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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."
Both very fine pieces of technology innovation.
Everything else -- I mean *everything* else -- was a copy of the successful work of a more deserving 1-in-a-thousand startup that suffered through all their hard times only to get stomped by the monopoly in the end.
Sam
When was the last time Microsoft actually developed something on their own? Arent most of their products bought then developed on top of? ie: DOS - Windows, XBOX, Direct X, Hotmail. Microsoft is not a great software development/inventing company they are however a great marketing company.
GL HF!
But when compared to the rest of the industry, they stagnate. Certainly, they've made some valuable contributions, but when you consider their next closest competitor is less than half the size, they should be responsible for an overwhelming majority of invention and innovation in the market. But - they're not. Part of my problem with Microsoft is that it seems like since Windows 95, they've been constantly playing a game of catch up, rather than bringing unique products to the market. They certainly have a way of solving integration, and seemless interface design with other Microsoft products, which has made them successful. Microsoft might be the master of integration, but innovation leader? Most certainly not.
I can think of preceding examples for a couple of is examples of innovation, so all he's really convinced me of so far is that he didn't do his research before writing this article.
Apparently, innovation isn't developing new technology. It's noticing new technology coming out of obscure companies and the academic community and then re-implementing it for Windows and backing it with 8,000 metric tons of advertising hype.
To actually have a reasonable conversation about this. I'll help, by clearing the deck of:
1) 1,000 monkeys typing = Shakespeare, yadda yadda
2) Broken clock right twice a day, blah blah
3) Every other thing that's always said about buying innovation rather than... what, mining it? Every employee that works there is "bought" every week when they get paid, and sometimes they're bought in a group from somewhere else. Same as anyplace else with a lot of irons in the fire.
But - surely people aren't going to pretend that Excel doesn't exist, or that Active Directory isn't actually pretty damn effective. And Visual Studio actually has its moments (me: old timey VB6 fan, but what do I know).
If you actually work with MS's server products all day long, you'll find that there really is a sum of the parts that actually scratches quite a few itches. And don't forget their hardware... given my choice of a anything from Logitech, MS, or several others (especially for the money), for some uses I'd probably reach for the MS stuff more often. Strictly on touchy-feely-reliability merit, no brand loyalty whatsoever in that area. Unfortunately, they don't make the asbestos products I'll need for this comment.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
The point is that some intercommunication between certain technologies is SUPPOSED to be difficult because they are INCOMPATIBLE. As soon as you find a way to make it "easier" you've likely inserted a ton of limitations. That's what Microsoft is best at, putting limitations on technology. I suppose I should correct my earlier assertion. Microsoft has innvoated both mediocrity and artificially imposed limitations within the technology realm.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
MS does help innovation, although not in a sane way. Sure, there are lots of small companies with fresh, innovative ideas which get bought up by MS. Evil MS, no cookie? Wrong. How likely is it that those companies would have survived? For most: zero. So, in theory its a good thing that the 800-pound gorilla takes the innovative ideas and includes them in their products. In theory. In practice the new ideas often vanish in the patent portfolio, or they mutate to really ugly MS incarnations.
This sig does not contain any SCO code.
It ends when "I wonder if Open Source can do what Microsoft did."
:) Google seems to be doin a great job so far.
There alone, explains the author's lack of grasp on the subject. The Open Source movement is riddled with people that once upon a time, made Microsoft a great company. And I will give credit, even as taboo as it may be on Slashdot with the large followers of Microsoft *cough cough*.
Microsoft's ability to innovate does not lie at the OS level, or the application level. It lies at a fundamentally different area, one that's not related to software in and of itself. Microsoft's brilliance is simple -- they made it possible for a business to conduct complete workflow thru their software, from beginning to end. Businesses will always mandate what the future of consumers will buy, and their decisions. If you work for a finance firm and they tell you "Okay Johnson, we are switching to Linux to save $2523432!".. do you think that Johnson is going to go home and buy another Windows PC for his home? He will need a Linux PC to mirror his work environment. Then he will have a friend who comes over and says "wow, what's that?", where Johnson will explain the benefits (as explained to him by his company) of Linux on his desktop, and will thus propogate the use of Linux on the desktop.
Microsoft made Windows -- arguably a crap OS, arguably not. But with the combination of Exchange, Biztalk, Sharepoint, the Office Suite and Windows working in (relative) harmony under Active Directory well.. I'll argue it takes some vision to bring a company that far, and innovation to boot.
But I wouldn't count out Linux as the author did... the people who made MS what it is are who are working in Open Source, working at Google, working at Yahoo, working at IBM. And they will tell us how innovative open source can be, or hell, not even Open Source... but MS alternatives
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
I wish I could find a link somewhere, but back in the Windows 3.x days, the days where serial mice were common, the days when _Mouse Systems_ actually meant something, the days when mice were ugly bricks, the days before the MS dove bar mouse, I remember seeing a mouse by Genius that had a front-center-mount scroll wheel.
The wheel wasn't clickable as a third button, but the spiel on the box was all about how it would make scrolling that much easier.
So Microsoft didn't invent the wheel mouse, but they did refine it considerably and make it universally usable, thanks to their ability to integrate tightly into the OS. It's so much easier to do that when you control the APIs.
-- I ain't broke, but I'm badly bent.
"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."
What I found absolutely hilarious about this comment is that Slashdot sports a woody whenever there's news about FireFox, OpenOffice, KDE, or any other product that copies an MS product. Is the real problem here that MS isn't innovating, or that a bunch of you want to strip MS of a word that they really love?
I'm not kidding, it's really hard to take comments like this seriously. Security hole in IE? Tar and feather Microsoft over their shitty code. Security hole in FireFox? Give the team a medal for the great code they've written. Playstation 3 may be really expensive? Sony sucks. XBOX360 offers a cheaper alternative? Microsoft sucks. Eolas successfully sues MS with an overly broad patent? That's great! Lindows intentionally infringes on the Windows trademark? Suddenly the trademark that Microsoft's had for 20 years should be invalid! Consumer confusion be damned!! Monopolies suck because competition is important! Oh no! Microsoft's making a competing product, they shouldn't be allowed to do that!
You'll pardon me for taking these broadly painted highly modded comments with a grain of salt. Slashdot's comments on Microsoft are about as credible as a Star Wars fan's advice on picking up chicks.
"Derp de derp."
Given the fact a *fucking lot* of Open Source applications are copying ideas from Windows, there must be some clever heads at Microsoft. But I still hate Equation Editor from the Office Suite ;-)
"Long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead." (John Maynard Keynes)
Standards? Works everwhere? Hey dude -- you're working for M-i-c-r-o-s-o-f-t... you know, the people who don't like standards, who won't use open standards (OpenDocument), tweak standards so they are not compliant (Kerberos), invent their own "standards" and not share them (MS-Word format), and then finally try to patent everything (FAT filesystem) so that other people (that would be us, the open source community) can't use it.
Maybe you should read your own article and think about those things, eh? Maybe a lot of people at Microsoft should think about those things...
coding is life
This guy works for Microsoft, and had released an article with a rather defensive tone to it. I laughed the same way when I heard Mrs. Bush chastising the American public for picking on her husband.
1992 was the year that OS/2 2.0 (the first 32-bit version) was released by IBM with its nifty ability to run both DOS and Windows software out of the box and a real drag-and-drop GUI that made the newly released Windows 3.1 desktop look fairly primitive.
:-)
Unlike DOS GUIs like GEM, PC/GEOS, and others which preceded it, OS/2 was demonstrably better than Windows in almost every way you could think of except in three areas:
* It required more RAM than Windows did (OS/2 was usable in 8MB while Windows was usable in 4MB).
* It had support for fewer devices (especially video cards) than Windows, which was a major issue for a number of people I knew who were interested in it including myself, and
* It required a bit of a mind shift to use if one was used to Windows, mainly because it actually used the second mouse button for context menus and such (unlike Windows).
It was missing native software, but that didn't matter -- most of the folks I know used it as a platform to run DOS or Windows software anyway. Why not? It that that job very well.
We know from history that preloads, developer deals, and various other Microsoft tactics and actions would cause OS/2 to drop from the industry radar roughly four years later, but I'm sure that the introduction of IBM's product scared the crap out of some folks in Redmond.
I for one am thankful that IBM released such a product -- in those days, we didn't have many alternatives on x86 hardware (BeOS wasn't around yet, nobody in PC land had heard of the BSDs, and Linux was just barely starting to become useful).
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
So let's see. It's perfectly acceptable for someone to claim MSSQL is not an innovation (in itself) because it comes from Sybase. Microsoft has a lot of products that are derived from technologies they've purchased (IE, FrontPage, Access, their original C compiler, VB, etc.) Of course we can all pretend that IE is not much different from Mosaic or VB.NET is not in any way superior to the original 'Thunder' prototype Cooper sold them. After all, this is not 'true' innovation the way we like to think of it, like Napster or ICQ or Bitorrent or Groove or OS X (which themselves are of course based in work previously done by other companies and individuals).
But, it's completely unacceptable to try to make the argument that Linux does not innovate because it's a (IMO, bad) clone of UNIX, or that GNOME and KDE simply clone the Windows UI or that no open source editor (think JEdit) is innovative because, well, there's Emacs over there. Firefox? Nope, based on Netscape. Postgres? CA Ingres. Firebird? Interbase. Following that train of thought, if innovation is MySQL then I don't want it - they're just getting stored procedures this year. Kinda changes things, doesn't it?
Microsoft is the only one who "gets it" about how technology is an interrelated puzzle
MS is the company that has taken a few productivity apps and crated an integrated Office suite that actually works together. They came up with COM/OLE and then started tying things in a way that businesses for many years have found rather useful. Their server products integrate very well, and so do their development tools. Now they are doing the next generation of this stuff with .NET instead of COM as a glue technology. Color me jaded but there is no such thing in open source, at least not to the extent that Microsoft has reached.
there should be a consistency across technology
I don't know about this but I sure don't think open source with the 'not invented here' problem and their dozens of different widget sets and slightly incompatible GUIs have it right, either. Maybe Apple are the ones who will get this right. At least in Windows and OS X you have a single presentation layer API to deal with. And let's not even get into backwards compatibility, which is still one of Microsoft's crowning achievements. People don't like change. Every time Microsoft changes the Office UI they take a risk. They're slammed because it's 'bloated and useless', but if they didn't they'd be called 'stagnant'. Yipeee!
there is no comparable technology "out there" to Microsoft's COM model
This is a dear argument to most slashbots - it's the equivalent of saying my PS2 is not an innovative or useable product - and use the Atari 2600 as proof for the argument. CORBA remained in many ways the lofty preserve of the UNIX enterprise - certainly no one did a complete binary-level object protocol that tied everything from the desktop to the browser to the enterprise and out (and provided the tools to work with that infrastructure). Are there technologies out there that are similar to COM? Sure. Is there prior art? Sure. Did anyone else take component technology to that level and delivered it to a few hundred million people? Nope. Hey, ask the GNOME folks. Surely they had compelling reasons to 'come up' with gconf and bonobo, eh?
If you choose to dismiss the incremental evolution of technology as a form of innovation then absolutely nothing is new anymore. It's all OK when that measuring stick is used with Microsoft and it makes for some great flamewars, but it's not acceptable when applied to anyone else, expecially open source.
As always, this article is just another big bashfest that gives the slashbots a chance to come out of the woodwork to rehash their Clippy and Bob jokes and puts some more money in OSTG's pockets from all those ad impressions. Great business model!
There's also the fact that they don't play well with other. People at Microsoft deserve a big share of the credit for inventing XSL — and it would be hard to overstate the importance of that. But, as they always do with any activity they can't control, Microsoft gradually withdrew from the XSL working group. So whenever you hear about XSLT or XSL:FO, it's in connection with somebody else.
OK; for one, the space race was for one purpose only: to create ICBM's. The dev costs were too high to get the US to fund it out straight, so they created a 'space race'. You'll note that the cancelation/reduction of the 'space race' happened pretty much when ICBM technology was available.
But the thing is, that's the way technology has worked. The technology of war always trickles down to the populace, from the technology to create crossbows and trebuchets, to radar, electronics, robotics...all the result of wartime technology efforts. In a way, those court intellectuals you quote are right; no wartech, no safe plane journeys aided by GPS (wartime tech too), radar and electronics.
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?
Wow. I've never seen anyone totally miss the point I was trying to make until now.
... *helped* satisfy human desires?
Yes, research during WWII, the Cold War, and space program led to good stuff. I specifically agreed to that in my post. But it's not enough to establish that, which you (pointlessly) went to great lengths to show in your post. You must also show that what would have happened in their absence would be worse. Showing that good stuff happened during program X proves NOTHING. Listing one by one the benefits of the space program proves NOTHING. Imagine if I took $100 from you, bought a candy bar, and gave it to you. By your logic I could say, "How dare you doubt the utility of the Theft-Candy Program? The TCP has resulted in your acquisition of a candy bar! Sure, you can play revisionist historian and claim you would have gotten a candy bar without it, but let's face it: you would have just stayed at home. And I know you can wave your hands and make the tired old 'I could have gotten a candy bar without TCP for under $100' game or even the 'I preferred my leisure and keeping the $100' game, but that's just voodoo economics."
In my post, I specifically showed how the spinoff arguments don't hold up to logic. At the beginning of the space program, entrepreneurs were researching better ways to satisfy human desires. Then the government diverted resources from this activity to another activity, which indirectly led to the satisfaction of some human desires. You're claiming that this diversion *from* satisfying human desires
The difference, in case you're wondering, between auto-racing research and space program research is that the auto research itself satisfies the desires of auto-racing fanatics, and the spinoffs to Ford Escorts are icing. In the space program, the goal does not actually satisfy human desires, and if it does, it's coincidental.
And no serious researcher takes your "job creation" or "boosts the economy" argument seriously. It's just the broken window fallacy reloaded (google it). Sure, we could start a government program paying people to dig holes and fill them up. That would create jobs. Or we could smash windows, burn down homes, evacuate cities and destroy them, etc. That would certainly create jobs in reconstruction! But it wouldn't prove the destructive acts were beneficial. What's important is whether human activity is directed at satisfying human desires or not. When you divert entrepreneurial activity to sticking it to the Ruskies, you take away from that.
It seems your courseload was heavy on the history, light on the economics. And you can't draw conclusions from history without a basis in the underlying economics. So you can spare me the indignance about all the great stuff from the space program, because it proves exactly nothing.
Rank my idea: http://www.sinceslicedbread.com/node/531
So interoperabtility between Lotus Notes and Microsoft Exchange is not a problem then, ehhh? Get over yourself. It happens anywhere once you diverge from the church of Microsoft. I used to be a part of that congregation and believed in the implentation of an all Microsoft shop. I preached it loud and far. Until I discovered that it didn't do what I needed and their answer was, "Why in the hell would you want to anyway"? At that point I left the flock and realized that there was so much more out there that was so much better. And most of that "so much more" was in the FOSS world. Sorry, but you lose.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
There's no doubt that Microsoft are learning, but it's only because they're being forced to be innovative, not because they choose to be.
For me, Microsoft are more iterative than innovative, and this shows in a lot of their software, which is reactionary and often grudgingly so.
There's no denying that within the walls of Redmond, Microsoft are demonizing the broader open source movement for forcing Microsoft to do the one thing they've never had to do, which is to compete on quality rather than sheer marketing might, which has historically won out time and time again...
Subject says it all.
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
Mostly everyhting else they do simply makes state of the art affordable and usable to the common person, which is innovative and creative in a certain. I mean stripping down FoxPro to the basics and redeploying as Acess is no simple task. Copying a webserver and making it usable to the average tech school graduatge is equally interesting.
The real problem is that MS wants to be known as a high tech leader, which in some ways they are, and perhaps were more than now. OTOH, Toyota makes a pretty penny delivery cars of adequate quality to consumers, and though they might exagerate, they are not going to say they know thier place.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
I like OpenOffice's equation editor better because is uses plain old [La]TeX if I remember correctly. Makes it easy to write equations in OOo and in LaTeX without remembering different syntaxes.
'Yes, firefox is indeed greater than women. Can women block pops up for you? No. Can Firefox show you naked women? Yes.'
MS licensed SMS from NetIQ...
.Net langs, just like most Oracle developers still write PL/SQL code, not Java stored procs. It'll make non SQL Server developers feel slightly more comfortable, but it will make it even easier for DBAs to say, "well, figure it out yourself."
MS colicensed SQL Server from Sybase, way back in NT 3.5 days, and eventually forked it about SQL Server version 6.0.
CLR? OK, let's allow other languages to "compile" to the JVM, eh, Sun? Let's not even think about the USCD p-code system...
SQLCLR? What about Java JRE embedded in Oracle?
Exchange? Hmm... Lotus Notes. GroupWise. CHMS (if you have worked in US military hospitals, you know full well about CHMS... but I would posit that it is internally what Exchange wishes it could be. Yes, I know about how shitty everyone who uses it thinks it is...).
WinFS? Oracle did this first, InternetFileSystem (iFS).
MTS...didn't they kind of steal that idea from IBM?
ActiveDirectory is MSified Kerberos.
Terminal Services, better ask Citrix how they feel about that one...
for one reckon VS.Net 2005 Team System Oooo...Delphi Enterprise. Hmm... been this way since at least Delphi 5. Remote debugging, too.
& SQL 2005 are gonna kick some serious butt. Nah. People will realize just how stupid it is writing stored procedures in
(Ajax support and ongoing ORM systems are gonna be the icing on the cake.) Ruby on Rails.
a lot of the stuff in this software has gotta be their own ideas/solutions
Maybe, just maybe, Microsoft would be far better off saying that they're the "BASF" of software development: "We don't come up with the ideas, we just market the hell out of them so you think we did". Of course, we wouldn't have AJAX if some other non-MS brains realized how powerful XmlHTTPRequest actually is...
Sure, some of the guts are actually worthy of respect, even back in Win 9x days (read: "Undocumented Windows 95").
I sure hope not, since there isn't any operating system called Linux '05 now, and probably won't be later. Perhaps this is something you're inventing yourself?
Jokes aside, Windows has *always* been ahead in terms of user experience. Sure, it's the target of viruses and mal/spyware. Sure, it's got a bad security model. Sure, it was produced by a company which could for most intents and purposes be considered evil. But at the end of the day, it's beating Linux out, and in 3 years, it will still be beating Linux out. I mean, we're talking about Linux, an OS where they can't even decide on a single method for accessing the clipboard. I realize this is a small point, but tell that to the guy who accidently middle clicked and had half a page of crap spew out all over his work. There is no one thing that wrecks the user experience in Linux, it's hundreds of little things that tend to drive the average user mad enough to ditch it.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
Well, two things. First, editing the registry is a hell of a lot easier, because it's a unified database, not a collection of odd files each with their own syntax. Second, I can't remember the last time I HAD to edit the registry. I had to muck with config files all the time in linux.