More on IE being the best tech innovation

I posted yesterday about the Computing Technology Industry Association survey finding that the most influential tech product of the last 25 years was... Internet Explorer!?!

I got one e-mail from somebody... well, let's just say this person didn't buy it. It was along the lines of this comment on the post.

So Marc Andreessen invents the browser and turns it into Netscape, and Microsoft copies it and gets the "most influential product" award? That's like giving Tony Bennett the Grammy for "Yesterday," isn't it?

And the winner is … wait, is this right?

Among the news releases that came over the transom today was one on a survey of IT professionals asked to pick the most influential tech product of the last 25 years, and I almost sprayed my coffee as I did a double-take at the headline. According to the poll conducted by the Computing Technology Industry Association, 66 percent of folks in the IT industry believe that title goes to Microsoft Internet Explorer.

In fact, the top five finishers had a distinct tilt toward Redmond. Following IE, the products rated most influential were Microsoft Word, Microsoft Windows 95, and then a tie between Microsoft Excel and the Apple iPod. The second five went like this: the BlackBerry, Adobe Photoshop, McAfee VirusScan, Netscape Navigator and the Palm Pilot.

Now I know people just love to go back and forth over such lists, but this one seems almost perversely designed to inspire agitated sputtering. I mean, if you want to pick a browser as the most influential product or application since 1982, how does Netscape come in lower than IE, when it was Netscape that drove the development of IE? And the Apple corps certainly has a beef about its meager representation. Any theories on how these particular choices came out of this particular group? Have they spent too much time in the server room?