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."

Comments

The monkey man screeches

[CaptainZapp]

"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."

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?

Re:The monkey man screeches

[Anonymous Coward]

>What about the open source guys? Ah, the
> business model is interesting but we haven't
> seen much in the way of technical innovation."

You have to understand this about Microsoft:
1) They are __not__ a technology company trying
to sell their products. They are a __marketing__
driven company whose products __happen__ to be
technological products.

2) Microsoft doesn't lead. Because they are a
marketing company, they __watch__ marketing __trends__ to see which way the wind blows.
When they think they know which way the market is going, then they will
either:
a) Buy the start up if they can.
b) Make their own (inferior) version if they can't buy the competition.

You have to wrap your head around those 2 points
until you grok the implications.

What are some of the implications?
1) They don't understand the motivation behind
open source and more specifically, free (GPL) software. As a marketing firm trying to sell product where's the money to be made here?

Answer: None. If there is no money to be made
from selling product, then why would you
waste time on it? (You have __got__ to see this
in market droid mode. This question doesn't make sense to ask from a technology point
of view, but Microsoft doesn't live in technology mode, they just visit and harvest from the technology world.)

2. You can't buy out open source software. You
can buy out a start up company or an individual
(like the creator of Gentoo), but that doesn't
stop the competition from using and improving
the software nevertheless.

You can't rip off the software either, in particular, you can't rip off GPL software
and be a leech about it.

So, from a __marketing__ point of view,
there is no "interesting" or "innovative"
software in the open source world, since
like MC Hammer sang it, they "can't touch this!".

I would have said in the past that Ballmer
is just an outright liar, but if you read
the above and grok it, you can see that
to use another a cliche, Baller "just doesn't get it."

--Johnny

Re:The monkey man screeches

[Anonymous Coward]

"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.

Re:The monkey man screeches

[dbIII]

Did IBM out innovate us? I don't think so. I don't think they've done much interesting at all

Things like high temperature superconductivity are boring - visual basic and clippy, those are innovations that are really ... wait, does this guy really believe what he is saying? Microsoft didn't even do any R&D a few years back, and what have they done since they did start R&D that actually is innovative and not just porting stuff done elsewhere to a different platform? I'm sure there must be something (and no folks, optical mice don't count because you could buy optical mice from other vendors before Microsoft had heard of them and put in an order).

Re:The monkey man screeches

[lemaymd]

I am a Linux developer and love the OS, but you have to admit that a lot of the stuff on Linux is a copy of something in OS X or Windows. It seems like Linux is always playing catch-up and MS and Apple are the ones producing innovation, along with less frequent contributions from UNIX companies like SGI. Who picked up on anti-aliased desktop fonts first, who was the first to really push web services into the mainstream, etc. I think MS plays a very important role in technology advancement.

Re:The monkey man screeches

[Skim123]

Who exactly is 'they'? Microsoft is a company with, what, 30,000 employees? Not a single one of them 'gives a hoot?'

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.

Re:The monkey man screeches

[mspohr]

"Hm, they developed Word, Excel, and Powerpoint to their current forms."

I wouldn't call the current bloaded "everything and the kitchen sink" MS Office apps "innovative".

WinCE shoehorned a bloated Windows OS into a small form factor. The success they have had has been due to their market monopoly rather than any technical excellence.

Yes, competition has faded in the face of monopoly market power.

Re:The monkey man screeches

[aej17]

Oh for crying out loud. You HAVE to know exactly what he meant. "They" are the people who make the final decisions. "They" are the people "you can't speak for". I am sure that there are people who work at MS who are passionate about their work and are actually nice people. That is not the point. It is obvious from any number of examples over the past two decades that MS, AS A CORPORATION, does not particularly care about either quality of their products or innovation in those products. What the parent post said was dead on.

Re:The monkey man screeches

[sirdude]

I think all articles everywhere that mention Steve Ballmer should include a link to this.

Re:The monkey man screeches

[revscat]

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.

I'm afraid to say that the evidence available does not support the implied conclusion, namely that because developers you have met care passionately about their jobs that quality software therefore winds up hitting the shelves. And here is the reason why you are a bit off, I think:

I can't speak for their marketers or upper-management,

It matters little how passionate the developers at Microsoft are if the upper management is having problems of vision, strategy, cohesiveness, etc. The products that Microsoft has produced have been by and large quite crappy, and I think the eventual cause of this was stated correctly by the AC OP: they're marketing driven, not technology driven. Such emphasis comes from the top.

Re:The monkey man screeches

[antic]

If you seriously think that Microsoft doesn't "understand" Open Source, you're an idiot. They understand it but they cannot ever show any support for it because doing so would concede ground and that territory is profit, shareprice and morale (all things that matter to a company). If there was a way to make equivalent money out of GPLed software, you can bet they'd do it. There isn't (they make more doing what they already do), so they don't. It's that simple.

Suggesting that they don't understand free software is a bizarre POV.

Re:The monkey man screeches

[Locutus]

I think most will agree that if anybody intends to seek payment for a service or product, they must market the said service or product. In a open and COMPETITIVE market, being able to say/show that you have the BEST product or service is how the marketing people sell the product/service. Once established, they can "sell" the "feel good" concept of making the right choice because of the BEST product/service approach worked. This is how the OSS market works. MySQL, JBoss, etc support vendors must show their prospective customers why the product is the best choice and why they are the ones who should be hired to help implement or support the customer.

Because Microsoft grew from being handed the PC monopoly and grew not into a competitor, but into an anti-competitor, what Microsoft markets has never been designed to be the BEST on the market. That is what differentiates Microsoft from pretty much all other companies.

Think snake oil salesmen. Great marketing, not much product.

LoB

Re:The monkey man screeches

[QuestorTapes]

> Suggesting that they don't understand free software is a bizarre POV.

Actually, I'd say it's pretty much typical. I've been doing a lot of reading lately on conversation and confrontation. Most people seem to argue from implicit assumptions that:

1- my point of view is correct, therefore yours is wrong.
2- since my point of view is obviously correct, anyone who doesn't agree with me probably lacks information.
3- once the information has been provided too them, if they still don't agree with me, they have a problem with comprehension; they just "don't get it."

I've been guilty of that one a lot, myself.

Re:The monkey man screeches

[stealth.c]

He's saying that from the top, Microsoft, as a corporation (we're talking about management here), doesn't care.

No bureaucracy does. Much less a marketing-driven one.

Re:The monkey man screeches

[ma_luen]

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

Re:The monkey man screeches

[timeOday]

Just about everything in modern computing was developed and commercialized by IBM, including but not limited to:

But wait a moment, how many of those things came out during Microsoft's lifetime?

I was at a conference this past week, and one presenter said that the information technology industry is mature, and the smart money is moving onto to biotech. Your list of 25-year-old+ computer innovations seems to lend support to his assertion. Then I read that SGI is dying and think about how many more computer makers there were 20 years ago than now. And processor speeds have stalled for the first time ever, leading to the multicore band-aid.

For all Ballmer's bluster about innovation, it seems to me the entire industry is stale. Where we go from here I don't know.

Re:The monkey man screeches

[Q Who]

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.

Re:The monkey man screeches

[jejones]

Um, I think virtual memory is an English invention: vide the Ferranti Atlas.

Re:The monkey man screeches

[man_of_mr_e]

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.

Re:The monkey man screeches

[QuestorTapes]

Thanks for the feedback. Actually, the books I was referring to have nothing to do with liberal relativism. Absolutely, one point of view may be the indisputably correct one. But for the purposes of discussion and debate, assuming you are right and the other guy is wrong inhibits rather than promotes the connection necessary to help the other guy understand 'the indisputably correct point of view'.

I'm very definitely not a liberal relativist.

I was referring not to the idea that "everyone's opinion is right", or "value judgements make people feel sad, boo-hoo", but rather the old principle from Dale Carnegie's "How To Win Friends & Influence People":

'A man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still'

It's not 'evil' to believe that "I'm right and the other guy is wrong", but it's pointless to argue from the standpoint that "I'm right, therefore you're wrong, and since I've explained it to you patiently, you must be defective."

I've just been realizing that most serious conflicts I've had require -me- to have missed something as well as the other guy missing something. Not necessarily something technical, usually not something that changes my thinking in the slightest. But -something-, often something that turns out to be based on assumptions I've made. Often I've assumed that the other guy has had similar experiences to mine, or evaluates pros and cons exactly the same way I do.

Often the other guy comes around to my point of view; but -only- because I first took the time to try to understand his point of view.

Re:The monkey man screeches

[Grishnakh]

I guess you never heard of Intel. Until the latest CEO, Paul Otellini, was put in charge recently, every single president and CEO was an engineer.

Of course, engineers don't always make the best technical decisions however, which might explain why Intel used the Netburst and Itanium architectures... But economically speaking, Intel is more successful than all those other companies.

Re:The monkey man screeches

[Glooty-Us-Maximus]

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).

free Puff Piece for Microsoft? Here?

[yagu]

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:

• Did MicroPro out-innovate us? (first word processor WordPro)
• Did Bricklin and Frankston out-innovate us? (fist spreadsheet... VisiCalc)
• Did Netscape out-innovate us? (guess!)
• Did Google...
• Did DARPA? (internet, TCP/IP, etc.)

Not sure why, but even on slashdot Microsoft manages to get some Puff Pieces.

(open the Troll and Flamebait mod floodgates)

Asking *MS* about innovation?

[Colin Smith]

You've got to be kidding. They really don't have any idea what technical innovation is. Microsoft is really a marketing company who do software as a sideline. They've certainly had some innovative marketing strategies but nothing on the technical side.

Re:Asking *MS* about innovation?

[Ingolfke]

EMACS doesn't copy Microsoft, it copies vi. Drop it and switch to a decent editor now.

Re:Asking *MS* about innovation?

[Ingolfke]

and linux does? all linux /oss guys do is copy MS....

You're full of crap. Linux absolutely does not copy Microsoft. They copy BSD.

Re:Asking *MS* about innovation?

[Tim Browse]

You mean the iPod click wheel? :-)

Re:Asking *MS* about innovation?

[jcr]

Incremental compilation
Incremental linking
Pre-compiled headers

Nope. Lightspeed C on the Macintosh had these first.

-jcr

Re:Asking *MS* about innovation?

[ScrewMaster]

"developers, Developers, DEVELOPERs, developers"

Put it this way, Microsoft wants to convince the end-users (who know and care nothing about how software works or is written) that they can fly like that little bird. Why one would wish to do this is left up to the viewer's imagination, I guess. But the real message is that whatever you want to do with your computer, Windows will take you there. You may or may not be using a Microsoft application, depending upon your needs, but outside of Office, Microsoft could care less about that so long as it is a Windows application.

Microsoft wants Windows to be seen as the be-all and end-all of operating systems to the bulk of the user base. This takes applications, and lots of them, so that no matter what someone wants to do with their computer they can find someone with a program to do it. In reality, you can probably find several competing products, and pick the one that best suits your needs. Ballmer is clearly aware that there is no way any single company, even Microsoft, can possibly provide that much variety.

That's why Microsoft focuses so heavily on developer tools ... without us and the wealth of third-party applications we produce, their monopoly would be in jeopardy. That's ever more true today, because the open source world has a lot of applications too, and most of them are free. Ultimately, the success or failure of a desktop OS hinges upon users just being able to do what they want to do, with minimal effort. Linspire's Michael Robertson is also very much aware of this: hence the Linspire "Click 'N Run" service ... frankly, I'm surprised that Microsoft hasn't already done something similar. They certainly have the resources. Probably another example of their "innovation" at work.

Heck, I'm an example of what I'm talking about. I have a substantial home network (like a lot of /.ers, I expect) and most of those machines are Windows boxes. I'd like to switch everyone over to something else, but there's a couple of niche apps that we use around the house that I haven't found good replacements for in an another OS, such as Linux or *BSD or whatever. And until I do, or code my own equivalents, we'll be using Windows. And from Ballmer's perspective ... that's precisely the point.

take advantage and exploit that

[Anonymous Coward]

from the interview:

Q: I'm on the evangelism team here, why do we have an evangelism team?

A: Well, really helping developers understand what we got available for them to use, not just frankly in Windows, but in Office and our Server products, what they can take advantage of, exploit that. ...

Yes, and with poor software design, a lot of exploits can be written.

Re:take advantage and exploit that

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

A: Well, really helping developers understand what we got

And Balmer really knows all about that doesn't he?

innovation.

[torpor]

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.

Re:innovation.

[damsa]

malware?

Re:innovation.

[advocate_one]

innovate: 1. To begin or introduce (something new) for or as if for the first time. 2. To begin or introduce something new.

There you go... that's how Microsoft can, with a straight face, call whatever they do "innovation"...

Re:innovation.

[dustmite]

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.

Re:innovation.

[daVinci1980]

Why does it matter that you are a D3D programmer? Neither of your arguments have anything to do with programming in D3D, rather they have to do with the history of D3D.

Which is irrelevant. The fact that MS bought D3D is irrelevant to whether or not D3D now is innovative. Innovation is not the same thing as invention (or patentability). Prior art does not negate innovation. The fact that someone did something before you doesn't mean that you cannot be innovative. Google hasn't done anything that hasn't been done before, they just do it better. Execution matters. And the execution of D3D continues to get better and better. Meanwhile, OGL stagnates. The extensions are not part of OGL until they are approved.

As far as never doing anything first... You only think that because you don't realize how extensions in OGL are added. Do you think that someone dreams up an extension first? Not a chance. Look at the extensions registry. The majority of proposed extensions (and pretty much all of the interesting ones) come from NVIDIA, 3DFX (still haven't been approved, huh?), ATI and the older 3D HW manufacturers.

A lot of the extensions that are proposed to OGL are a direct result of requirements for new versions of D3D.

But as a few examples of things that D3D did first... Multitexturing. Shader support. Caps bits. MRTs.

That's not to say the D3D is always the latest and greatest. For example, percent-closer-filtering (used in HW soft-shadow mapping) has had an extension available in OGL for what now, 4 years? And it still hasn't made it into D3D.

The bottom line is that MS is still innovative in that the things that are available in D3D, are available on all 3D accelerated hardware. (Which is actually why PCF is not included in D3D. ATI has yet to add support for it.)

Re:innovation.

[mikael]

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?


I've been to interviews for entertainment software companies and 3D chip vendors. There are two demands that Microsoft makes on each type of company.

For entertainment software companies:

1. That the most qualified staff are assigned to DirectX projects.

For 3D chip vendors:

2. That the most qualified staff are assigned to DirectX projects.

Because of this, many 3D drivers simply convert the OpenGL API calls into DirectX commands.

Innovation!

[utopicillusion]

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?

Re:same old same old.... everybody is leader but..

[CHESTER COPPERPOT]

That's what happens when you have an economic system that magnifies mans already flawed greedy nature. Case in point was the guy who said "I mean, my first thought when I heard (about the London bombings) -- just on a personal basis, when I heard there had been this attack and I saw the futures this morning, which were really in the tank, I thought, "Hmmm, time to buy."

Show me one example

[Anonymous Coward]

of an interview with an open source developer or "leader" that is not exactly the same intellectual masturbation.

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.

Re:Show me one example

[mallardtheduck]

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.

If we're talking about spreadsheets, I think you'll find that Lotus 123 was once the killer app for business computing. (Lotus 123 was the name given to VisiCalc when IBM bought it.) Excel only achived dominance when Windows became popular. 123 for Windows was late in arrival.

Re:Show me one example

[Darth Maul]

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*.

Re:Show me one example

[Monte]

(Lotus 123 was the name given to VisiCalc when IBM bought it.)

No, "123" was the name Lotus Development Corp. gave to their spreadsheet product, many many years before (a) Microsoft ran 123 out of town with Excel and then (b) IBM bought Lotus primarily for their Notes product. Which was innovative, IMHO.

Re:Show me one example

[LibertineR]

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.

Re:Show me one example

[sgt_doom]

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 Innovative

[Evil W1zard]

Or at least they will be soon when they are the first company to buy a Spyware company and then incorporate that Spyware directly into the OS. Plus the Spyware will be proprietary so you will need to pay them 10k to view some code to make an API for your spyware to talk to its spyware and ....

At least one innovation...

[LaminatorX]

Hey, come on. If these guys weren't so innovative I'd never have been able to program my Altair in BASIC. That's gotta count for somethin.

Re:At least one innovation...

[Anne Thwacks]

Are you suggesting that MS invented BASIC?

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.

Re:same old same old.... everybody is leader but..

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

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...

Does IBM innovate more than Microsoft?

[nurhussein]

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.

Developers Developers .. gasp .. developers!

[cerebis]

I have a hard time taking any interest in what Mr Ballmer says, especially after that ridiculous "developers" chant he performed recently. Not to say much more about the crowd that, rather than laughing him off the stage, clapped and cheered.

What a weird world that must be.

Microsoft may do cool stuff

[ShatteredDream]

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?

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 .NET, Java, Windows Media, etc.

The problem is that just as Microsoft takes Apples ideas, so do some projects like Mono and OpenOffice take Microsoft's ideas.

He's Not 100% Wrong...

[GaryPatterson]

I am a big fan of the concept of open source, and free software.

I don't believe it can work in every situation, but the idea is good.

The most damning thing about Linux (for example) is that it has zero innovation. I want to see something new for the desktop, not rehashed ideas that Apple or Microsoft or Unix implemented years earlier.

I don't believe Linux is innovative, and I see that pervading the entire open source movement.

Look at Open Office. Great idea, lousy implementation. Apart from the cost, what benefit does it have over Microsoft Office? There's nothing new in it, nothing innovative.

I'd even go so far as to say that the amount of sameness cripples it. Apple did more with Pages than the Open Office has with its word 'wannabe', and it shows. They're trying something new, something innovative.

Ballmer is right when he says open source software is not innovative. I disagree with the man on almost everything he says and is, but he's right in that.

And goddamn it, I wish he weren't

Re:He's Not 100% Wrong...

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

The most damning thing about Linux (for example) is that it has zero innovation. I want to see something new for the desktop, not rehashed ideas that Apple or Microsoft or Unix implemented years earlier. I don't believe Linux is innovative, and I see that pervading the entire open source movement.

You say this because you expect innovation from Linux. However, the truth is, Linux started out as a brilliant student's pet project, and is now a commodity Unix kernel clone. Linux won't bring much innovation, as its architecture is deeply conventional.

The main innovation with Linux can be found in the social networking of F/OSS that Stallman started, and that Linus Torvalds and friends popularized. It demonstrated that decentralized, free software development was viable.

There are no truly groundbreaking innovation in the OS field. Yes I know about Hurd and BeOS and whatnot, but they are just variations of the same themes. What I'm waiting for is a true massively parallel OS, OSes with totally virtualized memories (disk and RAM and rom etc), OS/hardware combos that are designed to be switched on and off at will with next to no "reboot" time, etc...

Re:He's Not 100% Wrong...

[deaddrunk]

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.

Re:He's Not 100% Wrong...

[freddie]

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.

Re:He's Not 100% Wrong...

[Qbertino]

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.ht ml)

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.

Re:He's Not 100% Wrong...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:He's Not 100% Wrong...

[GaryPatterson]

And yet I'm a big fan of Open Source.

As I stated.

Open Source has done a great deal.

It's just not innovative on the application front, or the OS front. And that's the area that matters to users. Python is great, but does it matter to a word processor user, or someone who wants to get to their foiles in a new way because the desktop metaphor just doesn't cut it for them?

And unless I'm wrong, Apple hasn't *copied* Open Source, but has in fact used it in exactly the way the authors (of the Open Source software used) wanted and explicitly stated in their licence. If you're going to call Apple out on doing what the Open Source community state that they want, then perhaps you need to define what the Open Source community should and should not want.

Re:He's Not 100% Wrong...

[argent]

It's the kernel, not the eye candy.

Oh, and that new graphics library (the one Apple beat to the punch with Core Image in Tiger) in Longhorn? "Avalon" is basically a copy of an open source window system called "Berlin" that never caught on because it was a bit early... good OpenGL video cards weren't cheap enough soon enough.

Re:He's Not 100% Wrong...

[torpor]

I don't believe Linux is innovative, and I see that pervading the entire open source movement.


maybe you see that in the bits you see, but it seems to me there are bits you're not seeing.

Linux is innovative. anyone who doesn't think so, probably hasn't built themselves an OpenEmbedded image, a GoboLinux USB-fob, a custom firewall boot-CD, a compute-server-room feeding a national ISP, a system of low-power MIPS boxes buried in the desert watching water supplies, a surf-board manufacturing fileserver, a tftp'able boot-image for the stereo, a terrabyte fileserver with streaming, an old-school MAMEbox ..

Linux is a desktop, but Linux can be far, far, far, far more things than a Microsoft binary release, to far more people. Linux is a desktop, Linux is not just a desktop, Linux is a car display, Linux is a fileserver, Linux is a synthesizer, etc. it need not be 'anyones way but your own' with Linux; the rule is the code is open, its up to you to make it work.

the problem with bothering with Microsoft propaganda is that it frames you, straight away, into an either/or argument on their terms. to argue against "Linux versus Microsoft" means "Linux as a desktop" versus "The Microsoft Universe". who cares about the desktop any more? there is no desktop.

bad maths

[recurrence]

are you gonna create opportunities where my program somehow works with another guy's programs and one plus one equal three. Windows has been that.

This is what worries me.

No room for anyone but us

[Just Jeff]

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.

It's a bit like...

[M3rk1n_Muffl3y]

...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.

Oh come on!

[NickFortune]

[Show me one example] of an interview with an open source developer or "leader" that is not exactly the same intellectual masturbation.

Hey, it's the microsoft groupies who've been saying for years that anything MS do is the de-facto standard. You can't complain if we occasionally try to be standards-compliant in our adulation.

Even so, MS remain the clear leaders in marketing innovation, and for good reason. Consider this interview with Eben Moglen. If you read that, you'll find a debate where the interviewer holds a different opinion to the interviewee on a number of counts. If the FSF were serious about competing with Microsoft, they'd have created an arse-licking department and had them ask the questions. Then Moglen too could have been asked "Think of a really hard question for yourself, and then answer it. If that's all right. Sir."

The open source community just doesn't have the infrastructure for that sort of thing. Thus, the world has to wait for MS to show us the way once again. And the rosy pink cleanliness of Balmer's behind stands as eloquent testimony to the one field where microsoft's dominance remains unchallenged.

What about Apple?

[otisg]

Funny, he didn't mention Apple?

Re:What about Apple?

[dustmite]

Spoken like someone who doesn't actually use OS X and has absolutely no idea of what features it has.

what has apple innovated lately?

Wait six years and see what appears in the next version of Windows after Longhorn, and you'll have the answer to your question.

Ballmer's right

[JChung2006]

IBM and ORACLE are not innovative. They are big unninnovative businesses just like Microsoft. They thrive on the continuation of their existence, not the creation of something new. As for open source not being innovative, it hasn't been lately, but it used to be. I suspect that open source's obsession with standards and standardization has something to do with its lack of innovation these days, because, folks, innovation by its very nature is not standards-based.

Yes and no

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe not from a end-user standpoint, but from a developer standpoint, I can tell you making ASP.Net 2.0 (still beta2 - due for November 7th) is VERY innovative (or doing anything in VS.Net 2005 for that matter).

Or perhaps you're purposedly ignoring some tools 9or maybe you don't know about them), like Visual Web Developper 2005 - which is much like Visual Studio (with some of the advanced features stripped off), that will sell for like 50$. While it's not like having the real/full VS.Net 2005, it's far better than being stuck with say, Dreamweaver and most other editors. Very innovative. An cheap, powerful IDE for the masses/hobbyists/those that code for fun/as a hobby.

Live Communications Server 2005 has quite a few nice and useful features too.

Indeed, they don't completely redefine the way we use computers everyday, but it's not like most people here like to claim (i.e. no innovation/new features whatsoever - they're just cloning apple, etc).

But hey, this is /., and it's cool to hate M$, and one gets modded up for it - and this post won't. How surprising?

Technical innovation from opensource

[Peaker]

Lets see, Software installation management:

• A central repository of packages, and a GUI with more than 10000 packages, all installable with 2 clicks.
  
• Automatic upgrading of all these packages.
  
• Uniform interface to install, remove or upgrade all of these packages.
  
• Automatic installation of packages according to file access attempts (auto-apt).
  

GUIs:

• Desktop/network integration (i.e: ftp exploration works just like local file exploration) (and no, this does not work, not even in Windows XP, try copying files from one ftp to another, for example).
  
• Panel applets bringing usefulness to the panel, as well as quick browsers/bookmark lists in the panel (Microsoft copied some of this)
  
• Tabbed command-line consoles
  
• Password-keeping wallets for all applications, allowing the user to remember just one password
  
• Customization of desktop behavior, shortcut keys to basic operations such as minimizing/maximizing, and any other feature in the desktop.
  
• Division of responsibility, window management keeps working even when applications hang.
  
• Search feature in Configuration Manager.
  
• Countless other innovations
  

Development tools:

• The diff/patch tools.
  
• gcc: A single compiler handling the compilation of a huge collection of languages, in a large set of platforms.
  
• xemacs: An environment platform that allows extensions via a dynamic language with seamless on-the-fly compilation of the extension code you write. Also, the most featureful platform out there for this purpose, with powerful macro recorders/editors, customizable key binding, etc.
  
• Languages: Python, Perl, Ruby. Microsoft is still behind in this area, despite its .NET technology, which is less innovation, and more an extension of the Java platform (I would even say, Java done right). Many more languages are Open Source, but I simply don't recall the exact history of other language to tell for sure.
  
• Vast libraries in each of these languages, many of which are filled with technical innovation (i.e: Twisted Matrix, SDL, pygame)
  
• Transparent RPC's for: Python, Ruby, Smalltalk. Microsoft, to the best of my knowledge, does not implement a single transparent RPC. (Transparent means that the server needs not be aware of what objects the client will use, nor does it require any code to explicitly export the object's features to the client, as Microsoft's COM/.NET technologies require).
  

Emulation:

• CoLinux: Modifying the Linux Kernel to run in kernel-mode side-by-side a host operating system.
  
• bochs: Unprivileged, 100% user-space emulation of an entire PC.
  
• qemu: Like bochs, but with dynamic code translation.
  

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.

Re:Bullshit

[The Infamous Grimace]

How about Visual Studio?... I can whip up a usable, very functional Windows app in seconds. Try doing that on any other platform.

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)

Is it real Microsoft face, after all?

[sogod]

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 :-(

There's a Word for That

[stephensamuel]

Innovation at Microsoft is an oxymoron.

I think they've also patented the idea of innovation....

and trademarked the word.

Re:Bullshit

[Colin Smith]

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.

Scoble complains, Slashdot obeys?

[syphoon]

Well this is annoying. Scoble complained just earlier on his blog that Slashdot hadn't linked to his Ballmer interview.

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 :-(. Come on editors, even the interviewer semi-admits this as being a troll-piece in a /. context.

Microsoft Innovates like Enron did - with BS.

[standards]

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?

And next week....

[mormop]

Joseph Goebbels on Compassion, George Bush on grammar and Count Dracula on the health benefits of a Vegan Diet.

MS is on the downslope.

[Qbertino]

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.

Re:free Puff Piece for Microsoft? Here?

[Monte]

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

Offtopic but funnier than the cream pie

[L1TH10N]

Balmer is great at making presentations.

Re:Bullshit

[maxwell demon]

Microsoft haven't innovated anything, ever.

Clippy? <gd&r>

Ballmer means "marketshare" not "innovation"

[tentimestwenty]

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.

Want a piece of me? Come and get it!

[skaag]

Ballmer, you are full of shit. You know why?

Anyone who says IBM and Oracle did not innovate is full of shit.

It is a person who did not dirty his hands with actual technology. Ballmer, show me your MSSQL Engine and let's compare it with the work of art & genious that is the Oracle SQL engine. It is like comparing "Made in Taiwan" and "Made in Switzerland" with Microsoft being the cheap taiwanese crap.

You guys managed to push your Windows SHIT over IBM's amazing OS/2 not because it was better. Far from it. You guys just had better marketing! You made dirty deals with intel and retail channels. You forced your crap upon us for too long, and now it's backlashing against you. I don't care that Microsoft is one of the richest companies on this planet - I don't use ANY of your products. Your BSA thugs are no use against me! They can visit my company offices and find NOTHING BUT LINUX & BSD!

Microsoft, wake up, you guys are crap! All those opensource people, they are not doing it because they hate you, not really, they are doing it because the alternative is simply shit! So what if some opensource solutions were not comparable to certain microsoft products? Bullshit walks, and money talks, and soon enough your money source will be no more as the opensource products out there better your products. I use OpenOffice and I love it, and I did not pay a dime for it.

Anyone who says IBM did not innovate, does not understand that the number one company today is IBM, holding the MOST patents! You don't know the kind of research facilities IBM runs, you don't know the kind of genious researchers working for IBM, and how they do not have to suffer draconian internal cultures such as the people in Microsoft.

Ballmer, WAKE UP! You like Google? No you don't! You hate their guts because they represent "Good" while MSFT represents "Evil". They are just so good there's nothing you can say against them. For example, They are not the ones removing spyware from their anti-spyware programs as part of a strategic move (hint!). They are not the ones buying young technology companies, in order to stiffle them and kill the competition before it reaches wide markets. They don't steal technology and try to make it better, like microsoft does (Never mind that Microsoft ends up making it worse yet, AND proprietary! Which is ridiculous!)

I strongly suggest you guys do things right while you have the money & the power. The chances are slipping under your feet. You guys have the chance to make it right, still - don't lose it! Such interviews do not impress people like myself - they do the opposite. Think about THAT.

Skaag

a few more?

[naelurec]

• ClamAV virus definition distribution model (use of incremental updates, dns txt field checks for new updates, automatic, etc..) -- compare this to the weekly (!) updates of Symantec (or manually updating slightly more frequently) or even some of the "download a big chunk from a centralized location" method of commercial competitors.
• BitTorrent
• So many things in KDE its insane.. (just check out all the awards, including Software Innovation of the Year - CeBit!)
• Plone, Zope, Typo3 - These content management systems lead the way for both commercial and opensource.. so much innovation going on here
• CUPS - While not glamerous, I have setup lots of print servers and the flexibility and modularlity of CUPS (in my experience) is unmatched.
• The spam fighters: greylisting, spamassassin, amavisd, postfix, dnsrbl, etc.. developed under or made popular due to opensource.. I have yet to come across _any_ non-FOSS solution that comes close to the success and accuracy of the OSS tools for spam filtering

OSS Not Inovative?

[WindBourne]

Hummmm. OSS

• Wiki
• Blogging
• For that matter, the web itself (http and html were OSS).
• Most of the low-level internet protocol (the original core was funded by DARPA, but the rest of the core is actually OSS).

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.

Re:Bullshit

[dustmite]

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.

Free software = End of Innovation

[cscalfani]

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.

Who drives them?

[khasim]

Who exactly is 'they'?

The people who make the decisions that the techs must implement.

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.

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.*

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.

Furthermore, it's amazing how passionate many are about their particular product line.

Again, those techs follow the instructions given by management.

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.

And yet, instead of fixing the real issues, Microsoft just bought anti-virus & anti-spyware companies.

So saying 'the literally don't care' is about as far from reality as I can imagine.

The flaws in their security model still exist.

Those flaws have existed for YEARS.

They can even just look at one of the Open Source OS's and SEE how others have solved those problems.

Yet the problems still exist within Windows. I still have to ensure that the DAILY anti-virus/anti-spyware downloads happen.

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.

Go ahead and ask those people you've met WHY Microsoft does NOT just FIX the virus/spyware problem instead of forcing the users to replace the bandage EVERY SINGLE DAY and just HOPE that they aren't one of the first hit with a new strain of virus.

See what answer you get and that will tell you why other people don't share your opinion.

(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....)

Listen up.

The same virus that was known to infect Win98 ... will STILL infect Win2003.

THAT is the problem.

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.

Re:Who drives them?

[localman]

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.

Re:Who drives them?

[TheLink]

Uh. How has OSS solved those problems?

The sort of windows users who keep getting infected by viruses are those who will launch email attachments (and even supply the necessary passwords to the encrypted zipfiles!) and not update their O/S or apps. I see nothing in Linux that prevents such users from getting infected, other than they aren't using Linux at the moment.

Mozilla/Firefox really isn't much more secure than IE.

If users run their browsers and email apps as root/admin whether it's Windows or Linux you'll have the same problems.

NOW, if users run their browsers using _different_ accounts/roles compared to their normal main user (nonadmin) account then they'll be in a much safer situation. You can do this on recent Windows O/Ses and you can do this on Linux.

Except old versions of Mozilla (e.g. from SuSE 9.1 which my workplace uses) insist on ignoring umask when saving files - thus making it hard to share downloaded files with the main user account.

You can secure Windows. The problem is doing it in a way Joe Average can accept. I don't see Linux etc solving that - heck you can't even get a standard desktop (talking about choice misses the point - it's the defaults). With windows, Helpdesk can tell Joe Average to click on Start->run etc. With Linux, is it Ubuntu or Kubuntu or SuSE or Redhat or Man-whatever-it-is-next.

If the OSS GUI people ever standardize on something, it'll be easier for the trojan guys to attack Joe Average - since it's easier to get a fake javascript/etc thingy to look like the proper/standard dialog (for a bit of phishing or something). As of now, it's likely to look different - so many Linux users customize their UI, and too few users will be fooled, so it's not worth it.

Hey Linux is useful (at work we can't do what we need to do without Linux).

But too many people don't seem to see that the reason why windows machines have so many security problems is usually because of the users.

Once Linux starts to allow 3rd party binaries to still work even if the kernel is updated for security issues, then Linux will have more software companies writing for it. However it'll mean the same "virus" that infects Linux 2.x will still infect 2.x+y.

Maybe SELinux and similar stuff will help. But as it is, Linux as installed by most popular distros out there is not really much better in terms of security architecture.

Re:Who drives them?

[Sj0]

I hate to knock a point of this post, especially since it's such a wonderful yin/yang with the post above it of another former MS employee, but if you believe antivirus software is the best way to stop viruses, then you have no business working in security. Just like how in physical security you want to lock as many doors as possible before flooding the area with guards, in computer security you want your machine to be as impervious to harm as possible before you start wasting resources actively scanning for malicious code.

If your scanner finds a virus or spyware, it's too late: you've already been compromised. Just because the virus was eliminated doesn't mean it didn't get a chance to cause damage somewhere, You can't trust that machine again.

blah blah blah says the Microsoft marketing maven

[Locutus]

Between Balmer and Gates, I don't know which one bores me more. Gates is getting pretty hilarious these days though. I crack up every time he says that speech recognition is about to take off and when he says anything about the tablet PCs...

I guess they've gotta keep trying to find SOMETHING that can produce money outside of their desktop OS monopoly. But 15 years of this stuff is getting pretty old. IMO.

Another thing that cracks me up is when Microsoft talks about how WindowsCE costs less than GNU/Linux on embedded devices. This, from the company that consistantly loses ~$1 Billion annually on that productline. Talk about Cost of Ownership. ;-)

LoB

MS innovative, not inventive

[anti-NAT]

From the Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary :

innovative - using new methods or ideas

Notice there is nothing in that definition that indicates the origin of those ideas ? Microsoft are an innovative company, because they take ideas and use them. They aren't an inventive company, because they very often don't come up with any new ideas themselves.

IBM and Oracle are innovative companies too.

As for being inventive, I'm not sure about Oracle, however, IBM are, based on the fundamental intention of patents (registering new inventions), and based on the number of patents they are granted (more than 3000 in 2004), IBM are one of the most inventive, if not the most inventive organisation in the world.

These "innovations" are up to 40 years old.

[argent]

# 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?

Re:These "innovations" are up to 40 years old.

[argent]

By the way:

some wacko obscure package

Smalltalk is "some whacko obscure package" in the same way that Newton was "some whacko obscure philosopher".

Re:Name 5 innovations from Microsoft.

[gullevek]

- Expose Style for the Windows (mac)
- PS / PDF totaly integrated into OS (nextstep / mac)
- application forwarding through X (any unix)
- central software / install repository (some linux distributions, xBSD)
- scripting languages (way before MS)

Re:Look at Microsoft's misdeeds

[loginx]

Please stop telling moderators what to do.

There are a lot of them, and I'm quite sure they all know how to read.

Additionally, please do not respond when you are being flamed. Flame wars bring nothing constructive to the community, they consume a lot of bandwidth, and they will almost always contribute to lower your karma.

Throwing stones.

[Shanep]

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. ; )

Ha!

[alucinor]

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.

That's the best you can do?

[khasim]

Oh, bullshit. The vast majority of problems in running as a non-Admin in Windows are the responsibility of *application developers*, not Microsoft.

Saying that there are other people doing it does NOT justify Microsoft doing it.

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.

Again, you are wrong. Linux and the various *BSD's manage to fix existing problems, yet they can still run most apps from years ago.

They manage the compatibility AND the security.

They can do it, but Microsoft cannot.

Maybe you should embrace some basic security principles then.

I have. And one of those "basic security principles", for Windows, includes daily downloads of anti-virus/anti-spyware signatures.

I find it very amusing that you seem to be suggesting that anyone using Windows become well versed in "security".

Isn't Windows supposed to be "user friendly"? :D

Re:I N N O V A T I O N

[superpulpsicle]

#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

Re:I N N O V A T I O N

[aesiamun]

Microsoft was the first company to utilize intelligent agents in their Software. Yes, that little stupid dog and clippy are annoying, but they are not available elsewhere.

Failure != lack of innovation.

Microsoft was the first to integrate a browser into the OS. While this does include some very bad concepts and potentially opens it up to more security problems, it's innovative.

So innovative that the KDE crew does it as well.

Re:I N N O V A T I O N

[zebez]

Actually the first web browser was WorldWideWeb, and the first web server was httpd. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WorldWideWeb

Bull----

[The_Wilschon]

5. Multiuser Operating Systems
6. Multitasking Operating systems

This is plainly wrong. From http://www.multicians.org/thvv/7094.html,

CTSS was written by a team of MIT Computation Center programmers led by Prof. Fernando J. Corbató, known to everybody as Corby.

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...

Re:Name 5 innovations from Microsoft.

[shmlco]

Innovation in and as of itself is not usually a desirable corporate attribute. "First movers" that innovate in a field are usually rewarded with arrows in their back.

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?

Ballmer: learn some history

[cahiha]

"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.

Re:I N N O V A T I O N

[Grishnakh]

This is a stupid argument. If you really get down to it, everything is derived from something else. Name one invention that is truly original and doesn't build on anything else at all. By this logic, the microprocessor isn't innovative; it's just a bunch of logic circuits integrated into one package. And logic circuits aren't innovative; they're just a bunch of transistors integrated into more convenient packages. Mozart's symphonies weren't innovative; they're similar to the other music at the time, and use the same musical scale. Shakespeare's works weren't innovative; they used the same English language everyone else used, and plays existed thousands of years before him.

Obviously, this is a pretty stupid argument. Innovation doesn't mean inventing something completely new and different from everything that preceded it. No invention or creation is like that. Even the USPTO agrees with me: every invention patented references other existing works. Innovation is creating something new which helps people do something they couldn't do before, or helps them do something better than they could do before. This could be as simple as combining some pre-existing technologies in a novel new way. The PS/PDF integration mentioned by someone else is an example of this. PS and PDF existed before Nextstep thought of using it throughout their GUI, but that doesn't render that idea "non-innovative". Web browsers are innovative because they use markup language and display things graphically, similar to typesetting. Gopher was just simple ASCII text. It probably pioneered the methods of retrieving data from a server on the internet (the back-end), but its methods for displaying data and what types of data it allowed to be displayed were not like the WWW (the front-end).

The problem with Microsoft is that they haven't created any of these types of innovation; at least none I know of, and none anyone here has ever bothered to list. No Clippy doesn't really count; innovations aren't very useful if no one really likes them. Every major product of theirs was purchased from someone else, not developed in-house. If they presented themselves as a successful technology integrator (which is the majority of what most large companies do these days), I don't think anyone here would have a problem with that. But by trying to rewrite history and claim themselves to be the original innovators, they're showing themselves to be dishonest.

How do we get paid???

[cscalfani]

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????