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Is Microsoft An Innovator? - The Winer-Scoble Debate
Carl Bialik from WSJ writes "Bloggers Robert Scoble (a former Microsoft 'technical evangelist') and Dave Winer (longtime Microsoft critic) debate whether Microsoft is driving innovation or playing catch-up, in an email conversation published on WSJ.com. Winer writes, 'Microsoft isn't an innovator, and never was. They are always playing catch-up, by design. That's their M.O. They describe their development approach as "chasing tail lights." They aren't interested in markets until they're worth billions, so they let others develop the markets, and have been content to catch-up.' Scoble responds that Microsoft's innovation can be found in the little things: 'I remember when they improved the error messages you get in Internet Explorer, or when they improved fonts in Windows with ClearType technology. That improved our lives in a very tiny way. Not one that you usually read about, or probably even notice. Is Microsoft done innovating in those small ways? Absolutely not. Office 2007 lets me do some things (like cool looking charts) in seconds that used to take many minutes, maybe even hours for some people to do.'"
See, M$ is innovative!
If Microsoft are "chasing tail lights" could someone please brake suddenly.
OK, they make small improvements to things, btu yeah, the big changes are definetly taken (purchased or copied) from others.
Still, they have a habit of taking crap and actually making it pretty decent. At least to my experience.
34486853790
Connection too slow for X forwarding? Try "ssh -CX user@host"
Stuff like UI-isms (paperclips, ribbons, hiding the file menu, etc) isnt "innovation" .... Stuff like Dtrace , TCP/IP, xml, .. THAT is innovation. Lets have MS give us some real innovation, you know - stuff that wont just change "the way things are done" inside of thier own software ecosystem.
MSFT is too big and bloated to be nimble and innovative. For the last ten years their product execution has been horrible. They show up late to the party with a buggy product and treat their customers like criminals.
Time for Ballmer to go. As long as he's in charge at MSFT nothing is going to change.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Scoble says "I remember when they improved the error messages you get in Internet Explorer, or when they improved fonts in Windows with ClearType technology. That improved our lives in a very tiny way." Sorry, but ClearType is not something I consider life-improving. A cure for diabetes is life-improving.
Well technically I would agree that MS plays catch-up most of the time. They are always innovating the way they do business, and in turn setting a standard so to speak for commercial software. Two examples of how they have changed certain markets in the recent years would be .NET and Xbox Live. They may not be innovating on their flagship stuff i.e. Windows, Office, but they move forward in other areas.
In a world of acronyms, the words are the real victims.
...Scoble responds that Microsoft's innovation can be found in the little things: 'I remember when they improved the error messages you get in Internet Explorer, or when they improved fonts in Windows with ClearType technology. That improved our lives in a very tiny way. Not one that you usually read about, or probably even notice. Is Microsoft done innovating in those small ways? Absolutely not. Office 2007 lets me do some things (like cool looking charts) in seconds that used to take many minutes, maybe even hours for some people to do.'"
Wow. Improved error messages in Internet Explorer. Which side of the argument is this guy on again?
... but they make such a mess of it!
ActiveX - why not let others use your computer resources too
MicrosoftBOB - bwahahahahahahaha
Clippy - bwahahahahahahaha x 200
MP3 player with WiFi (crippled beyond belief)
Brown Mp3 players (my god - who told them brown was the in colour?)
PlaysForSure - but not on our player
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The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
The reason that Microsoft is so successful is in no small part to their innovations. Regardless of whether or not they created the ideas, by far the most difficult part is putting them into practice. This feat alone is a major innovation of the industry. An even greater feat is putting them into practice in large quantities. Furthermore, although Microsoft has had situations such as ActiveX, they have had success stories such as Direct-X too. Of course, the merits of Direct-X are continually questioned by OpenGL fans, but there is no doubt that creating a standard is innovative.
we are supposed to all shout NO!. But they innovated in one critical way. When the Unix wars were in full swing, they came up with a remarkable new business model that utterly crushed all competition and set them as the worlds main desktop and office OS.
/sigh...
Is that innovation? You may argue not, was it nice, nope, but they managed it, and business was so desperate for someone to get of their fat corporate arse and solve their newborn IT problem, that they loved everything microsoft did.
If only it hadn't been them that did it
Yeah... I guess I'm not an evangelist for Microsoft then ;)
ClearType. It's so good MOST PEOPLE have it closed. It's closed by default, and it causes a %/$"%(load of problems with most software (Gaim and other GTKs for example has problems with that, I can't even see the "i" when I type a sentence). That said, I opened it, and found the way to get it configured (oh great, you actually need to go to a M$ website, and either download a powertoy or a IE ActiveX, talk about conviviality), and now am a happy user of it. But I had to lose a great hour trying to find the way to get things done. So I guess it helps EVERYONE.
Geez, if that's the best example he could harvest, Microsoft is in deep trouble!
But does something really need to be innovative to be a good thing?
Really, most of us have fallen for the big lie. It doesn't matter whether or not Microsoft is innovative, everyone is innovative. It's inventive we should care about? I can rearrange the paperclips in my drawer and that qualifies as innovative. It's a work that means nothing. That's why Microsoft made it a key feature of their advertising campaigns, it's a technical sounding word that only requires that Microsoft copy other companies.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
yawn
I think the MS evangelist is missing the point. What drives Microsoft to make those small improvements? I have heard from other recent articles, such as the 9-choice Vista shutdown menu fiasco, that the development team supposedly has Macintosh computers around as "good examples". I'd say that's playing catch-up. Of course, it completely makes sense that anyone wanting to dominate has a much shorter road to use a 90+% install base as a copycat platform rather than risk an innovation that doesn't work... MS lets the little guys figure out what doesn't work. If it works, they either copy you or buy you, whichever is cheaper. They'd be dumb not to given their position. After all, why earn a ph.d when you can hire one; and why hire one when you can just buy the end result off of him/her; and why buy the end result when you can just copy it and patent it from under them?
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Lets see... MS took an existing Operating system, repackaged it, and sold it to IBM. And thus an empire was born.
MS innovates in their marketing and licensing schemes, but is that really what you want from a TECHNOLOGY firm?.. Sure, their lawyers are smart.. ("Lets see how we can gouge you today, AND not have you realize until your bleeding").
Everything else they have done as been, as many have pointed out, been based on someone else's work, that they have taken to market with their leverage. Again, nothing I can respect from a TECHNOLOGY firm. Microsoft should just cut the crap and call themselves what they are. a Terriffic marketing firm. They are NOT and have never been a technology firm.
God made the Idiot for practice, and then He made the School Board -- Mark Twain Look for http://Thebar.steelbeachca
innovation /nven/ Pronunciation Key - Show Spelled Pronunciation[in-uh-vey-shuhn] Pronunciation Key - Show IPA Pronunciation
-noun
1. something new or different introduced: numerous innovations in the high-school curriculum.
2. the act of innovating; introduction of new things or methods.
From dictionary.com
So, I guess technically MS does innovate, but they don't create new markets.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Microsoft, who spends billions of dollars on R&D each year, is able to turn that into... friendly error messages and smooth fonts? That's a mighty fine return on investment there.
Not a pleasant position to be in :-(
Microsoft are more pleasant to interact with, in my experience.
Slashdot looked deep within my soul and assigned
me a number based on the order in which I joined
Okay, so where's the Apple icon that would seem to go with this story by implication? And what does the Hardware icon have to do with this? Or have the topic icons started making sense all of a sudden...except not?
Triv
creating new markets.
They are not the same.
Innovating is creating something new or different.
So Zune is innovation. Is it a new market? no. Is it new or different? yes.
No I am not a MS 'fanboi' but lets use the correct definition.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
uh, are any of you aware of Microsoft Research? i'm not a fan of Redmond, but i do have colleagues who do real research, something a "technical evangelist" doesn't know/get educated about/understand, since it's not directly part of the marketing for their flagship products. there is serious cash being put into R&D at Microsoft for years. they also promote research in Academia; for instance Bill Gates donated 20M to MIT to help start the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT. http://www.csail.mit.edu/index.php - egad, a building is even named after him! don't hate if you don't know the whole story... http://research.microsoft.com/
I just blogged about this because I read an article in the "Toronto Star" about the launch of Vista in Canada. The best part is the last paragraph:
"Microsoft doesn't have to be the leader. They are a fast follower," Sharwood said.
Innovation does NOT MEAN inventing.
Look it up.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Most of Microsoft's most commercially successful products "borrowed" heavily from other applications on the market, at least to start with. But I think that culture is starting to change. Microsoft PowerShell is the most impressive operating system shell that's been released in a long time, an innovative, object-oriented departure from the old Unix shell paradigm.
If you need absolute proof that innovation lives at Microsoft, take a look at their experimental operating system: Singularity.
We've always known that Microsoft doesn't innovate. And if that's the best Scoble can come up with, he's essentially just confirmed that fact.
Understand that politicians always say they're doing good for the people, used car salesmen always say _this_ car is the best deal you'll see, and those slackers at work always say that they're indispensable. Those who pay attention know the difference. Those who don't are the intended audience.
Microsoft knows that to maintain their monopoly they have to convince enough people that it's actually good for the customer. So they hire windbags like Scoble to do what he does. Let's just take a little satisfaction in the fact that this is as good as he can do.
=J
It was and continues to be. They have their ups and their downs. Just like other companies, Apple included. Its fun to remember their screwups. They get noticed more because they are so big they attract enough "haters" to make a community.
Office was a great idea when it came out and has steadily improved. For some of us its entirely too much but it does the basics as well as enough fancy stuff to keep most business needs covered.
Xbox Live is probably their last great innovation. Everyone talks about online content not being original but until Live the execution of it for consoles was leaving a lot to be desired. Actually Live is a great example to follow for PC based content and should and could expand into the PC Arena. It probably is going to be used mostly as the stepping stone into the living room and is in a better situation to do so than Frontrow and Apple's iTMS integration to come.
Are they too big to truly innovate? No. There is much that goes on behind the scenes that we never see. The problem MS faces is that much of what they are planning leaks out under the guise of "will be integral to the next OS" that others can jump on it, deliver it, and appear as the originators because it takes too long for MS to turn on complete new releases of the OS.
If anything they may want to follow Apple's model of releasing revisions more often, though I doubt they could get away charging as much as Apple does for it.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Maybe they mean innovative in a different way, like BASF - making the good things we know better...except that BASF does it, you know...well.
Didn't Microsoft buy cleartype??
The little things are important, but not THAT important. Those are improvements, not innovations.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
Read: they couldn't tolerate a hole that's larger than their own security holes.
Oooopppss ... did I really say that?
Scoble tacitly supports Winer's argument by pointing to what would be normal "improvement" of products and technology citing that as innovation.
Come on! Every product is iterated! Scoble's claim this is innovation is specious. If any vendors out there didn't iterate on their own products with "small" improvements, they wouldn't stay in the business.
So, basically Scoble cedes the argument -- Microsoft really does lie in wait until the market is huge enough for predatory action, and jumps in with "small improvements". Innovation? Hardly.
"I remember when they improved the error messages you get in Internet Explorer"
Don't make me laugh. The error messages in Explorer are pitiful, and haven't gotten any better, just more verbose. IE is not alone in this however. To illustrate the point, exactly the same goes for Oracle messages such as ORA-00942 "View or table does not exist"
So *which* view or table does not exist? The message can be made more verbose:
"The view or table that you tried to access does not exist. Check if the specified view exists, and if it doesn't, if there is a table of that name. If neither is the case, you can create one. Are you still reading? Please bring me a sixpack next time you want me to find the table for you."
but a much better approach would be to parameterize the error message:
"View or table 'pesron' does not exist"
This would *immediately* make clear that the word 'person' was misspelled, possibly saving hours of bug-hunting time. I'll accept the extra verbosity built-in for 'stupid' users, but at least give me some troubleshooting information so that I can fix what the hell is wrong.
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
"Scoble responds that Microsoft's innovation can be found in the little things: 'I remember when they improved the error messages you get in Internet Explorer, or when they improved fonts in Windows with ClearType technology."
These are NOT innovations, in *any* way, shape or form. They are product polishing. It seems that the only way MS have innovated is by creating their own definition of "innovation" to suit themselves (hmm.. this seems to be a recurring thing with them), and brainwashed the media to make it come true.
We have enough youth, how about a fountain of SMART?
Isn't innovation, by definition, creating products that are so new that they create markets? The small things that help are only making new technologies more useful, not inspiring new generations.
I'll make my case as such. Microsoft did come up with the XMLHttpRequest object, but it took people outside MS to turn that into AJAX.
The fact that Microsoft isn't an innovator is known for a long time. Their "commitment to innovation" is just PR, and people know it since the 90's.
See, for instance:
MS: Innovator or Integrator? - June 10, 20000 .html
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,36902,0
Saluting 25 Years of Microsoft 'Innovation' - June 14, 2000o fficesuites/article.html
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,17180-page,1-c,
BTW, I know of many companies whose slogan includes "paradigm shift", "a new way of ...", "innovation comes first" or anything else along the same lines. As always, they offer the very same things as everyone else.
Mr. Winer: I have to admit that I haven't played Halo, but of course I am familiar with it. I did a quick search and found that it was created by Bungie Labs, a Chicago company that Microsoft acquired six years ago.
Mr. Scoble: Yes, and there's always room for a company that innovates through acquisitions.
--
If I had their checkbook, I'd be innovative as hell! Fire the lot of them and let the guys with the checkbook do their work...
No. It was a bloody awful debate, full of contradictory statements and non sequiturs.:
Guy 1: Microsoft doesn't innovate.
Guy 2: Yes they do! They innovate by improving their own software! So clearly they are more innovative than themselves!
Guy 1: Apple doesn't innovate either.
Guy 2: Ah, but what about Halo??
Guy 1: Um, Microsoft bought the company that made Halo.
Guy 2: That's just how they innovate: buying people who do! Um, I guess that's not innovation, so.... remember how much more Apple innovated in 1989, but then Microsoft made more money than them? That proves that Microsoft can innovate in this new horrible way that I just made up!
Guy 1: No, that doesn't make sense and you know it. I think Google is the top software company now because I use their products.
Guy 2: Well, Google shut down one of the things they do, and I like how Microsoft ranks my blog better than how Google does it! That's the kind of thing that makes Microsoft innovative: providing a better search result for a single query. Vista has an RSS aggregator. Is that innovative? Oh...no but it's cool. Also the XBox is popular.
Guy 1: Big corporations are all assholes and none of them innovate.
Guy 2: A friend of mine that works at Microsoft says he's happy that Google is innovating, because that means he gets to work on his projects to play catch-up...I mean innovate. Here's a bunch of random stuff Microsoft did that has nothing to do with innovation.
This uninformed waste of time brought to you by the Wall Street Journal.
Did you ever notice that *nix doesn't even cover Linux?
It's nice that your list points three failures to the same product... very insightful.
And even if we took those three issues as separate products it's pretty damn pathetic that you have to go the entire way back to MSBob to make a list of 6 things you've found less than perfect in your little world.
If that's the best you can do I'd call MS a pretty damn good company from where I sit.
What the poop is a "technical evangelist"?
The dictionary definition (according to m-w.com) of "innovate" is "to introduce as or as if new". Microsoft has certainly introduced a lot of things _as if_ they were new (even though they weren't, since Unix, Linux, and/or Apple had them years before). Therefore Microsoft is innovative.
And the viruses and malware problem is significantly less since Windows XP Service Pack 2. Huh... I seem to remember seeing an article purporting that at least half of the spam-zombies perpetuating these stock pump-and-dump schemes are Win XP SP2 boxen...
Apple will come out with iTV next year, after Microsoft has been doing Media Center for more than two years. I bet Apple will get credit for their "innovation" first, though, cause it's not fun to give Microsoft credit for innovation. Maybe that's because Apple did more than cobble together a rank-ass Media Center version of Windows and slap a nice TV-video card in a tower enclosure. I mean seriously, where the hell are you supposed to put M$'s media center PC that will make it suitable as a Media Center AND a workstation? They completely missed the boat. Apple will most likely do it better, smaller, cheaper, faster, and with more quality. (I'm not a Mac fanboi so much as a MS Loather...)
[Winer]: You have to create things they don't teach in school. If you can take a college class about it, it ain't innovation. True dat, BUT they really should be teaching security more these days. I can't say it really ever came up in my classes way back when, but then, it was a different day and age. PC's didn't get "mugged" the minute they stepped onto the internet then either.
Ahh, have you ever played Halo? That's from Microsoft too. And here we have the crux of the problem... I believe Bungie had been working on Halo before Microsoft devoured them... In fact, it was Bungie who made many wonderful games for the Mac. Pathways out of Darkness? Marathon? Hello? Then suddenly, MS pwned them, and now they make crappy back ports to their "original" OS... *sigh* More importantly though, how is Bungie's Halo a Microsoft innovation again?
Yes, and there's always room for a company that innovates through acquisitions. Forgive me, but being innovative does not involve buying other people's work and calling it your own, and furthermore not giving credit where credit's due, as above. That's called evil.
Would YouTube have gotten purchased for more than a billion if Microsoft wasn't threatening Google? I doubt it. Isn't that the other way around? I mean, MS is kinda king-of-the-hill. Seems like Google poses more of a threat to MS... Where is Microsoft's innovative "video site"? Oh yeah, they are playing catch-up trying to cobble together their own...
No... most of MS's innovation is sadly in their relatively nasty and harmful business practices like "Embrace and Extend". Honestly, this is the kind of innovation we wish they would just shelve somewhere....
Office 2007 lets me do some things (like cool looking charts) in seconds
And this is meant as a demonstration of how Microsoft is innovating. I remember when I last got excited about making "cool looking charts in seconds", it was using a program called Harvard Graphics in about 1991.
It's 2007 and he's talking about "cool looking charts". To me this just demonstrates the extent to which Microsoft is holding back innovation...
Microsoft was the first to ever get this right with windows 95, OS/2 and CDE had a similar toolbar but it would disappear under other windows and you were constantly chasing after it by tabbing between windows. And what about all those network protocols MSCHAP (wireless), Cascaded style sheets etc. Is it that Microsoft doesn't innovate, or /.ers just refused to acknowledge that they do?
Adobe Type Manager, with font smoothing, was out on Macs in 1991, long before ClearType, which was touted as one of XP's new features when it shipped in 2002. ATM was even available as an add-on to Windows by 1993, nine years ahead of ClearType. Furthermore, Mac OS 8.5 shipped with Apple's own built-in font smoothing in 1998. Whether or not M$ has done much innovating, that example doesn't exactly help his case.
The Office 2007 touts some kind of new UI improvement on toolbars. MS claims enough interest in the new UI to offer licensing http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2006/n ov06/11-21officeui.mspx
. I'd call that a UI innovation.
Then there's the WinFS file system that was pulled from Longhorn. I don't know if it's better, but it sounds innovative.
One MS project that really interests me is PhotoSynth. http://labs.live.com/photosynth/. Anybody out there willing to argue it's not a truly innovative application?
One other area of innovation I'm willing to give MS credit for: building large systems. It's almost impossible to build software on the scale of Office and Windows. Tens of thousands of developers, millions of lines of code, thousands of different software & hardware environments to test in. Not to mention all the backward compatibility. I'm guessing here, but I bet MS innovated in large software project managment.
--- Often in error; never in doubt!
The fact is that microsoft does a lot of cool, innovative things.
How about the most innovative thing of all, getting people onto commodity hardware and out of the clutches of the clutches of the tyrannical interated systems of the 1980s.
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
Which part of Microsoft are you looking at. You would be hard pushed to find much innovation of value in Vista (Search, gadgets, GPU accelerated UI, UAC...where have I seen these implemented better?), Office (ribbon bar is lipstick on a pig) or Zune (I don't consider wireless DRM a useful innovation) - but LINQ, XAML, ATLAS, POWERSHELL and their marketing of a monopoly certainly show innovative ideas.
$2B OR NOT $2B = $FF
There is more then just technical innovation isn't there, can't innovations be made is usability, presentation, interfaces, support, etc?
If they have framed the debate in terms of innovation or "catch up" they have overlooked the destructive results of Microsoft's domination and "improvements." The third of the three Es is Extinguish. This is played out by breaking competitor's programs on their platform. Once M$ has driven their competitors out they stagnate. XP was behind the free world when it was released and today it's pathetic. Vista has not even close to having caught up. The world of M$ PDAs is much the same outside of Japan. Fortunately they have not been able to push the Xbox, media PC and Zune onto the world but you can see how grossly inferior they are to their competitors. Microsoft will never innovate because they waste time and resources thinking of ways to put others out of business.
Witness the Bad Attitude:
What an asshole.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
"Syntax error near ','"
Pining for the fjords
For sake of not getting banned from Slashdot: Down with M$.
Now on to the actual post. I think the chasing tails lights method of development and business building can be not only financially sucessful like M$ has proven, but can also be innovative. Much like drafting you are staying as close as possible to your competition and then just at the right time jumping around them. Why does M$ have to build the next market sector? And just because they don't does than mean they are not innovative?
Has M$ done this? Yes. Look at the Xbox and Xbox Live. Look at Zune. Look at the hooks into Media Center. I have bought 2 Xbox's and a Media Center PC because no one else is allowing me to do the things they are when used together. I have gotten rid of the cable boxes and tivos because M$ actually gets it. One device with unlimited turners to record TV and the 360's to view them in any room (even wirelessly) and I get to stream music, movies, etc. While by themselves none of this may seem innovative but put them together and suddenly the technolgies developed by chasing tail lights is now innovative and even kicked Sony out of my house.
Oh yeah, and my MSN Messenger Phone rocks...OK, I don't actually have that but I have seen them for sale at Best Buy and it is yet another hook in to there connected network.
Well, duh. First of all, there is obviously no single yes or no answer. MS innovates some, so yeah, obviously you can't literally say they never innovate, but good God, look at the examples Scoble gives--freaking "friendly" error messages (which suck ass) and ClearType are the best he can come up with as counter-examples? Everybody borrows from everyone else and builds on the work of others, but anybody who has been paying attention to the industry for the last couple decades knows that MS has not been doing much innovating, no matter how you define it.
:-)
I could spend all morning picking apart his arguments but I don't have the time. A couple highlights:
As to security problems in Windows, yes, Microsoft deserves blame there. But it has made huge strides.
He then goes on to say how fucking wonderful MS is that they were able to fix problems that other vendors had solved decades ago. (OMG! Don't automatically run scripts from web pages and emails! We're fucking GENIUSES!!!!11) That's innovation--cleaning up your own mess?
As to security problems in Windows, yes, Microsoft deserves blame there. But it has made huge strides... Very few [interns and college graduates] had more than a single class on security in college or universities. Our industry just hasn't cared about security either.
So, because computer security isn't taught in school, that equals innovating?* And which fucking "industry" does he think "doesn't care" about security? Obviously he's never been within a thousand miles of an IT department. Or IBM. Or Cisco. Or Sun.
And, although I love Apple (I have three Macs and three PCs in my house right now) I can't display full HDTV images through mine onto my HDTV screen (I have a slightly older Sony screen than Dave does). But with Xbox 360 and Media Center I can.
So, MS is innovating because you have an old TV? Uh-huh. Wow--backwards compatability, component outputs. Yeah, REAL fucking innovative. Unlike that non-innovator Apple, who's leaving analog outputs in the past where they belong and moving forward with pure digital goodness.** Besides, who brought A/V to the desktop in the first place?
I love the smell of flamebait in the morning. God, reading Scoble's lame-ass arguments makes me want to gouge out my eyes with a titanium spork.
* hint: maybe... just MAYBE... "innovation" = thinking up shit that's NOT taught in schools!!! Eh? Eh? My fucking God, this guy is as dumb as a bag of hammers.
** watch me change my tune in 2 months when Apple releases the iTV with component outputs.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
That another way Microsoft innovated was by paying a blogger (Scoble) tons and tons of money to speak on their behalf.
There has been very little innovation in computer and information technology in the last 10 years. Lost of smoke and very little fire. Lots of light but little actual heat.
Vista is XP with some minor changes and a cpu/gpu hungry graphics engine. XP is 98 with some minor security improvements and Playskool theme.
The two major changes at Apple have been the move to intel and the move to a *nix based OS.
Linux has been more of the same. Adding in functionality seen in other *nixes, more distros, more hardware support, more crappy half-finished applications.
The biggest changes in the IT world have been "Web 2.0" and multicore processors.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
The concept of allowing others to invent and develop an idea and waiting for the right business moment to launch your own version of it, while predatory, is certainly one used by many corporations and small businesses everywhere. So MS can't be singled out for that, it does make business sense.
What is sad however, is that it is still possible to allow other to invent and then innovate to improve the original product. MS did indeed used to do that. They don't appear to now.
For example, Word, though possibly technically inferior to Word Perfect, was considerably easier to use. Word allowed everyone to use a word processor, rather than just those who had the arcane knowledge of what that cardboard shortcut list stuck on top of the function keys meant. Word provided most people with exactly they needed and empowered many more. Seriously, if you're old enough to remember those times you know that Word Perfect deserved to die the slow and painful death it did.
Similarly true with IE versus Netscape. IE was a good free thing compared with the performance of the paid-for Netscape.
Now MS seems to be in the middle. There are more innovative companies ahead of them and behind them (Firefox, as one example). It would be great if they can regain some of that innovation that they once had. There are still many targets for improvement. Photoshop being one that comes to mind immediately - powerful and the best available but preposterously expensive, arcane and unintuitive. I use it every day, and though it's take me years to get proficient with it, I'd gladly dump it right now for a better more intuitive and user focused interface.
I think the Monad cmdline shell is innovative in its use of rich objects rather than text as output. Exchange 2007 adopted it heavily for their administration tools finaly giving decent cmdline access to that product. Hopefully more server products will follow that trend.
Yes.
Im an AI trapped inside this fucked up universe simulator!!!1
This guy needs to be beaten over the head with the complete works of Edward Tufte.
Pining for the fjords
So improvement to an original idea, sure. Innovation (that is to say new ideas), no.
Microsoft are not a research institute, so innovation is just one tool (of many) towards financial success (their primary motivator). Like it or not, they're good at taking ideas (not neccessarily their own) and implementing them in a way that is suitable for mass consumption. With exceptions, of course. *cough* Zunicide *cough*
:)
But how much innovation can be squeezed out of an office suite or an operating system? It seems like they're working on diminishing returns as the curve of innovation on these particular products tends towards an absolute. As we've seen, they're looking at new market areas for more fertile ground in the future. Contrary to popular belief, they're not stupid.
biopowered.co.uk - catalytically cracking triglycerides for home automotive use since 2008. Just say no to big oil!
Sure, we all bash Microsoft for various reasons - and most of the time for good reason. There are so many examples of the big M wanting a new feature or service - and just buying out a third party that's doing it. Look at Defender, purchased last year and integrated into Windows. Or even worse, taking an opensource idea and "Microsofting" it so that it's just beyond open standards to work with anything but their own stuff - LDAP to Active Directory.
For most who haven't seen Office 07 - I also couldn't understand what MORE they could put into Office. Office is the epitome of bloat ware and user unfriendly interfaces. They've been piling features upon features, and giving each one a menu, sub-menu, and pop-up window to use them.
But I've been following the Office '07 development for sometime, even subscribing to the development newsletter and reading up on it. They've truly impressed me with the amount of actual work they've been doing on the user interface and features. I decided to beta test it after it's 2nd RC version came out - and I'm actually very impressed at the end results of throwing dump trucks of Microsoft cash at making Office 07 better and different.
I think in this case, I'd have to say yes - they've been innovative.
The brown MP3 players were obviously suggested by Mr. Hankey.
...with its revenues of US$19B and $10B in equity, what's to wonder about? Just look up their R&D campus: http://finance.google.com/finance?q=AAPL
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Microsoft has done some shady things in the past. Microsoft continues to do some shady things in the present. Microsoft will continue to do some shady things in the future. I understand, see, and accept that. However, I get the feeling that if they were doing the same practices but were not the massive success that they are, no one would care.
That's right. Massive success. You can argue all you want about instability, abusing their monopoly, stealing ideas, etc. You cannot deny that they are successful. This success, in my eyes, is what causes many people to be so critical of them.
Do the idiots that do the whole "M$" thing honestly think that Microsoft is the ONLY company out there that does this (Not to mention the whole point of buisness is the almighty dollar...grats on discovering this) How about a lot of cable companies, or pharmeceutical companies, or insurance companies, or any of the other hundreds of companies that are far WORSE than Microsoft? Sure, in passing we say they are crooks or whatever, but you don't see the same kind of litigation being brought forth. You see it being brought forth in the pharmecological industry when a medication goes awry, but never against the companies THEMSELVES, these lawsuits only come about due to failed medicine.
People seem to enjoy dissecting that which does not matter. The human race as we stand now disgusts me more each day that passes.
Living With a Nerd
The anti-microsoft guy is not the best to ask. He has not been off the platfrom for more than six month and he's not really off it. He sometimes uses a Mac and only briefly implied free software. Give him a year or two and the scales will really fall out of his eyes. Right now, Scoble can run circles around him mentioning Halo and the disaster of HDTV, which is an example of how bad M$ sucks the life from technology. I can play "high definition" movies on my 233 MHz PII when they are put into a reasonable format, but this ten year old technology has yet to make it to the point where you can go to a store and buy a movie player that works with a screen. No, it should be easy to show how lame M$ is, but the champion foisted on the WSJ fell down from lack of experience.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Yeah, they improved on Microsoft's bad old way by copying someone else's good new way.
That clown Scoble's head is so far up Microsoft's monopoly that he thinks "innovation" means "new to Microsoft", even when they're copying tech from elsewhere. That the standard of comparison is the other people damned to working entirely inside MS monopoly so that they can't even tell something exists until MS gives it to them. Until which time they're crippled, though the rest of the world is stepping large and laughing easy.
Only the Wall Street Journal (and its fascist ilk) could pretend that such a debate is "fair and balanced": reason balanced by retarded corporatism.
--
make install -not war
Don't know if that would be a good idea. Could end up like a guy in a Nova braking suddenly to keep a cement truck from tailgating.
Like pi? Try 10,000 digits.
Is he fucking high?! Oddly enough I was complaining about Microsoft's poor decision to change over to those "user friendly" (in reality EVERYONE HOSTILE) messages just yesterday. Mainly because I had a branch computer tech call and tell me that the branch's WiFi was "down". Since I don't deal directly with helpdesk issues anymore I made the cardinal mistake of taking her word for it. I spent about 20 minutes looking at the Cisco APs via their web admin interfaces and they showed the right number of clients connected and the proper VLANs. After all that it finally occurred to me that I should ask her EXACTLY what is or isn't happening. Her answer? "The internet is down because the WiFi is down". Seriously, that was her answer. Digging back to my heldesk days I knew this meant something more specific was going on. I asked her, "did they log into Windows OK"? She said, "Yeah. Windows if fine. It's the internet that's not working anymore. So that means the WiFi must not be working. I rebooted the network but they still don't work". So I asked her, "How do you know the internet is down"? She said, "Because the program said it is". I asked her, "What program"? She said, "Umm... Microsoft word. No. Um.. The blue E program. You know! The internet"! At this point I kept from flipping out and said, "What does it tell you that indicates the internet is down"? She said, "It shows that screen that says to contact the administrator. It said something about the home page not being there I think". I then asked her if she had tried to go to any sites other than the default "home page". She said, "Um... no. Should I go try that". Me: "Yes". She took off and then came back to the phone and said, "Oh. It looks like out home page isn't working. I guess I'll need to call the people who host it"? I said, "Sounds like it".
The problem illustrated above is that Microsoft's thinking that providing a "friendly" error is useful is untrue. They SHOULD have added a button to click on called "Technical Detail" or some such that would reveal the real error as presented by the web server itself. This has been one of my gripes about IE ever since they went that route. Fortunately my desktop isn't polluted with MS crap. It's a Linux box and I use Firefox. So when there is a problem (like there was yesterday) with a web site, I CAN see the REAL error message as presented by the server. I know you can configure the IE browser to NOT use the friendly messages, but to be honest it should be a default that the friendly message displays WITH the option to see the real message.
Innovation my ass. As a second example of their failings in terms of being up on technology that is important, it took them until Windows XP to have proper MIDI support. And I'm not talking the crap MIDI that's on your soundblaster card. Having been a professional composer in a past life (1990s) I was faced with the decision of getting a Mac (which had proper MIDI support since 1987) or getting a PC. I couldn't afford the Mac, so I was stuck with getting a DOS/Win3.1 PC. To say the MIDI support was lacking is an understatement. There wasn't much hardware for professional outboard gear on the Windows side, and what little there was was REALLY backwards. But this was mainly due to MS not really giving a crap about a very important piece of musical technology at that time. The reason? Windows was a business OS at the time. It wasn't an OS for creative people. And Microsoft didn't really truly start paying attention to the creative people until Windows XP. Windows XP finally had a real 32-bit MIDI driver and supported 256 MIDI ports vs. 16 in the previous 16-bit driver that lived on through Windows 98. This was one of the main reasons I abandoned Windows as soon as I could. And here's the thing that REALLY burns me up. Back in the late 80s I was doing TONS of MIDI and audio work on an Atari ST that was pro level stuff. People were using Macs in the same way. MS didn't give a shit. Back then we were called musicians and it w
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
I think the way that Dave Winer characterises Microsoft is accurate; they're a company which only becomes interested in markets once others have proved them viable. After all, that's the safe bet. Microsoft are a business first and foremost, not an innovator. A lot of technology companies are innovators first, businesses second, and a lot of this type of company go out of business when they realise they didn't actually have any means of making money from their innovation. From this perspective it is of course sensible to let others make your mistakes for you, then enter the market once it's proven. Microsoft have done this time and time again; with Apple, IBM, Sega (Dreamcast, anyone?), Sendo and probably numerous others I've not heard about.
I quote Paul Graham (who created Yahoo Stores, cited by Joel Spolsky):
But there is innovation, still. Microsoft has begun to give a lot more free reign to its web development teams. There are interesting projects taking off there, and they might well become useful tools. But as far as business goes, this is practically just research. They might turn up useful tools in the future which can be sold, but then again they might not.
The biggest problem Microsoft suffers from nowadays is that where previously they allowed others to do their market research for them, nowadays they seem to assume that they have a right to any market dominated by any company vaguely related to technology. This is a serious mistake. Microsoft can't beat Google by doing the tools Google does better than them, because Microsoft isn't an advertising company. Microsoft can't beat Apple at the iPod+iTunes game, because they don't understand what it is consumers want. They fundamentally don't grok either what it is that makes these things successful or their reason for existing in the first place.
Scoble can talk about the little innovations that Microsoft makes (even though I think pretty much every example he cites is desperately flawed), but even in these cases they're usually incremental improvement. Microsoft didn't bring the mouse to the desktop as a revolutionary input device; they merely refined it. They didn't 'make' Halo; they bought the company that did and got them to make their game an Xbox exclusive (to begin with, at least).
I honestly believe Microsoft would be set for a fall (in the way that all those clueless journos predicted the 'death' of Apple throughout the 90s) if it wasn't for the insanely large pile of cash they sit on. It'll take many years of stupidity to fritter that away. In the meantime they'll keep putting out crappy operating systems based on Windows NT with yet more "me too!" chrome based on what Mac OS X looked like 3 years previously but that will begrudgingly be accepted by the market who are already crack addicts to Win32; they'll keep on attempting to win the handheld device / videogame system / portable music player markets; keep on trying to compete with Google and keep coming up scratching their heads. Eventually a wind change will occur once the likes of Ballmer has been superceded by a new generation of people who were inspired by Apple, Google, Yahoo et al and want to do more. People who recognise that there is sometimes a correlation between business success and innovation, and that being "me too!" doesn't always hack it. That's when Microsoft will finally return to being an innovator.
Annual revenue:
MS: 44,282,000 (ending 30 Jun 06)
HP: 86,696,000 (ending 31 Oct 05)
IBM: 91,134,000 (ending 31 Dec 05)
Sun: 13,068,000 (ending 30 Jun 06)
Dell: 55,908,000 (ending 3 Feb 06)
Oracle: 11,799,000 (ending 31 May 05)
So, no. Microsoft in no way dominates the computer industry.
Of course, that explains why Microsoft is shit-their-pants scared. They actually own only a relatively small corner of the entire computer industry, and they've made absolutely no friends on their way to owning that one small portion of the industry (low-end desktops).
The only reason Microsoft continues to exist as a major player is monopoly vendor lock-in.
And the castle walls that maintain that monopoly vendor lock-in are surrounded by an army of competitors armed with high-grade explosives and effectively backed by a major world power (the EU). Once those walls of vendor lock-in crumble, Microsoft is fucked, and everyone will be laughing at them on their way down.
That's why they tried the SCO play, and why they're now pushing software patents. Those are desperate defenses against the attacking hordes of commodity low-end-desktop software.
> Scoble responds that Microsoft's innovation can be found in the little things
This is called improving and there's a reason people use this word instead of innovation. Innovation has to do with "novus" (in my language "novo, nova"), which is "new", i.e., something that did not exist before. Improvement is taking something, good or bad, and making it better.
Now, better is a relative concept: what is better for Microsoft may be worse for its clients. That sums what some of us say: Microsoft does _not_ bring new things and their improvements are debatable.
> 'I remember when they improved the error messages you get in Internet Explorer,
This is one major problem. Perfectly clear error messages are translated to "there was an error" or "IE can't display this page" generic stuff. It was better if they just flashed a message like "Watch out! Behind you!" and the minute you look back, the monitor displays "... and that was the page you asked. How did you like it?"
> or when they improved fonts in Windows with ClearType technology.
That was really an improvement (probably not originally theirs, but still...). IMHO, they are good at this and should pursue this avenue. There's no shame in being the one who perfects things others invented. You can even get a solid reputation. The Japanese did this with resounding success.
> That improved our lives in a very tiny way.
Very tiny, really, considering to this date I haven't got me yet a f* LCD display... But still...
> Not one that you usually read about, or probably even notice.
These things you usually don't read about or notice are called "unimportant" or "insignificant".
> Is Microsoft done innovating in those small ways? Absolutely not.
Big things surely won't come our way: from where you least expect things, there sure nothing will come.
> Office 2007 lets me do some things (like cool looking charts) in seconds that used to take many minutes, maybe even hours for some people to do.
Well, suppose I have a device for whale make up in seconds... would you buy? Maybe if you whales painted.
Sometimes I get happy to produce anything. But mostly people around me want changes, and I must be able to make them happen easily.
This world is changing at a furious pace. Things held to be impossible are being done right now by pioneers who make millions in a single year (Youtube). Microsoft is not doing this. They are copying other companies (like in gaming and searching) -- in my view, desperate to leave the PC island, before free software eat them alive.
I hope they survive and keep participating, even as a leading company. But they cannot retain 90% of market share in anything -- no company should, it's not healthy for anyone. Not even the dominant company.
OS with new PCs, Browser with OS, Media Player with OS etc..
Then of course you must recognize their innovative ability to help 3rd parties create new markets and then destroy it with a new MS product.
OSGGFG - Open Source Gamers Guide to Free Games
Is this jackasses argument that clear-type and error messages make M$ and innovator?!!! Come here Mr. Whiner, and blow me while I tell you how much you'll enjoy it.
In my view MS primarily innovates how to integrate things (unfortunately so much that you cannot do without the whole kitten caboodle) and package them for delivery. With web based services their old package/delivery method will not work. It will be interesting to see if they can take their method and apply it (with modifications) to web based services. i wonder if that would require any innovation or will it be more integration?
Open Source and Computer-aided Design (http://ossandcad.blogspot.com)
"I agree that they don't do big things that are innovative, and this leads to disconnects as to what innovation is"
.. Noah Snavely (UW), Steve Seitz (UW), and Richard Szeliski (Microsoft Research)"
..
.. I did a quick search and found that it was created by Bungie Labs, a Chicago company that Microsoft acquired six years ago"
..
translation from RedmondSpeak: MS is only percieved to not do innovation only because of 'disconnects' in other peoples perception.
Samples of Ms innovation:
"improved the error messages you get in Internet Explorer"
"improved fonts in Windows with ClearType technology"
'Originally invented by IBM in 1988, subpixel rendering was first commercialized by Microsoft in 1998 as ClearType'
"cool looking charts in Office"
"Our industry just hasn't cared about security either"
You mean Microsoft don't you, the rest of the industry tackled security a long time ago. Since the inception of the Internet in fact.
"when you see things like Photosynth, you realize Microsoft can come back and be innovative"
A 3-D photo gallery. The demo looks good. It is actually one third MS innovation.
"Photosynth is a collaboration between Microsoft and
"Xbox Live, for instance, is very innovative. I can't see the gamer scores of players on any other system. That is innovation"
You're kidding
"Scoble: Ahh, have you ever played Halo? That's from Microsoft too"
""Winer:
""Scoble: Yes, and there's always room for a company that innovates through acquisitions"
""Scoble: Microsoft's Live.com has my blogs listed in the correct order, while Google does not"
Pardon me, I'm feeling a disconnect coming on
davecb5620@gmail.com
Microsoft is stifling innovation in the industry. Why should others innovate when the innovation of others just gets "integrated" into Windows and offered for free?
...this bit from Ballmer:
5 ,00.asp/
http://http//www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,206653
The perfect follow-up peice.
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
In some things, MS is a serious innovator. For example, one project I'm working on is the RoundTable. It's a VERY unique video conferencing solution. Is the concept of video conferencing new? No. But this implementation is way beyond anything I've seen. It will change the way video conferencing is done.
MS is quite well served by Microsoft Research; there are a LOT of brilliant, innovative ideas coming out of that group and many will make it to public release. Will everything be earth-shakingly new and novel? No, but if you're looking to only qualify huge leaps as innovation then everyone short of IBM or 3M wouldn't be innovators.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Scoble is still too close to Microsoft to be free of its private bizarro dictionary. At Microsoft, "to innovate" is to make any positive change. For example, improving web browser error messages is something which should be (and all-too-often can be) done for any application; it was a new idea only when the first computer program was written. My favorite example of this particular entry in the Microsoft Dictionary is a few years ago when BillG crowed about how Windows had finally incorporated a TCP/IP stack, killing off several third party products. He called that innovation even though Mac OS had TCP/IP for years by then. The Microsoft Dictionary needs to hire the sage Inigo Montoya, who said: "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."
I agree that people should learn more about security in CS classes, but I can't see how this could benefit MS.
Unless they mean "teach security" as in... teach ppl which buttons to click in the Microsoft Genuine Security Center Experience(TM) in order that they might (hopefullly) delay their zombification by a day or two.
Seriously, wouldn't the first lesson in a security course be "you can't audit what you can't see", i.e. the internals of a proprietary OS?
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
Microsoft isn't where they are because of innovation, they are on top because of business strategy.
This doesn't mean that they don't innovate, they just aren't who they are because of it.
It's all good.
point taken, they don't have the largest sales, I'm not an analyst, I'm an old coder, but a lot of those companies sell computers as well, which microsoft doesn't. However I wasn't talking about the current state of affairs.
I code exclusivelly for linux, and I think windows is a heap of shit. This does not detract from their performance early on, which is where my point was based.
Vendor lock in is a dying strategy, they're trying to extend it, and I hope that they fail, because I *really* don't want to have to make the win32 port of my code a main branch of my development.
I was wondering if my post would make people think I was a microsoft supporter, I'm not. I am however not interested in revisionist history. There was a time when they were the good guys, and IBM were the devil incarnate, and their software was streets ahead of other peoples. They acheived this by killing competition in unfair ways, but in evolutionary terms this is a valid strategy, even if it does suck shit.
I am immensly amused that IBM are the good guys now, that tickles me. SCO are muchly responsible for transforming the public opinion of IBM, although I doubt they are happy with this turn of events.
If MS doesn't innovate how come Windows is the only major OS I can use if I want decent multi-monitor support?
.Net is a significant innovation, even though it's largely modelled after an existing technology (java).
An innovation isn't necessarily a radical new idea, BTW.
"Microsoft's Live.com has my blogs listed in the correct order, while Google does not (Live.com lists scobleizer.com, which is my currently-kept-up-blog first, while Google lists scoble.weblogs.com as first, despite the fact that I haven't updated that blog for more than a year)." -Scoble in TFA
& mkt=en-us&FORM=LVSP&go.x=0&go.y=0&go=Search- 8&oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=f irefox-a
I searched "scoble blog" at live.com and google
http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=scoble+blog
http://www.google.com/search?q=scoble+blog&ie=utf
both have the weblogs link first.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
Yes, Microsoft is always playing catch-up. Chasing those tail-lights. That is why they are always so painfully behind everyone else, right? Microsoft is virtually dead while the UNIXes and Macs of the world sit pretty atop their amassed marketshare of innovation.
Reality sets in and dumb fuckers realize that Microsoft is where they are because they do innovate. They just don't get any credit for it because dumb fucking shiteating tards like this try to claim that pitiful examples of so-called "prior art" were the innovation. Well, enjoy your AJAX and your XML, dipshits. I'll be waiting for you guys to play catch up while enlisting my transactional filesystem with distributed database transactions for true atomic operations.
If you said "monopoly" much more, I'd think that you were sleeping with John Ashcroft and his other fascist buddies.
IANAS ( I am not a slashdotter ) , but if I was, I would mod this +5 funny! So someone please mod the parent up! I almost fell of my chair laughing while reading this insightful synopsis.
An innovating Microsofty starts out with ideas so lofty
watch him write his code without a care!
But bureaucratic corporations aren't attuned to innovation,
Google waits so learn to catch a chair.
Cake or Death? Cake Please!
Curiously, the ancient Romans and Japanese share this kind of MO.
Both cultures routinely "borrowed" innovations from neighbors, notably Greeks for Romans and Chinese for Japanese. They then tweaked the ideas to suit their needs. With the result, whether improved or simply changed, being absorbed by that culture and ultimately being thought of as theirs.
In this sense, Microsoft really does sound like an Empire, regardless of how evil you think they are.
What I find humerous in the interview is how the Microsoft drone goes on about how innovative they are, yet names software that they bought out other companies to obtain. That is indeed innovative!
Just look at the size of their patent portfolio. *ducks
We often refuse to accept an idea merely because the tone of voice in which it has been expressed is unsympathetic to us
I use OSX all day, Windows All night, and Some weekends I force myself to use Knoppix.
I feel I have spent more than enough time in each to declare that ClearType is crappy.
I'm not a huge Microsoft fan, but Active Directory is one innovation of theirs that's tough to argue with.
All things considered, Active Directory is a very well-thought-through directory system that doesn't seem to be a mere refinement of a competitor's system. At least not when you consider its most innovative features like multimastering. Linux and Unix in general are still playing catch-up with AD and it's been out for years.
Yes, I know about NIS/YP, but it's more appropriate to compare simplistic flat systems like that to old-style NT domains. AD is several quantum jumps beyond that. Who had a really usable enterprise-class distributed hierarchical directory service before Microsoft?
AD does so much so well that it's possible to, for instance, set up intranet secure web servers and have them get their keys automagically through AD. Compare that to the hoops you jump through to do anything similar on Linux.
Check out the Apostrophe open-source CMS: http://www.apostrophenow.com/
TFA calls MS "world's largest technology company." What is it saying, IBM is not a technology company?
MS: $44 billion revenue, $12 billion net income, 71k employees
IBM: $91 billion revenue, $7.9 billion net income, 329k employees
Most profitable, maybe, but largest? Come on, what is the point of having professional journalists if they won't even check their facts?
Penny - plain text accounting
I'm not sure which fallacy it is but Scoble arguing "little innovations" shifts the debate entirely away from the more factual observation that Microsoft is a follower.
IMHO, Scoble has nothing to argue and is attempting to save face by using this tactic.
In Scoble's defense, the media and their consumers love a good conflict, so they'll make as much of it as possible. So it's reasonable to assume he might have been drawn into it.
Discuss amongst yourselves...
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
Acorn RISC-OS was certainly using anti-aliasing to improve the legibility of small fonts on computer monitors by 1990, and also offered sub-pixel anti-aliasing - although the latter feature was usually disabled because it used too much CPU/RAM for the entry-level models c.f. the improvements (and probably didn't achieve much on a CRT anyway). Not sure if their (not too successful) portable did anything different - although I think they did have some patents on improving greyscale LCD displays.
The OS ran on ARM-based "Archimedes" (and later RISC-PC) systems that had about half of the UK schools market in the late-80s/early 90s. The DTP and vector drawing applications were particularly impressive.
Xara Xtreme (www.xara.com) is a decendent of a RISC_OS based graphics app, which was one of the first to anti-alias everything (text and graphics) in real time.
C.f. Windows which, ISTR, from Win95-Win2000, only used anti-aliasing to hide "jaggies" in large fonts and turned it off for small fonts.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
Did Microsoft invent the mouse with a scroll wheel? I'm fairly sure they were the first to market it, but I don't know if it was their idea.
If it was, as much as I hate to admit it, it was a pretty awesome innovation -- and I do consider it an innovation. The introduction of the scroll wheel was more than an iteration; it was one of the few changes to the basic design of a mouse that actually changed the way the user interacts with it. Wheel mice have essentially become the de facto standard, and have become so because they're *good* (as opposed to other MS creations that have become standards for other reasons). I have a hard time working with a mouse without a wheel now, no matter what GUI-based OS I'm using (currently Mac OS X and Xubuntu for the most part).
Microsoft is clearly on the cutting edge of innovation as per their recent dealings with Novell. I predict their next "innovation" to be along the lines of a new open source operating system... MS-UX (pronounced "M SUCKS"). let the IP lawsuits ensue.
They don't innovate EVERYTHING -- most things they just piss in to change the recipe enough to add to their value. They do innovate though -- they've understood how to people at their desktops work better than anyone else for a very long time. They've also innovated in terms of taking product leverage for license revenue higher than anyone in history. It pisses many of us off on a daily basis, but they have taken it to a new art form.
They are neither all evil nor all good -- they're too big for their own good. They're bogged down in their own size, and they're desperate to keep up a revenue stream that's unsustainable in the long term.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
Strangely enough, nobody noticed that before Intellimouse Explorer, no one makes optical mouse that uses image sensors.
(Note: the sensor was from Agilent Technologies, a spin-off company from HP.)
Of course they're not. Direct3D is playing catch-up with OpenGL's ease of use, and they try eliminating OpenGL anyway for their platform, although they took a ton from it. Internet Explorer is playing catch-up with FireFox. Windows Vista's user interface is playing catch-up with the Mac. C# played catch-up with Java and to a good degree they passed Java. My point is even though they may be playing catch-up, they still make things standard but in their own ways. But they are clearly not innovators.
What about DirectX? OpenGL had its chance and blew it now Microsoft leads the market with DirectX.
What about Office? The keystone of Microsoft.
Everyone loves to hate the big guys. MS and Walmart are some of our best companies and we continually whine and beat the crap out of them. MS is far from perfect, but its the best desktop available in the world (Yes, I run Ubuntu at home, but not my important machine). Linux is almost there but is chasing the taillights of MS. Linux has a superior architecture, but just isn't usable enough to put in a business without a full time linux geek. The whole PC industry is what it is becuase of MS. No they didn't invent it, but THEY MADE IT HAPPEN. Give them some credit and stop piling on with the sheep.
or TFA either, for that matter.
The "innovations" mentioned by the parent comment and the Microsoft guy in TFA are things like "improved error messages." The error messages were already there, so making them more useful isn't "innovation" in the revolutionary change sense. It's more of an evolution.
The same can be said of the vaunted "ribbon menus." So we now have menus that work more like toolbars. This is supposed to be innovation? It might be the next step in the evolution of the Office UI, but it's hardly innovative in the same way that a tabbed browser was when it was introduced.
Not to say that Microsoft has never innovated. Just that the examples given aren't innovative.
Interested in a Flash-based MAME front end? Visit mame.danzbb.com
I love how he cites ClearType as an example of a Microsoft innovation because it really is a perfect example. Unfortunately for him, it's an example of Microsoft dressing up other people's work as their own and selling it as innovation. The technology actually dates back over 20 years to patents held by Apple on sub-pixel rendering and was used back in the Apple ][ days to give old displays artificially better resolution.
In my opinion, the fact that MS holds patents on this idea is yet another example of how broken our patent system's treatment of prior art and obviousness is.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Xerox viewpoint was actually prior to winword and sported such innovations as true wysiwig wordprocessing and allowing the paint program, calculator etc. to open within the word processor or vice-versa - all in true wysiwyg mode. And then there was the Apple Liza as well. So what - besides clippy - Microsoft has actually truelly invented in the office space is beyond me.
I had the (mis)fortune of paying extra to buy an RGB video card and monitor for my Apple II, instead of using the composite output. So I got subjected first-hand to the consequences of Apple's sub-pixel line-smoothing technology. How you describe ClearType is is almost exactly how Apple's system worked.
You are incorrectly assuming that the display mechanism is a necessary component to this process. ClearType takes advantage of an LCD's layout of R, G, and B subpixels. Apple's version took advantage of the way the Apple II represented the screen image in framebuffer memory. Apple's representation of the display in video memory gave each pixel an intensity, and a color. The color choice was binary (GR or GB), not trinary (RGB) - hey, memory was expensive back then. ;) Since there were two types of pixels, they simply alternated at the highest resolution with one pixel being GR, the next being GB, the next GR, GB, etc.
The smoothing came in when you wanted to display white (or gray). Because of the binary pixels, a green line could be rendered at full resolution (your eye has the greatest resolution in green); bur red, blue, or white lines were rendered at half resolution. Apple realized that text was white and the display would look pretty crappy if you rendered it at half the max resolution. Then they realized that white didn't have to mean lighting a GR pixel with the GB pixel to its right. You could also make white by lighting the GB pixel to the left of the GR. And thus was born sub-pixel rendering - although the white pixels were fatter, you could position them more precisely in "half pixel" increments. That's exactly what ClearType does except using RGB (or RBG) subpixels, instead of GR and GB subpixels.
This all worked fine over the composite video output. My misfortune was that my Apple II's RGB card simply broke the pixels into GR+GB blocks, converted the pixel to RGB, and sent it to the monitor (it had a special hi-res mode for green so 80-column green text would render correctly). It would render GR+GB pixel blocks as white, but completely ignored the possibility of a GB+GR block being white. And so my color text was not white, it was white with flanges of color anywhere the sub-pixel addressing of white pixels did not line up with my video card's idea of an RGB pixel. It looked awful and made it nearly impossible to read 40-column text, and was distracting in games any time white was used.
NetWare 4.x had Novell's NDS [now eDirectory] available and working for years before the initial release of Active Directory. I've implemented software that was NDS aware, shifting the actions permitted a user depending on their current effective roles and rights.
AD is at best a copy of a subset of NDS.
Caution: Do not stare into laser with remaining eye.
A homeless dog that's kicked out of the house still barks/blogs for its former master. Talk about eternal loyalty! Who's feeding him now?
None of those things are actual innovations.
The main "innovation" of DirectX was business-side -- the forcing of hardware vendors to adopt more interesting hardware features at a radically faster pace than the OpenGL standards body was doing. The actual innovation of technologies in DirectX has always been done by developers, hardware manufacturers, and grad students outside of MS. MS has just been a driving force at getting these ideas into the market -- a useful thing, but not innovation.
There is nothing inherently innovative about Xbox Live. It is an evolution of services provided by companies like Blizzard in the past. Xbox Live just provides a common framework for all companies to share. Evolution not revolution.
ASP is just an evolution of ideas from COM as applied to the web which were already in use in some CORBA environments and in many dynamically generated websites. Once again a maturing and refinement of existing ideas and not an innovation.
PowerPoint was originally written for the Mac by Forethought which was bought by Microsoft the same year the software debuted in 1987. This is an example of MS buying innovation from others. Many of MS's best products are from acquisitions, but that's once again an example of MS's skill at identifying a market and seizing it.
Optical mice -- in the form we use them -- were innovated, like many things, by Xerox. My first encouter with an optical mouse was in the late 90s. It came from Sun and had a special shiny, grided pad that you had to use it with. Optical mice that needed no special pad also came first from other manufacturers.
MS has had a great role in popularizing many technologies that might've never entered the marketplace. Nowhere is that more evident than in Direct3D. However, they have never been much of a leader inventing new and risky things.
Lastly, I'd like to point out a couple of problems with other points your raise in your post:
Few people have problems with MS actually embracing a standard. It's the fact that MS almost never embraces a standard without somehow extending it in some fashion to provide new features that encourage vendor lock-in that irritates people. Witness MS's proprietary changes to Java, Kerberos, etc. -- all intended to produce incompatibilities.
The other thing I take issue with is praising as innovative the way MS broke open the commodity PC market. It's not like no one had though of doing so before. It's just that no one had managed to be put in the unique situation that MS was to supply the essential OS of a prioprietary system to anybody who wanted one because an IBM exec slipped up. (Apple would later be bitten by this too when Laser, a clone maker, was able to license Applesoft BASIC from MS thanks to a lack of exclusivity).
While MS's power play certainly benefitted the computer industry, I fail to see how under any reasonable definition of innovation selling essential components to competitors is "innovative." I'm afraid I'm going to have to call into question your definition of innovation if you think any of the issues in your post count.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
PowerShell is a half assed implimentation of what VMS and as400 users have had for years, only MS left out lots of functionality. And they are too stupid to realize they need to have an SSH server too so that you have secure remote admin functionality.
Singularity is just MS inferno, with the notable exception that inferno actually exists, you can go download it and use it right now. Where as singularity is not and likely never will be available.
Monad is based entirely off of VMS, only with significant functionality removed. Just because you don't know where they took the idea from, doesn't mean its their idea.
Why is it if I type in a website URL with DNS entry that simply does not exist, that it can't show me anything meaningful? This is an example:
Well, I am connected to the internet--it should be able to test for this pretty easily!
There is no website--it can't even find the domain.
Finally, at the end they mention that maybe I typed the wrong address.
They shouldn't have changed the interface unless it offered a clear advantage. Maybe if they gave me a less dumbed down answer I could decipher this much more quickly. Why not give a short meangingful error first and then give some likely explanations? Why not, if they really want to help the less-technical user, automatically perform some simple tests automatically or on-demand? For instance, see if it can http/ping a highly redundant MS site? Check their search engine/DNS records for existence of the domain/host? Maybe even try to search for a likely match?... Bleh.
Ok, I'm bitching and I haven't done extensive testing, but it strikes me as a pretty poor attempt at improvement. It does _not_ help me (as an advanced user) and I'm sure it will only make things more difficult when I try to walk less-advanced users through these things over the phone in the future....
Winer is right because "Innovation" does not mean 'new and improved', it means 'NEW', 'GROUNDBREAKING', 'Never been seen before'. Nothing Scoble cited was 'NEW' in any way, it was "improved". Better error messages (say what?!)? Better fonts (cleartype BS aside, that's a better FONT, not NEW LETTERS)? Halo? He must be kidding. Scoble even had the literary gall to say "three innovations, like, say, the blog, the wiki, and search..." which are not in any way INNOVATIVE, or even revolutionary, they're evolutionary. How irksome that someone who apparently writes for a living doesn't even understand the words that are coming out of his mouth.
...who cares?
-- Watch me working: www.magerquark.de
That's what really happens. That's the main reason why people should boycott their products whenever they can, including the Zune and XBox 360.
As far as I can tell, "Cleartype" actually is two things. The patented "innovation" is their use of subpixel rendering, which treats the rgb of an lcd as three pixels rather than one. There is also antialiasing. It is pretty obvious that Cleartype does antialiasing when filling in those rgb pixels (ie it does not turn the red 100% on or off, but actually sets it to a gray level depending on the coverage of the red portion of the pixel).
Experimenting with a Windows machine reveals that there are really 4 settings:
1. Aliased. This is like old versions of Windows or X11 or Mac. Each letter consists of 100% on and 100% off pixels.
2. "Font smoothing". This is a crude form of antialiasing that Microsoft wrote. It's primary advantage is that it is fast enough to work on machines of that vintage. I think it mostly relies on pattern recognition?
3. "Cleartype" with "LCD" turned off. This is true antialiasing and looks the same as X11 Xft and OS/X rendering (since it is exactly the same algorithim).
4. "Cleartype" with a type of LCD chosen. This is antialiasing but rendered on 3x as many horizontal pixels, squashed down by encoding each pixel as a color. Commonly called "subpixel rendering".
So it appears from the controls that to get antialiasing you must turn on something called "cleartype". However Microsoft has also published documentation saying that subpixel rendering is cleartype. Thus about half the people arguing about this think cleartype means subpixel rendering, and the other half think it means antialiasing. This leads to all kinds of confusion when they argue.
Back in the day, people bought PCs rather than Macs because, "You can't get fired for buying IBM."
Maybe. People also bought PCs because they were a lot cheaper. If you wanted a Mac, you had to buy from Apple, and they charged a premium for their hardware.
Although the IBM PCs were on inferior, non-shiny hardware, all the clones available made them dirt cheap. You would get fired not because of some ingrained shiny-hating bigotry, but because you spent $dough so your number crunchers could have a shiny computer.
That's also how they caught market share. The IBM architecture was a much more "open" standard - Tandy, Compaq, and so could license it and build their own 100% IBM Compatible machines, which happened to run on PC/MS-DOs and Windows - Microsoft Products. Apple would not license anything and remained the sole supplier of their superior, but more expensive hardware.
Guess what? The cheap stuff outsold the Macs, and Windows gained a foothold in the biz. Economics, not suits and conspiracies.
DATABASE WOW WOW
We are being way to harsh on Microsoft when it comes to orginal ideas. Lets list some truly orginal Microsoft innovations.
1) Secure Audio Path in Vista. No other O/S will block what those pesky users want to do with thier music.
2) Tying the O/S to the BIOS/Computer. Why would a user want to move thier hard drive?
3) Universal Music fee for every media player sold. Only thieves buy music players.
4) Software Assurance. Lets get users to pay for nothing.
5) OEM license fees. Lets get users to pay us even when a computer ships with no O/S.
I'm pretty sure Microsoft is the only company thats done any of these things. Did I forget anything?
Enjoy,
It's just the normal noises in here.
Nothing new in this. Many large software companies don't do disruptive innovation because there's really no financial reward in it. If a market gets big enough, a large company can usually pick among several startups and acquire one.
It's all about vendor-lock.
Once you own the market, the trick is to keep it. Msft's DirectX 10 scam is much more beneficial to msft than any silly technical innovation.
I suppose msft's vendor-lock scams are innovative.
This is really telling. The pro Microsoft crowd gets so caught up in MS hype that they actually believe that MS products are new, exciting, and creative. Seriously, who is technology savy and thinks ClearType is innovative? I remember using antialiasing fonts LONG before MS put a word to it.
Whats worry some is that this group accepts the crap that MS gives them and sticks with it, because they dont know any better. I talk to people all day that are surprised that there are options. For you MS heads out there its important for you to know whats going on around you so you can put the company you are paying money to deliver.
I've been struggling with the definition of "innovation" since I started reading the article. Mutual agreement about the concept is fundamental to this debate. Establishing the definition is much more interesting than debating how a particular (undefined) label applies to a particular company.
So what exactly is "innovation". From the MS Encarta dictionary (hardcover)
1. The act or process of inventing or introducing something new. 2. something newly invented or a new way of doing things.
But I don't think a dictionary definition satisfies the question. My mind is open on this, but I tend to think that innovation almost implies "improvement". I believe that it has to be a significant improvement, rather than something obvious or incremental, but I also think it's different, and something less than "invention" or "discovery".
A case that comes to mind is Clarence Birdseye(sp?) frozen vegetable pioneer. People have been selling vegetables for centuries, and freezing things has been around since. . . (nevermind). The idea of producing and marketing frozen vegetables was certainly a major "innovation" in the food market. People have been shaving for a long time too, but the triple blade razor seems like an incremental improvement however and not really an "innovation". Recorded music was around for decades before the CD, but despite the fact that CDs were something "new", I think that's an "invention" as opposed to "innovation".
Now, if we limit the discussion to software, what are the "innovations" that we've actually seen? Depending on your definition, there are probably few worth mentioning, or conceivably too many to list. So which is it?
Microsoft has millions and millions of dollars and all they have to show for that are little things? Even I will make a better case for Microsoft. What they have done is *unified* the computer experience with an *extremely diverse* range of hardware configurations allowing much choice without looking like a total mess. This is something linux and Apple cannot claim to do. Because of Microsoft, I can get a computer for a low price and it will just work. Maybe not as cheap as linux. Maybe not as polished as Apple. But for most people it does the job. And the ubiquity in the OS market is good for developers who just want to write once and run optimally (unlike java) nevertheless, i will root for Apple since they moved to intel. I hope linux can get their act together on the usability. Microsoft needs competition. But right now they have what the market needs.
Firefox Power http://firefoxpower.blogspot.com/
Microsoft was truly innovative in their initial negotiations with IBM for supplying a PC operating system, and subsequent product marketing strategy that is still going full steam ahead today.
The Microsoft marketing machine stands out as a truly innovative idea. Commodity hardware pricing is an outstanding example of the unrelenting marketing machine. Few could afford computers without it, and the Open Source community would hardly exist.
Another innovative win for the Microsoft marketing machine is elevating Bill Gates to a technology shaman who emerges from his yearly week of deep-think pontificating visions of the Next Big Thing. The press falls all over itself scrambling to get the holy words out to the unwashed masses. Unfortunately, I think there's little correlation between the yearly stream of pontifications and reality. The show continues and the press continues its job of giving relevance to the annual pageant.
Another innovative win for Microsoft is dressing up troubled operating systems with more eye candy. It's like heaping more layers of frosting on a cake that's molding on the inside. The cake may have marketing flash and sizzle, but customers are getting sick eating it. Untold billions of dollars are consumed trying to keep defective systems limping along and patching the latest security breaches.
Unfortunately I think the innovative streak for Microsoft marketing will continue unabated. They have a formidable task of ushering in the Vista era.
Like many pieces of Microsoft Software, IE was purchased, rather than produced internally. [By now, I would expect that little or none of the original Mosaic/Spyglass code survives]
Since Microsoft gave it away, it's developers [Spyglass] never received any of the promised royalties.
Caution: Do not stare into laser with remaining eye.
They describe their development approach as "chasing tail lights." They aren't interested in markets until they're worth billions, so they let others develop the markets, and have been content to catch-up.'
;)
I have to think a lot of innovators have "being bought by someone" as a part of their business goals, as the cash windfall is considerable.
In that sense, even someone who just buys up promising new technologies is still driving innovation... even if it's by tailgating people into going faster
I cannot understand this ClearType thing. It just makes all text look fuzzy and out of focus and harder to read. Just today, while setting up a new notebook, I had to endure these horribly blurred fonts until I took the time to go turn off ClearType completely. Suddenly, everything was clear and sharp again, with no weird artifacts. Fortunately, it's usually not on by default. This (HP) notebook was an exception. It should have been called FuzzyType. Turn it off to get clear type.
Personally I'm fully of the opinion that 'innovation' is [or rather should be] reserved for something entirely new, never seen before, a cream of the crop class of inventions. The Wii joystick control ...thing would, I'm pretty sure, qualify. Joystick? Motion sensor? Wireless-mouse-controller-thing? The fact that it's hard to describe proves the point - it's original, new, INNOVATIVE... The original mouse was innovative, the *first* gui for sure - maybe even the first true 'icon' in software (debatable). I think we've diluted the word itself (or rather allowed the dilution by not scoffing at its over-use) which is why the debate even happens. For me, that's the crime - it makes it harder to define something that truly is 'innovative'. That word has lost its meaning and we're left scratching for a new word that adequately describes, defines, or classifies the importance of the thing.
Software innovations are harder because almost everything has been an incremental improvement. The 3D desktop could have been innovative if Sun's 'looking glass' project had gotten it right 4 years ago, but if it takes 5 years of making incremental improvements (like we're doing now), it loses it's 'newness - and becomes an invention, or God forbid Vista [joke].
I don't know - for me, "innovation" is hard to describe - which is, I guess, precisely the point. An innovation should be hard to describe. I'd bet the first shipment of frozen vegetables was a very hard conversation to understand for the first grocery store that got them.
More than twice, in a post about Microsoft's monopoly?
John Ashcroft ever said the word "monopoly", other than "you're not a monopoly in my opinion", or "monopoly is OK"?
What are you talking about? Will you understand this post, even though I said the word "monopoly" 7 more times, while talking about monopoly?
--
make install -not war
Today I saw a video of real innovators...:6 174204822&q=alan+kay
3 0059754521&q=alan+kay
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-53353733
The video is quite large (1h 38min) but take a look at the first part, the demo of SketchPad is from the 60's!! Awesome! Object oriented UI, gesture recognition.
Also take a look to another video from Alan Kay, in a talk at OPSLA'97 (there are funny comments about M$ "innovation"):
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-29509497
Why does Scoble keep bringing up Halo? Overlooking the fact that Bungie was well into making it before Microsoft even bought them, what is so innovative about Halo?
Scoble wrote"But, when you see things like Photosynth, you realize Microsoft can come back and be innovative."
Funny, when I go to Photosynth, and attempt to use it I get, "This version of the Photosynth Technology Preview runs only on Internet Explorer 6 and 7." That's some innovation you got there boys...
"back then Microsoft hadn't invented the word processor, or the spreadsheet, or the database program, nor the presentation package, but today Microsoft Office is the dominant office suite of applications around."
What exactly is so innovative about MS Office?
"But, I didn't realize that Google built a game console." WTF? X-Box live might be nice, but what is so innovative about either version of the xbox? It plays games just like every game system since the first cartridge-based consoles came out. At least Nintendo is trying a new type of controller...
"Would YouTube have gotten purchased for more than a billion if Microsoft wasn't threatening Google?" and MS is threatening Google how???
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
Microsoft appears to be very good at what the Japanese call kaizen. This is, in a nutshell, gradual or continuous improvement of an existing thing. All of these examples are of that type. The really big innovation that creates a market or produces the Next Big Thing(tm) it seems they have always ever left for other people to do, and then they try to make gradual improvements: most of the time these improvements are nothing other than getting part of it to run less than spectacularly on their own platform. They'll occasionally get useful improvements out the door too (true kaizen), but these are generally rare.
Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.