Apple has just eclipsed Microsoft as the biggest technology company in work by market capitalisation - $222 Billion versus Microsoft's $219 billon. Stunning turn around for Apple and not great news for MS considering it used to be over $500 Billion in the past.

As a follow-up to my post on Microsoft not innovating - the following insight by Scott Berke on innovation at Microsoft was passed onto me. Scott used to work for Microsoft and appears to have a very successful track record during his time there.  

Personally reading his analysis - I feel it's really important to distingush "Innovation" from "Invention". Invention is thinking up great ideas. Innovation is turning these ideas into something useful – i.e. a commercial success or what ever is your measure of "useful".

I think “Innovation” as a word is often used when people really mean “Invention”. If everyone used Innovation as “ideas that are turned into something useful” the word would have much more currency.

A really interesting and thought provoking article from Crunchgear on Microsoft and it's failure to be innovative in recent times. It makes a good point the word "innovation" these days is overused and could be used for any large tech company. It also talks in depth about some ideas for Microsoft, ideas for the rest of the world to compete with Microsoft and a really good treatment on some great ideas from Microsoft that just have not seen the light of day. Very interesting analysis!

Really interesting to read about the forthcoming Google Chrome OS at the Google Blog.  On the face of it, this is a major shot across the bows of Microsoft with the vision to replace the "ol' bloated OS" with a Web based browser centric OS. I can't for one see Microsoft taking this on the chin and not responding - in fact I suspect that if anything they will fight back very hard. Take for instance, information on Gazelle and Midori. I think this is just the beginning of a fairly major battle.

My questions to ponder are:

1. Who else will throw their hat in (Oracle did talk about this for a loooong time but maybe buying Sun is going to keep them too busy).
2. Will this truly commoditise the OS?
3. Is this just for consumers or a viable proposition for enterprise computing?
4. Will this support application streaming/visualization or is it truly browser only?