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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."
That may be all well and even true. But why does Mr. Ballmer remind me so much of glass houses, stones, pots, kettles and the color black?
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
This interview doesn't shed much light on an already dark and rainy corporation. How could this be anything but intellectual masturbation on Microsoft's part when you have a Microsoft employee slow pitching to the biggest windbag at Microsoft? Especially when the two appear to be patting themselves on the back about the fact that Microsoft really does innovate. Aside from the fact Ballmer is amazingly general in his list of innovations, the interviewer asks questions about other companies and if those companies out-innovated Microsoft. Of course, the response is they didn't.
But the interviewer might have asked some more thoughtful questions in that line like:
Not sure why, but even on slashdot Microsoft manages to get some Puff Pieces.
(open the Troll and Flamebait mod floodgates)
When I read the Ballmer quotes, the first thing I thought was, he is saying that there is no room in the industry for anyone but Microsoft.
All these other companies make products that other people use to be innovative. There relly isn't a lot of innovative room in relational databases for Oracle. They make databases, and very good databases and very popular databases, and they make a lot of money doing just that. THEIR CUSTOMERS are the ones who put those databases to good use.
IBM make a lot of stuff. Most of it is pretty good stuff, and they make a lot of money selling that stuff. It is IBM's CUSTOMERS who make good use of it.
"The open source guys..." Well, they make a lot of stuff too. IT IS THE PEOPLE WHO USE OPEN SOURCE software who put it to good use and who are innovative. Open source allows people a little more room to be innovative. They can aquire it at a lower cost. They can alter it to better meet their specific requirements...
Steve Ballmer believes that computers are a platform for software companies to restrict and dictate what happens there. In that model, customers do not decide what computers do, but software vendors. That's why Microsoft feels the need to compete in every single little corner of the software industry. For Microsoft to (almost literally) control the world, they have to be the sole supplier of software to everyone.
"The open source guys" have a different view.
...asking the Osama Bin Laden about the virtues of Catholicism. Okay, maybe not quite, but I don't think MS are a company who do innovation. Rightly or wrongly their approach has been consistently based on developing other peoples innovations into mass-market products. Such as QDOS, VisiCalc, Navigator, GUI OS (from Apple or Xerox, take your pick). So I sincerely doubt the value of Ballmer's comments on this topic.
This is not the sig you are looking for...
And I can whip up a usable, very functional app in seconds that compiles to 3 platforms using REALbasic. If I want a Cocoa OS X app, I can use Xcode and Interface Builder, both of which are free.
Other platforms have similiar, and some would argue better, IDE solutions.
(tig)
Ignorance and prejudice and fear
Walk hand in hand
One innovation that Google came up with is that it learned that it doesn't need a figurehead spokesmodel like Ballmer.
Ballmer does Microsoft a disservice by ranting about innovation but not actually delivering innovation. No wonder why theses Microsoft guys are so uncharismatic - people have a distaste for bullshit-slinging horn tooters.
IBM - the inventor of so many basic industry ideas - is declared a non-innovator.
Apple, who brought so many great ideas from the lab to desktop computing, ideas that Microsoft admittedly embraced after Apple delivered them successfully to market - doesn't get a mention.
And Google, who mostly innovated the idea of not screwing over internet users with ads and pop-ups and cross-marketing crap, is an exciting innovator.
IBM is the innovator of basic technology. Google is the innovator of doing the Internet right. Apple is the PC marketplace innovator.
Microsoft? Um, well they invented something... I just don't know what that is. Truetype? SQL? The mouse? The file system? Does ANYone know?
That's what occured to me just watching.
Shrinkwrap Software only business is over. 50 Billion$ on the bank or not. That's the simple truth. Be it that MS will roll on with XBox 360, 720 or whatever. But their core milkcow is withering.
The CEO of MS having a sweet-little-nothings chinwag with one of his minions and hideously bullshitting 90% of the time won't change that.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
The Lotus software was particularly horrid
!!!
You should pray to develop such "horrid" software. There were two primary things that put the IBM PC on desks all over corporate America: 1) The TLA logo and 2) Lotus 1-2-3. Lotus invented the first "Killer App".
Microsoft introduced their first spreadsheet product before Lotus 1-2-3 hit the market (1982 for the former, 1983 the latter). It was such a huge scary success compared to that horrid Lotus crap that nobody can remember it's name ("Multiplan", BTW).
Excel (for Windows, it was originally introduced on some silly fruit computer of some sort) came out in 1987, leaving Lotus to pretty much own the spreadsheet market in the interim.
and swiftly abandoned by nearly everyone that wasn't glued to their memorized 1-2-3 key combos.
You mean like F1 = Help? Yeah, what a goof that was!
This message brought to you by Old Farts Inc, keeping history on track for hundreds if not thousands of years
OSS is so un-inovative, that Apple based their OS on it, borrows heavily (but they acknowledge it and contribute back). MS steals all the ideas and then declares it for their own.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Incremental compilation
Incremental linking
Pre-compiled headers
Nope. Lightspeed C on the Macintosh had these first.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Another bitter Netscape refugee shows his face.... By the time that Explorer 4.0 hit the market, it was considered by every single reviewer to be superior to Navigator, and that gap only widened, never narrowed. Everyone is entitled to hate Microsoft, but that does not mean that they did not only kick the shit out of Netscape by bundling, you would be a liar to suggest that Navigator was the superior product by the time Netscape began losing market share. You can sling that 'fanboy' crap as far as you want, but back in those days, you could not find a single tech review calling Navigator 4,5 or 6 superior to its competing Microsoft version. Deal with it.
Spoken like someone who doesn't actually know the history of OpenGL or anything about it at all, and only got into 3D programming once D3D was established. I suggest you learn some history, if only to balance your views.
Direct3D is innovative. It revs regularly, and it keeps up with technology. It provides a unified API to deal directly with multiple types of underlying hardware and architecture. It incorporates new hardware functionality directly into that API. It's not perfect, but it works pretty well.
As a Direct3D programmer, I have to say there are two major problems with your argument: firstly, Microsoft didn't create Direct3D, they BOUGHT IT. OK, sure, they've changed it a lot, but mainly to just bring it in line (read "follow" or "catch up") with new hardware innovations by the graphics card vendors like NVIDIA (i.e. shaders, which MS did not invent), and to clean up some of the really braindead aspects of the original design of the API. Secondly, Direct3D never did anything new or original, it only cloned and in fact caught up to either (a) what could already be done in OpenGL or (b) what the hardware vendors invented. MS may sit on advisory boards that steer the development of these technologies now, but they aren't driving the process, that's for sure.
As an example to my point, find a PC game developer who uses Open/GL. Got one? Good. Now, if that developer is iD, go ahead and drop that and find another. Got another? Good. If that's Blizzard (for WoW), go ahead and drop that and find another. Got one? No?
Well, if your definition of "innovative" is "the product that most people use", then we're using very different definitions of "innovative". Most developers use Direct3D due to (extremely obvious) market forces, not because it was more "innovative". In fact (and I know many) most developers that already had experience with OpenGL were dragged kicking and screaming to Direct3D, because it really was an incredibly sh*t API compared to D3D, especially in the beginning.
Oh, please name one thing that can be done in Direct3D that cannot be done in OpenGL. Can't? That's because there isn't anything - with OpenGL's extension mechanism, you can do anything in GL that you can in D3D.