A Lesson from Valve on The Importance of Innovation
In the early 90’s, Gabe Newell, a Microsoft employee, commissioned a survey to see what was actually installed on people’s PCs. To Newell’s surprise, the most installed software actually was not Windows. Windows was only in second place at the time. What was the first? First place actually belonged to to id Software’s Doom video game. It was at this time Gabe left Microsoft to start Valve, one of the best video game development companies in the nation. They are the creators of the famous Half-Life and Portal series. They also have their own online game distribution platform called Steam, which has over 50 million users.
Gabe started Valve because he found the results of the software survey to be very telling. How could dozen people in their mid-20’s manage to get their software installed on more PCs than the product made by the largest software company in the world? Simple. The nature of productivity has changed.
