If you’ve been wondering why Windows Vista is such a disappointment and thinking that maybe if Nathan Myhrvold still worked for M$FT it might not have sucked so much, this New Yorker article on Myhrvold’s innovation company is for you.
4 thoughts on “What has Nathan Myhrvold been up to?”
Comments are closed.
Ah, Myhrvold, who’s got an honourary spot in the dumbest Apple predictions hall of shame:
‘Microsoft’s Nathan Myhrvold couldn’t even predict the present: “Apple is already dead,” he said after Jobs’ return.’ http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2007/11/analysts-dont-k.html
Another, maybe more descriptive, term for Myhrvold’s “innovation company” is btw “patent troll” http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2006/07/10/8380798/index.htm .
I wonder what Dave Cutler has been up to, he was the reason behind NT’s success. Myhrvold is one of those super smart people who are not particularly practical, and thus are very bad for business. What would you expect from a man who paid to have a full scale Difference Engine in his living room? Then again Cutler’s friends mocked up a huge minicomputer as a prank in his…
I used to work for Microsoft, and never could figure out what Nathan Myhrvold supposedly did. Apparently Ballmer couldn’t figure it out either, which is why he canned him when he became CEO.
Meh. Here’s Glynn Moody on Mike Masnick on Malcolm Gladwell on Nathan Myhrvold’s Intellectual Ventures: “a company set up with the express intention of coming up with *ideas* and patenting them so that it can hold companies that might actually create *inventions* based on them hostage. Perfectly parasitic and utterly pathetic.”
http://opendotdotdot.blogspot.com/2008/05/intellectual-monopoly-ventures.html