different than that from which it is torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest. [1] http://nancyprager.wordpress.com/2007/05/08/good-poets-borrow-great-poets-steal/ http://nancyprager.wordpress.com/2007/05/08/good-poets-borro...

rbanffy 16y ago
Comparing Windows with the Lisa, the Macintosh, the Xerox Star or even Smalltalk 80, or MS-DOS with CP/M, you arrive at the inescapable conclusion Microsoft has always been really, really short on good poets.