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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.'"
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.
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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.
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?
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
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
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
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.
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.
.. but the product was created from conception to execution rather quicklyWell... it usually helps when you purchase a prexisting product (toshiba gigabeat) and start from there..
..and a interesting idea in the wireless sharing of songsWow..you have an interesting idea of what interesting is.. I think most people would see thier implementation as ummm Worthless and/or insulting. But I guess Fanbois will be fanbois..
So many injustices..so little time..
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....
Isn't it because most of their user base is comprised of criminals? I'm sure the majority of PCs out there are using illegitimate MS software one way or another.
innovation (?n'?-v?'sh?n)
n.
The act of introducing something new.
Something newly introduced.
Anti-aliasing has been around since at least the seventies, Do YOU call that particularly new and thus an innovation?
Suck a lemon?
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.
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.
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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.
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!
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.
Here is a cognitive disconnect; "They are innovators; Regardless of whether or not they created the ideas, by far the most difficult part is putting them into practice."
This is a fundamental mental dysfunction I'm seeing in the USA that just drives me crazy... it is the main thing that allows corporations to have their way with our society.
Yes, implementation IS TRICKY AND IMPORTANT. Kudos to Microsoft to implement other people's already working ideas "cough" -- this isn't like drawings on a chalk board. But the fundamental problem is, it's part and parcel with the "those who win, right the rules." Microsoft is "GOOD" because they are powerful. Wow, what scary thinking.
Sorry to rant on this, and many won't get what I'm talking about. But its the same sort of disconnect that allows people to think; there is no such thing as greed. That it's either Free Markets or Communism, that un-checked opportunism allows for fairness. That we have to "debate" torture.
I know people will see this as flaming -- but I know some of you understand. I think it's why so many people "bash Microsoft" -- because we have this impotent frustration, with a company that continually abuses the marketplace. It steals ideas and then buries the competition -- it is everything that shouldn't happen in Capitalism, if we have a functioning government that provides oversight.
But our country is more or less Corporate controlled. And "bundled" with that, is the mindset that we exist for profit, and not the benefit of each-other. Anything that smacks of "greater good" is automatically thrown into the "Hippie pile." When we criticize Microsoft because they are being corrupt -- we are just "Bashing" and resenting "Winners."
So, success is it's own justification. That means we will continually have ENRON failures -- because we will allow anyone in the lead to abuse the marketplace as long as they win -- and the only check on them is the folly of their own greed.
Anyway, it's not MS business, or this persons comments in particular that so bugs me -- it's the sense that I live in a land full of blind people, who just don't see the big damn elephant in the room, about to step on their heads. It goes to an authoritarian mindset that values "Power" over "Decency."
>>"ad space available -- low rates!!!"
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.