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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."
This guy actually works for Microsoft as acknowledged by ZDNet themselves. You should take some of this with a pinch of salt then.
Maybe I am a bit out of the loop but the lion's share of M$ revenue comes from Windows & Office. An operating system and a collection of applications, that are direct dirivitives of the same software you would likely buy over 10 years ago. Sure both are a bit more polished than the same version from a decade ago but I would not call that innovative. Nothing else springs to mind when thinking of what M$ is known for. They just buy or steal other people's ideas and rebrand them.
And Microsoft's innovations always seem to hurt the consumer in the long run. Granted, they have made some significant contributions and ideas to the software industry, but MS seems more concerned about catering to the companies that demand to impose regulations on digital media (**AA, et al.) while most of the open-source and freeware community listens to their users and tries to help them all the more, instead of partially helping, and partially hating.
I suppose I just prefer unconditional love, than a love-hate relationship.
fast user switching? Have you ever seen a linux workstation with virtual terminals?
Szo
Red Leader Standing By!
It's worth noting that John Carrol is a Microsoft employee, who also writes for ZDNet. The journalistic integrity here is absolutely zero.
Now I don't blame him for his obvious slant. He's paid by Microsoft. Hell, he probably wants to think that his work, and the work of his co-workers is innovative. Who doesn't?
Personally, the fact that ZDNet brought him aboard as a writer is where the real problem lies. I remember at one time how ZDNet used to try to defend themselves against accusations of being MS-shills; but now they seem to embrace it whole-heartedly.
So, coming from this source -- can anybody be surprised by the conclusion? It's worth just what we've paid for it: absolutely nothing.
Yaz.
John Carrol is the guy who used to be an developer living in Geneva, Switzerland. Anyone who had the misfortune to follow the ZDNet talkback boards would never fail to see John jump to Microsoft's defence no matter what the topic was, be it the DOJ case (Jonh:Microsoft is being punished for innovating), Linux (John:Developing for Windows is far easier. Just look at how easy it is to make a COM object I can use anywhere) or Microsoft's business practices (John:Microsoft is innovating).
Now, years later, after having trolled incessantly for Microsoft for years, he finally got a job with them and a blog at ZDNet where he, surprise, trolls for Microsoft.
I actually do think that Microsoft does innovate in places (xmlhttpobject for example)but I don't think I'd listen to John Carrol when I wanted impartial advice on Microsoft or th IT market.
Let's face it, Microsoft is a technology reseller. They take what already exists, or at most aid in the planning of some new standard, then turn around and screw with it just enough to assure that competitor products don't do as well as its own. That's not innovation, that's anti-competitive, monopolistic behavior deserving of punishment, not kudos.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
You see, there was this company called "Go" a few years ago. Read about it here.
They were working on a Tablet PC before MS fucked them over - at least that's the way they tell it.
Evil people don't think they're evil. - George Lucas, Making of Ep III
I don't know --- I run two X servers on all my desk top boxes and have for years. Wife uses VT8, I use VT7. CTRL-ALT-F8 is much much faster than M$ user switching. The invention was just building it in as a standard configuration -- if you think that's really an invention.
"Microsoft first implemented the XMLHttpRequest object in Internet Explorer 5 for Windows as an ActiveX object.
Similar functionality is covered in a proposed W3C standard, Document Object Model (DOM) Level 3 Load and Save Specification. In the meantime, growing support for the XMLHttpRequest object means that is has become a de facto standard that will likely be supported even after the W3C specification becomes final and starts being implemented in released browsers (whenever that might be)."
Source.
Microsoft innovations: Around 1980, IBM wanted Bill Gates to write an operating system for them. Since he had never written an operating system, he bought the rights to QDOS from the author, Tim Paterson of Seattle Computer Works, for fifty grand and kept his deal with IBM a secret from Paterson and SCW. Gates then talked IBM into letting Microsoft retain the rights to his new MSDOS and to market the operating system separate from the IBM PC.
So much for innovation at Microsoft. It's what they did then and what they do now.
Can you give a source/example for this one?
Sure. Go here.
- - - - - - - - - - -
I am a programmer. I am paid to produce syntax not grammar. Deal with it.
Various office programs working together predates MS-Office,
Can you give a source/example for this one?
Lotus Symphony for DOS in the mid 80s
Lotus Jazz for the Mac around the same time
Some old geezer here can probably come up with some mainframe applications that did something similar
Microsoft had Word and Multiplan fairly early on, but it took them a while to roll Word, Excel, and PowerPoint together into Office
I am so smart!
I am so smart!
S-M-R-T!
I mean S-M-A-R-T!
"Can you give a source/example for this one?"
Hmm... there used to be a program called Enable/OA, made by The Software Group. There was a product by Lotus called Symphony. There was PFS:First Choice, too. They were PC/MS-DOS apps, and had integated word processing, spreadsheet, database and telecommunications modules (I don't recall if PFS: First Choice had the latter, however).
Most of the base technology that MS has been touting since its glory days of DOS/Win3.x was copied from Apple, or the Xerox PARC. [For those unfamiliar with PARC, I highly recommend the book "Dealers Of Lightning"... or just google "Xerox PARC history".]
MS's claim that they're responsible for ANY major innovations in the computer industry is on par with Al Gore's comment that he "invented the Internet". How can a company whose base technology was stolen from someone else, and enhanced with innovations originated elsewhere, claim any innovation of their own?
Below are a few examples of the baseline concepts that completely changed the computing world, and led to the proliferation of personal PC's, the Internet, and quite a few other things. And NONE of them were pioneered by MicroSoft.
1.) A suite of applications that shares data and is designer with multiple users in mind.
2.) A packet-based, self-monitoring networking protocol? i.e. "let's work out a stable connection over an unstable medium".
3.) Image rasterization (conversion of displayable image to printable).
4.) A programming language whose specs fit on a SINGLE piece of paper, and from which dozens of other languages spawned.
5.) Seamless scrolling, adjustable by-screen, by-line, and by-pixel.
6.) In-application adjustment of application parameters, as well as command scripting.
Just six examples out of hundreds, of the concepts that were invented by others, but co-opted by MS. And now, they claim innovation? I call "bullshit"! Almost everything that is promoted by MS today is based on technology that was invented in the 1970's.
There's a significant difference between "enhancements", and "invention". My advice to Microsoft's mouthpieces would be, look up the definitions of these terms, and don't make yourself look like a fool in front of a worldwide audience.
i might even concede your point - microsoft has indeed made several small innovations that by themselves are not much to look at, but in their entirety can make up a totally new style of working and collaborating...
but IMHO your examples suck!
please correct me if i'm wrong, but calling c# "elegant" is stretching it a bit, ain't it?
just by using the OO paradigm or design patterns my software doesn't automatically turn "innovative"; using known technology to achieve new aims is the right way to do it, but calling it "small innovations" is a bit over the top...
It's nothing but crumpled porno and Ayn Rand.
Troll.
1. The "taskbar". Before Windows 95 there was a concept of a window being "iconized", where the "icon" vanished if the window was open. It appears that Microsoft first made an "icon" that stayed there even if the window was open.
Err, both NeXT and OS/2 did this. Furthermore, there's a very good reason almost nobody else uses the "task bar": it's a terrible user interface.
2. Also in the taskbar, the realazation that words are more important than icons, and shrinking the icon to a more appropriate 16x16 size and making the text visible.
In OS/2, you got the entire text. Even for Modal Windows (which don't show up on the Win95 task bar). For NeXT you got a tool tip of the full text, and never an amended version (like you'll see in Win95).
3. Eliminating the artificial dividing line between the window border and the contents, so that a window displaying a uniform gray rectangle of the right color blends cleanly into the border. Although I wrote something like this myself quite a few years earlier for the NeXT, I hardly publicized it, and never saw similar graphics design until Windows.
Wow. Many MacOS and OS/2 applications did this exactly, and NeXT did it one better by getting rid of the window border itself.
4. "Combo box" where text input and multiple selection are done by the same widget. Having worked with NeXT before this, I'm pretty certain it did not have this, and never saw it on any other system either. (crappy popup implementation with the scroll bar is irrelevant to the innovation, although I really wish they would fix that...)
NeXT most certainly did have it, and so did Motif. They were uncommon with Motif, but SGI used them quite a bit.
5. Scroll wheel. The idea of having another control to scroll data on the mouse was older, but Microsoft seems to have realized that a 1-D version would provide most of the benifit without the confusion or flakiness of older attempts that tried for 2 or even more degrees of freedom.
Wrong again fanboy, both Kensington and Logitch did it with a knob, and Logitch even did it with an actual toothed wheel that was much easier to use than the Microsoft bastardization.
This is exactly why Microsoft has a patent on using a scrolling wheel as a z-index instead of as a scrolling device.
6. Having all files be "commands" in that if you double-click it examines the file (even if only the filename) and opens it with the correct program. The Mac does not count because it relied on imbedded metadata in the file, rather than an outside deciding program. Nor does #! notation in Unix exec of files, as it still requires the execute bit and does not work for files that lack this. I think a very important detail is that this idea could have been implemented 20 years earlier, it does not rely on GUI, and no CLI system ever did. A useful idea that is not realized until long after it is possible is a real indication that it is an "innovation".
First of all, MacOS doesn't work that way; the "type extension" is 4 characters (instead of three), but it's basically the same mechanism. Furthermore, multiple programs that support editing a file type are all accessible (as the creator is additionally available as another 4-character extension).
Why are these things invalid when they're clearly part of the file name?
So even if you refuse to let the Mac count for other reasons, why don't GEM, OS/2, OSF/Motif, CDE, or NeXT count?
>Cleartype for one
"So more than twenty years ago, Apple II graphics programmers were using this 'sub-pixel' technology to effectively increase the horizontal resolution of their Apple II displays." -- Steve Wozniak
Birge, you should've chosen KDE as your Windows example, and not Gnome. By default, Gnome looks more like MacOS (pre-X) than Windows. There are three menus, none of which have the same set up as the Start menu. I don't know how the distro you may or may not have tried modifies the standard set up, but GOD you're wrong on this one. KDE, however, has all the Windows stuff in by default. I had mod points, but there wasn't an option for "oninformed/just plain wrong"
Put identity in the browser.
Another place where you don't know what you're talking about. There are so many alternative desktop concepts in OSS it's almost impossible to try them all. The most recent is SymphonyOS (http://www.symphonyos.com/), who's first law of UI is that Fitt was right, but nobody listened. No nested or drill-down menus, no scrolling if possible, no icons, and no pop-up dialogs. Sound a lot like Mac or Windows, doesn't it?
There are already 3d desktops for Linux, so "MS will have a rendered graphics engine before linux" is silly. As for DB file systems, I found three for Linux in under five minutes.
Put identity in the browser.
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.
Other than KHTML, the roots of OS X are in NeXT/OpenStep which has been in production for the last 15-16 years or so. What the hell are you talking about? NeXTStep had the first "web browser", etc. I think this argument is futile. As far as not contributing KHTML back to the "community", the last time I checked, the WebKit source was available to everyone with a (free as in beer) base-level ADC login and password.
Go emit code.
It's not hard - I remember such times easily. However, in those days, we complained about having to edit text files called "INI files" in C:\WINDOWS, and "CONFIG.SYS" in C:\. Eventually, that avenue was taken from us, and we had to resort to using a graphical tool to change settings in a binary data-store, which was called the "Registry", which contained the exact same entries as the old "INI files", but without the ability to edit them in DOS mode.
Just because they're not stored in
"Go to CNN [for a] spell-checked, fact-checked summary" -- CmdrTaco
If there was ever a piece of software so central to an operating system, yet so fragile, vastly overburdened and insecure with a tendency to break if you just look at it, then it's the Windows Registry.
Dude, you're to young. The Window's Registry was preceded by the OS/2 Registry, which was equally hated and villified for years before Redmond picked up on the 'idea'.
My biggest beef with Microsoft is that when they do claim to innovate, it turns out that what they've done is either steal someone elses bad idea, or reimplement a good idea poorly.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba