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Microsoft's Unique Innovation
Anonymous Coward writes "The way John Carroll sees it, Microsoft doesn't get enough credit for all the technology it invents. The company's understanding of the marketplace, argues Carroll, has proved fertile ground for many of the inventions, however incremental, that Microsoft produces on a regular basis. That awareness is that all software markets, however "unrelated" they may seem, have linkages to each other. And it's an awareness that open source will have a hard time matching. Another reason many fail to appreciate Microsoft inventiveness, continues Carroll, is because most inventions are pieces of larger puzzles."
* checks calendar *
Nope... it's not April 1st. Did I miss something?
Riiiight. I work in an almost all MS shop, and if everything suddenly started working seamlessly, I'd have a friggin' heart attack.
You are not the customer.
I don't remember having to reboot as much with other platforms ... I guess that's sort of an innovation
A mature, rational discussion will follow.
Microsoft Bob.
AKA "Clippy"
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"Sufferin' succotash."
You forgot teh internet. They invented teh internet. With a shiny nice blue "e" logo.
This sig does not contain any SCO code.
If they had just straight copied Apple's Trash, think of the landfill problems we'd be having right now. Reuse! Reduce! RECYCLE!!!!
As a previous owner of a seafoam green 1995 Ford Escort I can say that comparing Windows to the Escort is very unfair to the Escort. It ran everyday and cost much less to maintain.
rm -rf
"has to have the tires upgraded every lap"
Guess you missed the US Grand Prix this year...
It's an especially bad analogy because he has it completely backwards.
Actually it's wrong on both ends, not only does engineering in the automotive world generally work from racing down to the consumer level, Microsoft hasn't turned an Escort into a Formula 1 racer. A better comparison would be that Microsoft bought a Ford Escort, put a new coat of paint on it, raised the price, fired all the engineers that built it to start with and tried to convince everyone it was actualy a Formula 1 car.
They do deserve a lot of credit.
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Slope of progress? Like, do you measure that in utils, or what? Lines of code? Eye-candy? How many OEMs include it? Or do you measure it in reliability, security, standards-adherence? The underpinnings (openstep, freebsd) have always been there for the taking by anybody in the OSS community yet it took Apple to produce what I think (and many others do, too) is the first decent version of UNIX for the desktop.
Always there for the taking? Nice corporate attitude. Well, that sentence speaks for itself. Apple benefits from the hard work of the folks at Berkeley and KDE, then adds some polish, calls it innovation. 'cepting they wouldn't be where there are now had it not been for open-source. And by the way, if you search the Slash archive, you'll see Apple is not exactly a self-respecting member of the open source community. They see far, by sitting on the shoulders of giants. But don't contribute anything back, unless they get their hands slap. Read up on Safari's roots in KDE's KHTML.
Even if Microsoft gets Longhorn out in 2008, it will still beat linux.
NOW you're talking crack. What an inane statement first of all. Still beat linux in what way? Again, what are your criteria? Besides, the Linux development pace has forced Microsoft to entirely revamp their glacial development process to the 'Agile' process of the Linux crew. Read up on the article in WSJ recently about how sloooooow it took to get builds from Microsot.
Just look at GNOME. It's practically got a [bleep] start menu.
The start menu. Oh, thank you very very much Msf. What a wonderful contribution. But they stole the entire user interface for Windows, and Windows 95, from Macintosh, who stole it from Xerox PARC. Xerox Parc built the GUI interface. Msft contributes a button. Thanks.