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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.
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.
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?