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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.'"
Don't get me wrong; DTrace does sound like a very useful application, but real-time debugging was available on Genera. Clinical debugging (as opposed to mortician-style debugging) has been around for quite some time.
I agree that TCP/IP was innovative.
XML is just a simplified subset of SGML; while XML is useful, it is hardly innovative. If you want to see innovative, you should look at Project Xanadu.
---- "XML is like violence. If it doesn't fix the problem, you aren't using enough."
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?