[Discuss] Econonomic contribution

[tmetro-blu at vl.com (Tom Metro)]

markw at mohawksoft.com wrote:
> Had a little debate, at work, about the importance of the work two men.
> Steve Jobs and Dennis Ritchie.
> Who contributed more to the world...

Looking at it from the perspective of general consumers (not developers,
which is a much smaller audience), this is an infrastructure vs. facade
type of comparison. Infrastructure alone doesn't add value. You need a
finished product made suitable for end-users to be useful. But you can't
build a facade without the backing infrastructure, so in that regards
Ritchie's contributions are more significant and pervasive. You may
think Apple products are wide spread, but just about anything with a CPU
in it is likely to be running software that has been influenced by C or
UNIX.

What's less clear is if Ritchie had not developed the infrastructure he
did, would it have soon become the obvious approach to a practitioner in
the field, or was it really a radical departure from what proceeded, and
without Ritchie these technologies would have been delayed by 5 or 10
years and/or not as good.

It's a little bit easier to see how others aimed for the same targets as
Job's and repeatedly failed, so you can argue that cell phones and
tablets would likely not be at their current state for another 2 to 5
years without his vision (comparatively the easy part) and execution of
his business strategy (the hard part).

 -Tom

-- 
Tom Metro
Venture Logic, Newton, MA, USA
"Enterprise solutions through open source."
Professional Profile: http://tmetro.venturelogic.com/