I was just reading how Microsoft trumps Apple in battle of the brands, and I noticed yet another example of techies that completely miss the (business) point. It boils down to this misconception: if company A has a technically superior product, company A deserves the most valuable product brand in the marketplace. As an example, I recently wrote about how Google Chrome is likely to be an important, disruptive technology. In the various comment threads, folks were vehemently deriding this idea as ludicrous given that Google is a "one trick pony" and that their other attempt at products and services have "failed miserably," citing examples such as Google Mobile, Google Docs, Book Search, etc. Meanwhile, out in the real world of business (the world where money changes hands), they are saying exactly the opposite: The report meanwhile attributed Google's success to "innovations like Google Mobile, Google Docs & Spreadsheets and Google Book Search" which has extended its "reach and ubiquity".
I'm a long-time computer techie myself (built my first computer in 1976 with a soldering iron and programmed it with toggle switches) and for a long time, I suffered the same from the same type of business blindness that a great many techies suffer from. But as an entrepreneur starting and running several different software companies, I had to learn the some hard lessons, one of which is that business success is only slightly dependent on the underlying technology. | 
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