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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."
you know, i really don't think he knows what that word means:
innovate: 1. To begin or introduce (something new) for or as if for the first time. 2. To begin or introduce something new.
what has microsoft introduced lately that is so new? i honestly don't know: i haven't used microsoft products seriously in 10 years. they're not even on my radar any more.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Microsoft has a very good research team in place,but that does not ensure innovation. I think they are having problems with translating research into products. Previously, their research was market oriented...say UI design for the common man etc. which did well for their prodcuts initially.That has now saturated.
The kind of innovation we see from MS nowadays is generally of a kind not needed, like what they did with RSS. (it's a standard for a bloody reason!).
Also, MS has spread themselves too thin by stepping into too many areas...OS'es, Search Engines, Spyware, etc. Well, maybe it's time to let go and focus on what they are...an OS company.
BTW, does anyone know how many MS innovations were by acquiring companies. Does that count?
just think about it, how each and every company always claims absolute leadership and innovation, market-leadership and to be the utmost and best of there is out there...
The reason they do that is best explained by the man who formalized that concept. Nazi Germany's minister of propaganda, Josef Goebbels once said: "if you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes the truth".
Corporations (and, gee, governments too) these days use exactly that same technique, whether it's in PR statements, interviews, punditry or advertising. They found it's easier to buy time with VC money and try to let the lies sink in in the general public to get people to buy their products, than putting out actually good products. There are exceptions of course, but that's the rule these days. And don't forget the added benefit of workers buying the lies too and working harder as a result...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
But they aren't genuinely "innovative" most of the time. Anyone who wants to see real innovation should look at Sun, Apple and Be before Be went belly up. Look at how small Be's development team was, yet somehow they managed to create a 64bit file system with many of WinFS' features back in what? 1998-1999?
.NET, Java, Windows Media, etc.
The one legitimate criticism of open source development though, is that you'd not have thinks like Apache Jakarta were it not for Sun creating Java. Open source and commercial closed source development should have the same relationship that name brand and generic drugs have. Software patents, IMO, would work if 2 things happened:
1) We had a patent office with people who knew what they were doing and could safely reject bad patents.
2) Software patents lasted for 2-3 years so that way the businesses could get a reward for doing stuff like creating
The problem is that just as Microsoft takes Apples ideas, so do some projects like Mono and OpenOffice take Microsoft's ideas.
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
Open Office offers something MS don't. A full MS Office-compatible (YMMV for sure) suite at a fraction of the cost. Innovation cannot come in a market so dominated by one player since no-one will buy a productivity suite that doesn't open MS Office documents no matter how superb it is.
Does a Christian soccer team even need a goalkeeper?
I"m sick and tired of hearing how gnu-linux/opensource/bsd is not innovative
What you are forgetting is that the whole internet thing became possible thorugh open source. What kind of software has made DNS and email possible?
The first web browsers like Mosaic were all open source. Apache the webserver that nearly everybody uses is open source as well.
I'm using OSX right now. What has apple copied from linux/open source? Well its copied a lot. From its scripting languages (python, perl, ruby), to its web server (apache), file system sharing (samba, nfs). Its all copied from linux/bsd.
The beautiful irony of the situation is that there's no evidence he ever actually said that. It is itself likely just a lie that gets repeated over and over.
Oh Please! Microsoft did not "out-innovate" Netscape by any stretch of the imagination. The only reason IE took over market share is BECAUSE IT WAS INCLUDED FOR FREE IN EVERY OS IN 95% OF THE COMPUTERS.
Duh. But I guess you're just a Microsoft fanboy.. *shudder*.
--- witty signature
Ballmer's not talking about hardware innovation obviously and he's hardly even talking about software innovation. He really means "marketshare" when he means innovation: the ability to bring the market together under one platform and to create a huge environment for 3rd party solutions on top of that.
I can't speak for their marketers or upper-management, but I've met with and interfaced with a couple hundred employees from Microsoft over the past decade and I'd say 90% of them have been more passionate, smarter, and more 'innovative' than the average employee I've met at any other computer software-related business.*
Furthermore, it's amazing how passionate many are about their particular product line. Shit, just read some of their blogs and you'll see how much many care about the products they work on, the user experience, and so on. So saying 'the literally don't care' is about as far from reality as I can imagine. So either you are psychotic or ignorant or the people at Microsoft you've interfaced with personally happen to be vastly different from those that I've met/socialized with/worked with. (And I'm sure you have had the interactions and experience to make such claims as you did in your post, no? Or are you just saying this based on the fact that your Win98 box blue screens once a day? Yeah....)
* - the majority of people I've met/worked with at Microsoft have been either in the Office team or ASP.NET team, so my observations may be skewed if just cool people work there.
I could not justify my existence if I were a turkey farmer. Would I terminate myself? Undoubtably, yes.
PROBLEM: Giving away software has killed technological innovations.
Why should Microsoft or any company for that matter spend millions on technological innovations when the market price for software is quickly approaching zero?
How much would you pay for a car if you could get a free one, albeit a no-frills one? How quickly would the car prices drop and the car manufactures stop creating new ones in such a market?
When programmer's jobs are being outsourced to other countries, the programming community is developing sophisticated software systems that could easily compete in the marketplace and giving them away.
We are destroying the very environment that we depend on for a living wage by working for free.
SOLUTION: Stop giving businesses free licenses to Open Source Software.
By making businesses pay, it reminds them that what we do is hard and worth money. The market price for software can begin to rise up creating software development jobs in this country and innovation can begin to rise up from the dead.
What "problems" are you thinking of ?
I still have to ensure that the DAILY anti-virus/anti-spyware downloads happen.
Maybe you should embrace some basic security principles then.
The same virus that was known to infect Win98 ... will STILL infect Win2003.
THAT is the problem.
No, it's the price of compatibility. You want your 10 year old applications to run on today's OS ? That means 10 year old malicious code will run as well.
Microsoft's security model PREFERS for you to run ADDITIONAL 3rd party software because the OS itself does not (without massive amounts of work and testing on the part of the HIGHLY TRAINED administrator) provide any way of stopping viruses, worms, trojans, spyware, etc.
Oh, bullshit. The vast majority of problems in running as a non-Admin in Windows are the responsibility of *application developers*, not Microsoft.
What about the open source guys? Ah, the business model is interesting but we haven't seen much in the way of technical innovation.
What have Microsoft actually innovated? I would seriously like to know. All I ever see from them is new functionality in the form of defensive answers to the innovation of others. They copy, modify or buy innovation. But what have they genuinely innovated?
I love using OpenBSD servers and firewalls, OSX desktops and begrudgingly use Windows XP Pro on my laptop (along with FreeSBD, which I love too). I just bought a very nice new Sony VAIO VGN-A49GP notebook with a 1920x1200 17" LCD display. The display is spectacular to say the least, but text is difficult to read at the default dpi setting within Windows XP of 96dpi. This displays true resolution is about 133dpi so I have tried various settings within XP including the "Large Size (120dpi)" setting which I figured would be catered for well. All settings larger than 96dpi, even the 120dpi option, cause font problems within system dialogs and web sites including Microsofts own from within IE. Often text within a SYSTEM dialog renders beyond the window it is within and is thus unreadable. I can't imagine such a problem occuring within OSX. Even Windows XP is still a dogs breakfast in these sorts of regards and shows that Microsoft products are still completely covered in bandages, instead of being fixed at fundamental levels. Do they even bother testing these perhaps fringe settings? 120dpi is their "Large Size" setting, so you would think at least it was tested. Could this come down to the driver? If so I would have to say that that indicates a fundamental design flaw if a driver is able to cause such havoc.
OpenBSD has deployed (I realise they may not have innovated the fundamentals) active memory protection security measures which Microsoft attempted much later and only came half way to what OpenBSD deployed.
Microsoft is not leading innovation in usability or security and I personally would say they are also not leading in stability (although I agree they have come a very long way). Performance is an area where there is a lot of overlap, but for a company with so much money and so many paid developers, I have to wonder why they don't have it all?
Oh no, wait a second, no I don't... that's right, they trumpet features and all those other things in prime time slots, etc and sell product based more on the trumpetting than the actual quality they deliver. I guess this is to be expected though, just like from the rest of the big capitalist corps like Cisco, Sony, Apple... wait, then how is it that Apple can keep reinventing themselves and their products, while keeping viable AND delivering quality products?
I live for the day when Microsoft dies. Thank heavens FreeBSD runs on my $5,000 AU notebook. ; )
War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?
IBM, Oracle, and open source don't innovate? How about Eclipse?! Xen and hypervisor technology? Grid computing? The Cell processor? Damn, there's so many things. As far as market innovations that Joe Average would care about, though ... no, they don't "innovate" much. And most of the innovations that happen in the software world come incrementally, through the efforts of multiple organizations and countless developers.
About the only good thing to ever have come from Redmond is the .NET framework and the XMLHttpRequest object.
Ironic that Microsoft can't seem to make hardly any cash off two of its best innovations ever.
random underscore blankspace at ya know hoo dot comedy.
YOU ARE COMPLETELY WRONG, OF COURSE! MS (as it was proven in court back in the mid to late '90s - so it is simply accepted FACT) used their OS dominance to come out with the latest and most compatible spreadsheet - Excel - quicker to market than Lotus (superior spreadsheet) and WordPerfect (superior WP). That is why and how. For many years, until perhaps version 6 or later, Excel was far inferior to Lotus - I could do major online file swapping and downloads and integration from financial services and banks on Lotus - that were simply impossible to do on Excel - UNTIL MUCH LATER!!!! History can be revised - but never truly changed!
Microsoft is a company with, what, 30,000 employees? Not a single one of them 'gives a hoot?'
That's right. Otherwise we wouldn't be seeing problems such as IE being "integrated" with the OS.
Having worked at MS in 98/99, I can say that "giving a hoot" doesn't amount to much. I was part of several projects where the majority of the team wanted to do something great, but red tape and politics got in the way.
At one point, after months of upper management arguing about how to do it, I rewrote the FastCounter interface over a weekend. I presented it, the team loved it. Yet it sat on the shelf. Too many people wanted to prove they were in control. Eventually I left. But a lot of good people stayed on.
Anyways, corporations are a group, not an individual. There are many great individuals at Microsoft. But as a group, as a corporation, their greatness can get lost.
Cheers.
This is stuningly wrong. I don't have my copy of Patterson and Hennesy next to me but off the top of my head and from a quick wikipedia cross refrenced by some googleing. Virtual memory came from the University of Manchester, the pascal P-code interp is not affilited with IBM and the first virtual machine, and of course the RISC architecture was developed at Berkeley and Stanford by Patterson, Hennesy.
This is just off the top of my head but some of the other firsts look suspicious as well. Maybe others who know can comment. But I just had to clear up some of these egregious statments in the parent.
Mark
I'm surprised the parent was modded up to Insightful.
If you'd like some *real* insight on what it's like to work at Microsoft, then feel free to ask one of us employees.
"That's right. Otherwise we wouldn't be seeing problems such as IE being "integrated" with the OS."
Here's one of your problems: "We" don't see it as a religious/philosophical issue. Integrating IE is tied in to the idea of it being a platform. There are services from IE being used elsewhere throughout the OS. Other applications are taking advantage of the features IE offers.
Whether you like the technical solution or not, that's the point. It was never about trying to Beat Down the Proletariat or any other such nonsense. If it weren't for the fact that there were some legal issues there, *you* wouldn't even have an opinion on it. You wouldn't give a shit at all.
Keep in mind that, no matter how tightly integrated IE is, you can still run Opera/Firefox/whatever.
"That's great. But those marketers and upper-management ones that you haven't met are the ones that tell the techs what to do and how to do it."
You clearly have no personal experience inside the company.
First of all, different teams operate in different ways, and when you have 60,000 employees (that's right - it's 60,000 and not 30,000, a number to which you agreed, again showing you haven't done your homework), you are *not* going to find One True Style of Management and Product Development.
On my team, for example, we, the lowly workers, have been given a *lot* of freedom to drive what we do. We've actually decided to put more responsibility on ourselves so that we can have more control over how we accomplish our goals. Nobody along the way told us we couldn't do that.
Are there teams which have to bow to the whims of "upper management" (how many "upper managers" do you know at MS?)? Probably. I can't speak for them, though, since I'm not on one, and since I haven't encountered anything remotely like what you're talking about.
I could go on, but, frankly, I consider you to have been sufficiently discredited.
I'm not saying you didn't make a few decent points, but your overall message is flawed with half-baked bullshit you pulled out of your ass.
"Microsoft's security model PREFERS for you to run ADDITIONAL 3rd party software because the OS itself does not (without massive amounts of work and testing on the part of the HIGHLY TRAINED administrator) provide any way of stopping viruses, worms, trojans, spyware, etc."
So, you're upset that the OS "does not...provide any way of stopping viruses...etc."
Fine, but a minute ago, you were complaining that IE was integrated too tightly, and now you sound like you want us to embed *more* software.
You have to make up your mind.
Every time we try to add something of value to the OS (what *any* good OS builder would do - whether we're talking about *nix, or anything else), people completely freak out.
And now you want us to go ahead and do it.
Do you have any idea how frustrating that message is?
- Rory [Microsoft Employee] | Free dirt: neopoleon.com
6. Multitasking Operating systems
This is plainly wrong. From http://www.multicians.org/thvv/7094.html, CTSS, of course, stands for Compatible Time-Sharing System. That is, the first multi-user/multi-tasking operating system. True, it was not fully multi-tasking in the sense we are used to today. That had to wait for MULTICS and UNIX, which were developed at.... ta-dah... Bell Labs! Oh wait, look at that, that's NOT IBM...
SIGSEGV caught, terminating
wait... not that kind of sig.
Success with an "innovation" usually comes from the second or third company down the line that's able to market it to the public at large.
Xerox Park may have innovated with the windows, mouse, and the gui, and Apple may have planted the seed, but MS is the one who brought the concept to the masses. Which one "deserves" the credit?
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
Suggesting that they don't understand free software is a bizarre POV.
Little news tidbits like these ones actually explain why there's been a steady trickle of those bizarre, off the wall, statements and comments, from Ballmer, Gates, and other senior Microsoft officers. You know -- the comments like open source being some demonic spawn of Vladimir Il'ich Lenin; or Richard Stallman invading your corporate vaults and stealing your company secrets, etc... etc... etc...
I do believe that Open Source software, and Linux specifically, are taking a bigger, and bigger chunk out of Microsoft's revenues. Not much, in fact it's rather piddly; but it's still noticeable. And it's growing. Although few people on /. can actually put a monetary amount on how much it actually is,
if there's anybody in the world who has a pretty good idea how much revenue
Microsoft is losing because of Linux, it must be Gates, Ballmer, and the
rest of Microsoft's upper echelon.
And I think they're getting scared.
That may be a bit self-serving or presumptious, and with 40 billion in the bank they clearly don't have much to worry about. Still, I think they have to have at least a mild case of indigestion.
There's nothing in this story that really should surprise anyway. So the feds, and the spooks, are using Linux, sometimes in a quite visible, and mission-critical way. So? That's nothing earth-shattering. And that's precisely what's giving Ballmer and Co the problem. Linux has traction. Not just the feds. Linux has traction in big corporate America. SIAC - the folks who run the networks for the stock exchanges, have cut over some mission-critical functionality over to Linux. Look at the classifieds ads in New York City, from big financial firms. There's a small trickle of open job reqs for hackers with Linux experience.
Gates, Ballmer, and Co, are seeing this as well as the next guy, and they just don't know what to do about it. That's what's scaring them. It's one thing when you have a well-defined opponent to do battle with. But how do you define the opponent here? Microsoft can't clearly define who their opponent here is. There's no single company to purchase, spread FUD about, or drag into court over some frivolous intellectual issue, in order to bleed them with legal fees.
So, all you can do is to try to FUD your way against Linux in general. But each time you'll try to go with a generic FUD campaign, your arguments can be easily shut down with a single, specific, counterexample of Linux's success in a mission-critical role. There's enough case history out there now to be able to point to, as a counterargument to FUD.
Microsoft is clearly struggling, trying to figure out a focused, targeted, anti-Linux campaign, and failing each time. Notice how they no longer claim that Linux isn't ready for mission-critical roles. That didn't work. Now they're claiming that using Linux puts your intellectual property in jeopardy. That can't last much longer. They still can't come up with a specific example, and only talk about in generalities; furthermore with Sun and HP putting Linux APIs into their respectives *nixes, the notion that Sun and HP have intentionally put their intellectual property in jeopardy is a bit difficult to swallow.
So, I don't think the intellectual property FUD has much more left in it, and it will slowly disappear over time. So, what's the next FUD attack? I don't know. Neither does Ballmer, or Gates. And that's what's scaring them.
Acorn had anti-aliased fonts on it's RiscOS computers for years before MS did. If you can't see where they take their ideas from, you're not looking hard enough.
Where do you get your information? I don't think IBM invented *ANY* of those things. They may have been the first company to bring products with those features to market, but that's the same thing Microsoft does.
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I think the meaning of "innovation" has changed over the years. To me, innovation means doing things that haven't been done before to solve an old problem in a more efficient way or to solve a problem that was unsolvable with current technology.
I don't believe that Linux, Firefox, JBoss, etc. are real innovations. They are simply a better fill-in-the-blank.
While the idea of free and open software makes sense from the emotional stand point, it runs counter to software as a profession where one expects to get paid.
The prevailing "wisdom" on Slashdot is that OSS is far superior based on the simple fact that it is free. However, another belief on these same boards is that outsourcing is terrible and wrong and all things evil but is mainly maintenance programming or application programming. The real programming is done in the developed countries.
Let's assume that all of this is true for a moment. What do we have by applying these common beliefs?
OSS is very innovative and outsourcing, while evil, isn't really the cream of the crop development. So the innovative, i.e. cream programming, work is best done for free and the drudgery jobs are going to be outsourced.
Great. So how do we get paid????