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Ballmer on Innovation
prostoalex writes "Robert Scoble interviewed Steve Ballmer on the topics of blogging, innovation at Microsoft, Microsoft's work with developers and other things. Video is available in WMV format." From the interview: "Did IBM out innovate us? I don't think so. I don't think they've done much interesting at all. What about Oracle? I don't think they've done much innovative at all. What about the open source guys? Ah, the business model is interesting but we haven't seen much in the way of technical innovation. People cite Google. Google has done some interesting stuff."
Also, you are certainly wrong in one example you gave. Microsoft did out-innovate Netscape. They mat not have been the first on the scene with a browser, but they were certainly the first to produce one that was a pleasure to use (by the standards at the time) and innovation doesn't always mean precedence, it can mean implementation of existing technology in innovative ways.
Much the same applies to the VisiCalc example. Microsoft took that poorly implemented idea - and I used the original VisiCalc, it was extremely painful to use day to day - and made it into something that most businesses can't do without now.
Did IBM out innovate us? I don't think so.
IBM invented SQL. IBM invented the hard drive. IBM invented the scanning tunnelling microscope. IBM employees have won the Nobel Prize.
IBM may be evil, but it has always been cool evil.
Microsoft on the other hand introduced...uhm...the animated paperclip? The monkey dance? The BSOD?
Really, Ballmer. You just down like IBM because they gave support to Linux. Which makes them even cooler.
"Did IBM out innovate us? I don't think so."
It's kind of ludicrous for Microsoft to claim that IBM hasn't been an innovator. Just about everything in modern computing was developed and commercialized by IBM, including but not limited to:
1. Virtual memory
2. Virtual machines
3. Relational Databases, SQL (ya, I know, but it is an IBM thing)
4. Protected memory
5. Multiuser Operating Systems
6. Multitasking Operating systems
7. Markup (SGML, the parent of HTML and XML)
8. Source code management
9. Spinning disk storage
10. Network terminals, graphics terminals
11. RISC architectures
and so many other basic ideas that most people (including myself & Steve B.) have no concept.
Microsoft brought a half-baked MacOS clone to Intel. That's all. I wouldn't call that innovation.
GUIs:
Development tools:
Emulation:
All in all, I may have misattributed a few innovations, but most of these are from Open Source. Also, there are many others I can't remember or simply don't know. Microsoft has done less innovation than Open Source, that much is obvious.
I would appriciate information fillers on innovations from other projects I'm less familiar with, such as Apache, the Kernel.
I am pretty sure Ballmer really believes what he says, because most people, surely Microsoft employees, are quite ignorant of Opensource offerrings and their innovations.
I think you will find that all economically viable computers had BASIC long before MS existed. (Most compputers that were not economically viable also had BASIC, too). A lot of Mainframes offered a choise of two or three different compilers or BASIC interpreters.
You might want to Google Dartmouth College, or even BASIC. In those days, every man and dog programmer team had written a BASIC interpreter, if not two.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
Speaking about innovation, MS probably meant her .NET technology, for example. Then should we forget who actually did it? The Borland guy!
We can continue the list of innovations.
The new filesystem? But look at Apple, she already implemented this database-like I/O concept and it really works today.
We could continue further, etc.
Honestly, do Balmer remind you a car salesman a bit? As for me, this face isn't even much in real Microsoft spirit and corporate culter. Some descrepancies... There are a lot of very thoughtful ppl over there, and they are not exposed. For example, the already mentioned big ex-Borland guy, big ex-Linux Guy, etc etc.
Probably, money is all that counts at the end :-(
You talk about lack of inovation and give openoffice as only example- an ex-commercial sad-and-sorry MS Office rippoff.
I'll give you some innovation in OSS:
Enlightenment
Konqueror (and it's extensions)
ogg
flac
Rox
zshell
Zope (you can hardly get any more innovative than that)
Python
Ruby
blender (ok, so it wasn't OSS from the start, but it was free (beer) and the people who drove blender back then are the same that do it now, that's why I dare name it - and before you ask: It's Blenders Workspace Management that is to date unmatched by any application in existance. It's actually the successor to desktop-metaphor workspace.)
verse, loqairou et al ( OK, so these are the rare things that are more innovative than Zope, they are the future of interface design and computer interaction and usage. I'd say ten years ahead. Go check if you don't believe me: www.quelsolaar.com/, http://www.uni-verse.org/Blender_Foundation.8.0.h
Bottom line:
What you said is wrong in so many ways. The truth is, a lot or real high-end avantgarde innovation takes place in the OSS world. You just need to open your eyes and look around.
But if your looking for innovation in openoffice your going to have a hard time, I'll promise you that.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Oh, please. What're you, twelve years old?
Go look up "HyperCard" and CORBA. Specifically the timelines. Microsoft haven't innovated anything, ever. All they ever do is look to see what other people are doing, make a barely functional, pale imitation and eventually kludge it into something which is only just usable with huge amounts of pain.
Deleted
Well this is annoying. Scoble complained just earlier on his blog that Slashdot hadn't linked to his Ballmer interview.
:-(. Come on editors, even the interviewer semi-admits this as being a troll-piece in a /. context.
The post in question: Interesting that Slashdot hasn't linked to the Ballmer thing yesterday. Maybe they belong to the Andrew Orlowski "we-must-not-link-to-or-acknowledge-Scoble" school of reporting. Heh.
What's fun is that Ballmer, in the interview yesterday, took a swipe at open source and IBM and Oracle. Surely that'd be worth getting the Slashdotters all riled up.
He got a lot of comments pointing out the interview was content-free, a spin job, and otherwise of generally no interest to the discerning crowd here. How pleased I was to see Scoble's shot go amiss.
And then I refresh the front-page here
I don't believe Linux is innovative, and I see that pervading the entire open source movement.
And I think you're wrong:
Linux had loadable modules as early as 1997; AFAIK Windows 2000 was the first release that could "disable this device" without a reboot.
Linux had flat memory addressing in 1993, two years before Windows 95 could do it.
Emacs is light-years ahead as a text editor than just about anything else, and it was fully open-source by 1985.
IRC was out almost a decade before AOL chat rooms were available.
GAIM was the first IM client I've heard of that combined multiple messaging networks into one interface.
gopher, archie, HTTPD (Apache), sendmail, bind, BSD TCP/IP stack: fundamental Internet technologies that predated most commercial equivalents.
JBoss, Hibernate, Struts, Velocity, Apache Commons projects: pushing further frontiers in J2EE much faster than the commercial servers.
The "entire open-source movement" is a myth. FSF has the stated goal of making a computer that is entirely free from vendor control: they are the only "movement" around. Each of these other projects is just out to get one thing done, and many of them have gone far beyond their commercial counterparts in functionality (a.k.a. "innovation") and reliability.
Microsoft didn't create COM, they bought the technology from IIRC a company called Wang (Technologies? can't remember the details).
Although Visual Studio is actually a fairly decent product (at least, it was from about version 5), it has never been "innovative" in any sense - there is nothing new or original in it, they just added features that were equivalent to what you could already do with competitors' products.
# Incremental compilation
# Incremental linking
Forth, um, 1972? Lisp, 1965?
# Pre-compiled headers
Manx C on the Amiga in 1986.
# A very strong visual debugger, with useful features like DataTips.
# Integrated source browser
# Integrated class browser
Smalltalk, 1978
Remote debugging over tcp/ip
EVERYONE, as soon as TCP/IP existed.
Intellisense (auto-completion)
GNU Readline?
#1. The first spreadsheet app.
VisiCalc
#2. The first use of a mouse.
Xerox
#3. The first GUI.
Xerox
#4. The first web browser/web server.
Netscape
#5. The first relational database app.
IBM
Actually the first web browser was WorldWideWeb, and the first web server was httpd. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WorldWideWeb
"Did IBM out innovate us? I don't think so.
Ballmer's ignorance and arrogance are astounding. Let's just take a simple example: Longhorn. IBM was shipping Longhorn technologies already years ago: database file system, vector graphics (DPS), managed code (Smalltalk, among many others), handwriting and speech recognition, and system wide object model (SOM). Some of these, IBM already shipped decades ago. Some of these technologies, Microsoft is only shipping because they cloned existing products and even hired away IBM employees.
The notion that Microsoft is even in the same league in terms of innovation as IBM is laughable. Microsoft has yet to prove that they can deliver any kind of innovation beyond Clippy and Bob in their products at all.
Um, I think virtual memory is an English invention: vide the Ferranti Atlas.
The concept of relational databases definitely came from IBM (http://www.acm.org/classics/nov95/toc.html). They were also the creators of the first disk drive (http://www.duxcw.com/digest/guides/hd/hd2.htm). Those are the only two that I can verify off of the top of my head.
To say that IBM hasn't out-innovated Microsoft is ludicrous. To say they haven't out-innovated them in the software market is an entirely different matter (and one that I don't know enough about to delve into).