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."

Comments

Haha

[sulli]

In the media realm, they have their DRM solution, their media formats (both video and audio), tools for generating that media, server and client software, management tools, etc., etc., etc. It's an integrated end to end solution that simply is not matched by anyone else. David Berlind talks about the "unstoppable Microsoft Media Juggernaut."

... which is getting its lunch eaten by Apple.

Hey Look...

[thebdj]

Another AC with an e-mail address (really people, think a little). Oooh and another inflammatory story from zdnet blogs. Yo slashdot, just save us the trouble, stop accepting blogs as news. All you do is drive up ad revenue for these sites that often are filled with jibberish and anything that resembles news worthy material...

What has Microsoft ever invented?

[ivanmarsh]

I'm just curious.

I know a very long list of technologies that MS claims to have invented... but buying a company that invented something and inventing something isn't the same thing.

Re:MS keeps innovating in their spin

[Apreche]

It's an especially bad analogy because he has it completely backwards. What usually happens is the Formula 1 race engineers are the ones who invent new motor vehicle technologies. Then after many years those technologies are gradually adopted by "normal" cars. See the linear paddle shifting transmission as the prime example. See various braking, suspension and aerodynamic systems for the rest.

Re:Article Summary

[eno2001]

OK I finished reading the rest of his tragic blog posting. It sounds like his eventual conclusion is that Microsoft innovated mediocrity. Which is probably OK considering that VHS (mediocre technology) beat out Betamax (superior technology). And IDE (mediocre technology) beat out SCSI (superior technology) on the desktop. for people who don't want to deal with mediocre software solutions, Microsoft still isn't the answer. Having a consistent technology backend that becomes the "de facto standard" is never a good thing when you are looking for the BEST solution. Usually you are making some compromises, at best, if you go with a solution like that. Witness the dismal quality of commercial software today. Everyone and his brother is a coder due to the logic this guy is suggesting (a desktop developer could also develop for handhelds). That's NOT a good thing. While the guy might write excellent apps on the desktop, do you really want him implementing things that he CAN implement on a handheld but probably shouldn't? And you know he will implenet them because he's never worked with handhelds before. This is NOT a good thing.

Just think about all the people out there who call themselves "web masters" and "publish" their sites with Microsoft Word on Windows 95 with Personal Web Server and you'll see where I'm coming from. Sometimes it's better to leave things to people who actually were trained within the problem domain. Trying to make them spread their reach may not be a good thing in every case.

Re:MS keeps innovating in their spin

[LeonGeeste]

I agree with you, just as long as you don't start applying this to the "spin-offs" of the space program to ridicule people who oppose it. I mean, yeah, it's great all the advances of the space program, but what was the space program? It was basically a program where the government said:

"Hey, all you entrepreneurs working on technologies to satisfy actual human desires: STOP. Give us money so we can show the Ruskies where it's it."

Then later:

"Hey, some of what we did can, coincidentally, satisfy human desires outside of getting to the moon. Hey consumers! Look at all the goodies we produced for you. Please TOTALLY IGNORE what the entrepreneurs, who were trying to directly satisfy your desires, rather than satisfying them by mere coincidence, accomplished. Just focus on what we did, not what could have happened."

Then later, their court intellectuals say:

"If you opposed the space program, you must oppose insulated lunchboxes. Luddite."

MSFT information value

[mulcher]

At the risk of being flamed... does linux innovate? does open source innovate?
And I mean besides being open-source alone which is pretty innovative... It
marginalizes existing industries and makes software cheaper + it provides jobs and opportunities without having to shell out $$$ for official certification programs.

A lot of what we like is *NIX apps and utilities... linux is not entirely innovative in this way. Sun with Java? Is a JVM innovative? I can say that in
academia there were previous VMs around.. Apple with Aqua? perhaps... but seriously... most people take what works and make it a little bit better and in many cases a little bit cheaper (or expensive by adding/increasing value). Apple
did this with OS X. It makes *NIX more valuable. DirectX? Is that innovative or a complete smash up of OpenGL? Visual Studio? Visio? SQL Server? MSFT buys good tech... SQL Server may get slammed by many here, but for a small-medium business that needs advanced data analytics to query financial data and export it to XLS/PPT for the executives to make decisions I think it works pretty well and is way cheaper than the alternatives. Big companies use Big Iron and Oracle. MSFT has largely been medium user to end-user desktop based. That is because there is a lot of money in those areas. Follow the money and
you will find MSFT.

For businesses that don't need that, such as web2.0 companies there is little incentive to go with MSFT on the backend since it is pure cost than value. Plus you can tweak and extend your linux implementation freely. Linux is more customizable and that helps in many instances and it is cheap for building a server farm. But for data analytics, for integrating information, and providing information value for cheap MSFT is the way to go. They own the corporate information pipeline. That is where value is. Information is valuable. Making it easy to create, get, and use information. Open source hasn't done that yet, except in limited cases where programming gurus go off and start there own companies (Yahoo,Google) etc... and even then they scale to large company size and then will buy Oracle and other large-scale data analytics (or write there own). Google makes then NET valuable. Ebay makes garage sales valuable.

I think open-source will continue to marginalize infastructure, but as long as MSFT keeps providing information value it will always have the lead. Here information value is provided by the solution and not necessarily the product.

Re:What the.....

[Blakey Rat]

I just finished reading a few entries in a blog about the new interface for Office 12, and I was really, really impressed at the level of thinking that's gone into the new interface and, more importantly, the level and amount of usability tests. There's some exciting stuff there, and I bet we'll be seeing that MiniBar concept in applications for years and years to come.

(The blog is here if you're interested: http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/default.aspx)

I don't know how others feel, but my impression of Microsoft is that they're always *trying* to innovate, whether or not they happen to succeed.

Re:MS keeps innovating in their spin

[ciroknight]

So you're willing to admit that Race technology its put into cars, but unwilling to admit that Space (or for that matter, Wartime) technologies get put into everything.

Apparently, you need to go back to the 40s. If you will remember, World War II was the advent of a lot of technologies. It's doubtful we'd have weather tracking RADAR systems if it wasn't for the advent of Brittish scientists playing with radio waves. It's likely we wouldn't have satellite communications if it weren't for the German's V2. And while you may argue that all of the things that got spun off from the different space agencies may have been invented anyways, it's likely they wouldn't have been advented nearly as quickly, and wouldn't have gotten any government money to do it.

NASA has given back to the Americans plenty of things we all take for granted, but it seems there is a larger and larger group of Slashdot readers who are revisionist historians and want to forget that WWII is what caused the Cold War, and thus, what caused technologies to explode into what they've become today. America is the country we are today because of War, and because of the spoils that war has brought to us. Hell, it can be argued that its the reason that Innovation has slowed down so much here in America; we haven't had a real need to. Our government no longer feels the need to compete with any other world governments.

Let's stop being ignorant and realize that Space technologies have been relatively safe (in comparison to every other industry, ever), that they've generated billions of dollars in jobs, technologies, and pathways for science. And no, I won't list them here (these are all things you should have learned in high school, and a simple google will catch you up to speed). There's simply too much that NASA and the US Military has been involved in coming together for us to simply turn our heads on militaristic and aerospace innovation.

Oh, and if it weren't for NASA's supersonic experiments, cars probably wouldn't be as fast as they are now either; Carbon Fiber, high heat resistant materials, metal alloys, aerodynamic profiles, and more, came from strenous testing and retesting at the hands of engineers using technology adapted from NASA.

You'd better bet if the government needed some awesome software to defeat cyberterrorists or something, there'd be a boom in the market ;).