RMS is right. Most of the big enterprise packages were started by college graduates but that certainly doesn't make it a requirement. Most of the big computer companies were started by college graduates, too. And then there was Apple.
You can't be innovative by thinking that just because something hasn't been done a certain way before that it shouldn't be done that way.
Real innovation REQUIRES violating some generally-accepeted principle of how things should be done.
Real innovation is one thing that that the current crop of enterprise software is largely missing.
"Real innovation is one thing that that the current crop of enterprise software is largely missing."
Based on what? You don't think virtualization is real innovation? Spend some time learning about Netezza, Endeca, ITA, BladeLogic, Scalent, VMWare... before making blanket statements that are blatantly inaccurate.
What does virtualization have to do with enterprise software? I'm talking about systems which store and manage access to company financial, inventory, human resources, etc. data(1). Things like SAP, Peoplesoft, Great Plains, and even Quickbooks. The examples you give are all very nice and innovative I'm sure but they aren't really examples of the same thing. (Except maybe for ITA but that's very specific to airline industry.)
You could have mentioned salesforce.com. That would be a valid counter to my original argument.
"What does virtualization have to do with enterprise software?" - Which rock were you hiding under ? Come out and face the bulbs :-D
Seriously though, one counterpoint could be that, Apple and Google - companies that had two of the biggest IPOs in history are not really enterprise software companies.
I think we're using two different meanings for "enterprise software."
I mean it in the sense of the system which stores all of the business information for a company or other organization (the "enterprise".) It keeps track of things like "who are the employees" and "who are the customers" and "what inventory do we have" and "where is it" and "where's the money" and things like that. This includes systems which can be described as accounting, customer-relationship management, human-resources management, etc.
You could also call it "Business Information Management" systems although the phrase "Enterprise Software" is more common (at least among my peer group.)
Companies like Seibel, Peoplesoft, SAP, Great Plains, Oracle, sell this stuff for a lot of money to big companies who then spend absurd amounts of money hiring poor idiots like me to work with it. In fact, that's exactly what I've done for a large part of the last ten years, for two different Fortune-100 companies, and I've had plenty of opportunities to observe these systems and think about ways of improving things
The biggest innovation in this type of software has been the move from using a client program on each user's desktop to web-based but their web interfaces aren't very good.
While virtualization may be very important to how an enterprise runs its software it's not directly applicable to the software itself. The employee who goes to a web page to sign up for a new health insurance plan doesn't know or care whether the web page is coming from a VM or a Sun box or a Dell box - but the fact that he CAN sign up for a new health insurance plan online or request a different schedule or generate a verification of employment letter to use in getting a mortgage.(1) THAT is important to him.
And that's the kind of enterprise software I'm talking about.
(1) All three are innovative features that the enterprise systems most people use don't have.
