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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.'"
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.
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.
...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
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
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
yawn
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
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.
Wow, that's incredible. Microsoft is "successful [due to their] innovations [...] whether or not they created the ideas". Just think how much less work innovation takes if you don't need to think up your own ideas! Why, I might innovate the wheel this afternoon, if I can be bothered.
Truly it is an exciting new realm of discovery that awaits us.
the layman's guide to computer science
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..
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?
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....
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.
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?
Youre going to get a lot of replies, mostly saying "NO! It was done by this company." and that person will reply "No, it was done by this company first!" then another person will reply "No, this university came up with the idea." "NO! it was this eastern european researcher who wrote the paper!" "NO! It was this science fiction writer no one has read!" And so forth.
I think theres some kudos to bringing an idea or implementation to market and making it affordable for most people. I'm not sure innovation is the word here, but its real work and deserves real credit. I don't think its just marketing, as some cynics have already suggested.
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.
"The Java innovation" ? What was that?
Those who think Java was an innovation should do a bit of reading about the UCSD P-System. The idea of a virtual machine wasn't new then, but few (if any) had previously built it into a full-blown platform like the P-System.
The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
So exactly what other languages other than Java can I write in and have it compile into Java byte code? Last I checked it was just one.
.net platform was its language independence. You can write in several different languages depending on preference and task.
/.
One of the major innovations of the
As for Xbox Live, I can't really think of any PC services that came before Live that offered the original features. Part of the innovation of Live is that your name is the same on all games (this just can't be done on PCs right now and wasn't done on consoles until the Xbox). The 360 expands this even more.
It is obvious from your post that your conclusion (that MS is not an innovator) was arrived at prior to any of your reasoning. It would be better to concede these rather small areas as that is all they are, small areas of innovation from a rather gigantic company. It doesn't look good when compared to companies like IBM or Sun. I understand that you feel like Microsoft is the big evil (and in some ways I would agree) but you can't just dismiss everything they do just because it's Microsoft. You end up sounding more like a tool of the opposition rather than the thinking person I am sure you are.
Then again this is
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.
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
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!
"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
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.
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.