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.

Comments

Re:What are you talking about?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, a recycler, how novel!

... well, it would have been, if it NeXTstep hadn't had it since before 1989 (NeXTstep is also where Window 95 got its taskbar). See for example this page for more details.

... which just serves to show even more how un-innovative Microsoft is. Of course, there's nothing wrong with building on other people's ideas, but there's something pretty sick about then pretending to be creative, and something pretty sad about a market where users are so unaware of alternatives that they buy this lie.

Re:You're absolutely right!

[steffl]

"KDE with a taskbar, start menu, integrated filesystem/net browser, Mono"

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. .net (Mono in gnome world) is MS response to Java, nothing new/innovative.

erik

Re:What are you talking about?

[dbirchall]

Okay, let's take a look further back, then.

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?

Re:You're absolutely right!

[LMCBoy]

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.

Re:You're absolutely right!

[fucksl4shd0t]

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. ;)