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Is Microsoft Money Crushing Microsoft?
JoshuaDFranklin writes "The latest Seattle Weekly has an article by a former Microsoft project manager titled Microsoft's Sacred Cash Cow. It argues that Microsoft, addicted to its Windows and Office revenue, is stifling innovation within the company: 'new, better ideas that would take business away from Windows or Office don't really have a chance at Microsoft.' Apple, in contrast, has embraced Open Source and is delivering a better consumer experience." Update: 06/06 21:24 GMT by T : Sorry, it's a dupe.
MS aggreed to contiune developing Office if Apple would give half ownership to MS.
Half ownership of what?
The terms of the 2000 deal were (1) Apple dropped their IP infringement suits against Microsoft; (2) Microsoft formed the Mac Business Unit and made a committment to four years of native OS X Office updates; (3) Apple signed an "IP cross licensing" agreement basically removing their ability to sue Microsoft for IP concerns; and (4) Microsoft purchased a large block of non-voting Apple stock, which they later sold all of at a profit.
What are you referring to?
Wow, a recycler, how novel!
And despite that, they still are. They're one of the few desktop environments that supports Mac OR Windows style menus out of the box, and a host of other things that just plain Make Life Easier.
Oh, and Microsoft didn't do the taskbar window-switching concept first. OS/2 and a number of commercial Windows enhancement shells (all long-since dead) all used it. A bunch of programs also used it for MDI stuff.
"KDE with a taskbar, start menu, integrated filesystem/net browser, Mono"
.net (Mono in gnome world) is MS response to Java, nothing new/innovative.
those are not MS innovations. There were number of different docks, launchpads, root menus etc. in X, OS/2, MacOS, taskbar and start menu are nothing new (i.e. not significantly different from the others). You could do cd ftp://ftp.uu.net in midnight commander since before MS new Netscape would be a threat.
erik
...all excited, don't know why...
Yes, I can honestly say that Apple has embraced open-source.
Apple's Web Kit is the only way that KHTML would have be on millions of Macs and PCs. Additionally, Apple commits changes back to the KHTML project. It's entirely symbiotic. Apple gets to use it in iTunes and Safari, and KDE gets the changes.
Apple's Darwin Streaming Server is the OSS port of their QuickTime Streaming Server. Apple even provides binaries for Red Hat and Solaris. It is trivial to port.
Apple was the first to throw major support behind zeroconf, an open networking standard, and provide libraries under OSS licenses to enable wide adoption.
Apple employs Jordan Hubbard, a major contributer. Apple also puts out Darwin with Jordan's help.
They do more if you're willing to look.
If that's the brand new price it's an eMac, and they're not LCD, they're CRTs
Not a bad CRT as CRTs go, but still a CRT.
Microsoft got its start in the 1970's. Its first product was a BASIC interpreter. BASIC had been developed in the 1960's at Dartmouth and made public-domain; Microsoft announced an interpreter for the Altair, then started actually working on it (using "borrowed" time on someone else's minicomputer), missed a bunch of delivery dates, and shipped a buggy product.
Then, IBM was looking for a PC OS and programming language. BillG's mom suggested they talk to him about BASIC; IBM's chat with Digital Research (makers of CP/M) didn't go well, BillG said "sure I can give you an OS" despite not having an OS, then ran out, bought a CP/M ripoff called QDOS, and tried to get it finished up in time...
Sounds pretty much like the recent history. What was it you were trying to have as a point, again?
You seem to be implying that Microsoft doesn't spend money on new projects and ventures, but they do. I don't know what numbers he used to make the comparison, but at TechEd Steve Balmer said that Microsoft's budget on R&D each year is second only to Pfizer's. I believe MS spends tens of billions of dollars annually on research.
I could not justify my existence if I were a turkey farmer. Would I terminate myself? Undoubtably, yes.
dr oaken was the character
Apple has been huge in the BSD community. It employs FreeBSD developers and it donates hardware, time and money to both the BSDs and independent developers.
CDE open sourced! https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/
KDE and GNOME copy Windows because they want to steal market share from MS
I can't speak for GNOME, but I am a KDE developer, and I don't know of any KDE devs whose motivation is that they want to "steal market share from MS". KDE is not a company; therefore we are not "competing" with MS. We're just trying to build a very useable desktop on un*x. You can argue all you want about whether the fact that we use the WIMP desktop model represents a massive failure of imagination, or a simple recognition of a system that works. I just wanted to object to your wrong assumption about the motivation of KDE devs.
Liberal (adj.): Free from bigotry; open to progress; tolerant of others.
Of course Microsoft innovate! Don't you remember Bob?
Actually, MS Bob is a kind-of enhanced version of the Commodore 64 cartridge program called Magic Desk.
So much for that one.
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
Microsoft innovates, their employees innovate.
Only in the US version of English (and maybe in Canadian English as well, not sure). In UK and Australian English, the name of a corporation, or any group of people, is a plural noun, and the verb is conjugated appropriately.
Both approaches make sense when viewed from the appropriate perspective, and neither is inherently correct. It's just a cultural difference.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Seriously, there's nothing I want to extract and reuse from my unwanted data. Don't confuse me with different names just because you're trying to be "different". What if GM called the steering wheel the directional input? Crimeny.
Microsoft didn't change the trash can because they were trying to "be different". The court decided in the Apple-vs-MS copyright-infringement case that the image of the Trash Can was pretty much the only copyrightable aspect of the Mac UI.
bp
Microsoft ripped all of those off as well.
1) The unified taskbar was available in some X implementations prior to 1991.
2) The increased prominence of text was available in a variety of systems, including several add-ons to Win 3.0/3.1 well before Win95
3) The Win95 L&F is a straight ripoff of several GUI enhancement programs developed for Win 3.1. MS actually got called on it too.
4) You must have lousy memory, drag-resize (with window contents displayed) caused all sorts of problems on most Win95 systems when it came out, and it tended to crash on anything less than a P133 (a very fast system at the time) with an expensive accelerated graphics card (also uncommon, most cards at the time were unaccellerated frame-buffers).
5) Absolute trash. CP/M actually contained this concept (although it was less obvious in those pre-graphics days) by requiring a specific extension for a file to be accessed by it's relevant program. VMS, Smalltalk, and numerous others also included this type of linkage in various forms. Also, what Apple did is actually the more elegant form of what MS did, MS just decided to take a lazy approach by keying off a portion of the filename, instead of adding limited metadata to the file entry.
Additional points:
The system registry was copied from Smalltalk.
The general GUI was copied from several places, including Apple and Xerox
Much of the FAT32 concept was taken (without credit) from a whitepaper put out by a UIUC professor around 90-91.
Office-suite integration was taken from Claris (and I don't think they invented it either)
The point is, take almost any "innovation" that MS has come up with since they started, and you'll find plenty of prior-art that they copied or extended. They have a huge R&D lab, now, that they've staffed with mega-bucks egg-heads, so this may change, but I suspect their corporate culture will make that difficult.
Yes, Apple's strategy is a good one in principle: they are leaving the commodity software development up to open source and they are adding value to it with brand-specific software development.
The trouble with Apple is that they are probably drawing the line in the wrong place. Apple seems to seriously believe that there is value in Quartz and Cocoa and they are spending a lot of engineering effort on it. But, in reality, there are no graphics capabilities in Quartz that aren't present in modern X11 systems, and an Objective-C based toolkit is merely a burden these days. You could easily create a GUI that looked and felt just like Aqua on top of X11, and ran faster to boot.
That leaves me wondering: is Apple doing this deliberately? Maybe they do want to "own the platform" after all, not for technical reasons but for the same reasons as Microsoft and Sun: to control it and entangle their developers in proprietary APIs. Maybe Apple figured out that you don't have to be 100% proprietary in order to have a captive audience, 50% proprietary is enough. Or can they really be so confused that they think Quartz and Cocoa add value to the platform? And how "open source" are the open source components of OS X anyway--I don't mean legally, but I mean in terms of development--Darwin isn't exactly a hot, widely used open source project.
Altogether, it's unclear to me that Apple really has changed so much. They are, of course, under no obligation to use an open source desktop or open source toolkits, but as long as they don't, they are still delivering a proprietary system with all the consequences that that entails; in particular, if you develop for the Macintosh GUI, your software will not run on any other platform without a lot of porting efforts.
if I click on a window that belongs to the Gimp, only that one window is made active. The Gimp is an app, and an app usually consists of a collection of windows, palettes, etc - when I activate an app, ALL of the associated windows should be brought forward, not just the one.
Right-click the GIMP windows (you are running a KDE that groups all windows from one app together, right?) select "MOve all to Desktop->pick an empty desktop". Now when you want to bring the GIMP to the front, click on the desktop on which it sits.
I tend to have the GIMP on 2, Blender on 1, and Mozilla, a terminal, and a few odds and ends on 3, while I'm doing graphical work. And I go ahead and let KDE put all applications on all desktops in the process bar so I don't have to remember which desktop each app is on, I can just click on *any* GIMP window and KDE'll automatically take me to the whole GIMP.
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Oh where do I start. ;)
The "taskbar" contained both opened and closed windows. All systems I have seen before then only showed closed windows, opened windows were either not represented or where in a different navigator.
Didn't Commodore's 2.0 version of Amiga Workbench support this? I recall it working as you describe...
The "taskbar" was the first indication that somebody has realized that text is important. They shrunk down the "icon" as small as possible (probably somebody at Microsoft tried to get rid of them, but was stopped by the "experts" who think easy-to-use == pictures). And they made the text in the taskbar icon prominent.
I don't see how this is invention. It's just a graphical design choice. Also a choice made by Commodore, where icons weren't always huge (unless you ran 3rd party software that made huge icons, which you could) and were always accompanied by text. The icon was supposed to be for quick usage, i.e. you could recognize a picture faster than you can read, but was never intended to stand on its own without text.
They got rid of the divider line between the window borders and the contents and made thw windows look a lot more like unified objects. (for some reason they have reverted to old-fashioned graphics today, unfortunatly the good graphic desiginers they had on Windows95 have apparently been replaced by Enlightenment geeks with no clean graphic sense whatsoever).
Aesthetic enhancements != invention
They supported drag-resize of windows, and hacked their system so it was fast enough to draw this on existing machines, rather than punting like far faster Unix machines were doing.
Quite the contrary, you needed a pretty fast 486 to do this. 33mhz at least, iirc, may have required Pentiums (although I knew people that ran win95 on 486s). On the other hand, Commodore Amiga also supported drag-resize of windows, and there was third-party software that would make it redraw the contents while resizing (I recall Macs at the time doing it too, and this was 1988), and they could do it on 7 mhz 68000 machines.
I belive Microsoft is responsible for a lot of the linking of "program to run" to the file itself. Every system I have ever seen before that required an explicit indicator as to the program to run. Apple's files contained this indication (the creator id) and is thus not exactly what Microsoft did. Now this could be done a whole lot better, such as using a program like Unix "file" to figure it out, and there is ZERO support at an os level (why isn't there a system call to exec a file?), but before Windows this idea did not exist.
Um, there is a system call to exec a file, assuming you're talking about executing a file. All Microsoft did was attach extensions to filenames. UNIX has always had MIME types, as far as I know, that define what content is in the file. More recently MIME types include extensions as part of the definition, but not always. There're headers in files that tell you what kind of content it is.
As far as opening a data file and it automatically opening the application that created it (or at least *an* application the user has installed that can open that type of file), um, again Commodore Amiga had this in, what, 1986? Yeah, that sounds about right. ;)
Commodore's Amiga was a very innovative machine, but even then the OS just ripped a number of things from previous existing work, because the OS was just thrown together to get the box out the door and into people's houses. I'm not claiming that Commodore or the Amiga folks innovated these things we're discussing, I'm only pointing out where it was already being used before Microsoft "innovated" it. ;)
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