You can have taste without being able to program well, but you can't program well without good taste.
The original point was that MS had smart people so a lack of smarts couldn't be the problem. The salient points are 1) smarts don't guarantee programming skill, and 2) smarts don't guarantee taste.
> I also a lot of dumb people that can't program worth a damn. What's your point?
Try to keep up here, Freddo. Try following the context :) Smart is orthogonal to skilled at a particular endeavor.
> Yeah, that's just an outright dumb move.
Funny how you twisted "lacking in the taste department" into "dumb". It's a computer industry truism that MS lacks taste, whereas Apple has good taste.
I agree that the frameworks are great for automating a lot of the junk we used to have to do manually. The "problem" is that people are cutting their teeth on things that don't require much knowledge, so they may miss out on a lot of fundamentals.
After the low-hanging fruit, there are some real problems that require some serious knowledge to solve.
> No longer can you just be a very good hacker to succeed, you also need to be able to raise money, market your product
Some people are just coding, not doing startups :)
I know a lot of really smart people who can't program worth a darn.
If you want to work at MS you're already lacking in the taste department. And what's the interview process, brainteasers or BSing your way through random estimates like the number of gas stations in the country?
Being good at bluster can make someone seem pretty smart. But the computer doesn't care about that. It filters out what you can really do from what you can fool people into thinking you can do.
> If they assigned a few engineers to work on this, they could replicate the functionality within few months, especially since they know the internals of Outlook.
Counter-exhibit 1: Vista.
Apparently the MS development process makes it almost impossible to get anything done within the bureaucracy these days.
Their best results are from their research groups (e.g. Haskell) but those are people paid to work on what they want to work on anyway.
You can't just assign developers randomly to something and get the same results.
In fact, given Outlook's bugs and lack of functionality in these areas you could make a pretty compelling argument that, despite their knowledge of its internals, those are about the last people you'd want to put in charge of making Outlook work. They already got their shot and look what happened!
More like how your car can't require its own brand of oil, gas, air filters, light bulbs, etc. If Cisco starts selling its operating system on a CD and you make a clone that can run it, it's fair game. Or another company that makes specialized firmware can sell it so you can install it on your car, assuming it passes regulatory requirements for safety (I'd assume).
> I don't mean plagiarize them, but emulate what they're doing and figure out the parts that you're good at.
They DID plagiarize. Nobody's objecting to other seed investors, just the plagiarizing.
What they SHOULD have done is asked YC for permission to use their application, then said "we are using YC's application with their agreement in order to make things easier for applicants".
> who fail to understand the humor in the above para may not kindly apply.
I don't know why writing about establishing some kind of sweatshop in a poverty-stricken country would be seen as funny. There are a lot of places that have conditions like that, no joke.
In light of the Lexmark decision Apple can't stop others from being interoperable legally. Their choices are to bludgeon clonemakers with frivolous lawsuits and try to bankrupt them for pursuing their rights, or to keep trying to make OS X paranoid about what it's running on while clonemakers keep patching the code that does hardware checks. And clonemakers might even be able to sue to stop Apple from doing that.