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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.'"
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!