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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.
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 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
Not only that, but Cleartype is mearly a marketing name for sub-pixel antialiasing, which is something Microsoft did not invent. So where is the innovation? "Friendly" error messages in Internet Explorer are also hardly an innovation, unless you're going to set the bar extremely low. Most developers and sysadmins hate the things anyway.
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.
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Thank you Microsoft, for improving the error messages you get in Internet Explorer. Now my QA team always gives "Cannot find server or DNS error" as the error message, leaving me with very little to work with.
Bucketing all errors to prompt one page is not improvement - its obfuscation, its stupidity, its annoyance. It makes troubleshooting a problem exponentially harder.
If thats what microsoft thinks is innovation, they should have their product development team strung up by their short and curleys.
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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
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....
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.
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.
A trivial search on the net shows that the 'ClearType' is nothing more that a rehash of the same generic fonts available to all.
It would be nice if the link you included actually supported your claim in any way whatsoever. Unfortunately it doesn't.
The link you included is to a discussion of the (admittedly confusingly-named) Cleartype fonts, which are a set of original typefaces that will be shipped with Vista. The name comes from the fact that they were designed specifically to take advantage of Cleartype itself. Cleartype is Microsoft's widely imitated font rendering technology -- e.g. Apple ripped it off in OS X 10.2, most Linux desktops now use a very poor imitation of it, Adobe has their own ripoff, etc.
You will see people claim it's just a ripoff of a technique used on the Apple II, but that's like saying that the automobile is just a ripoff of horse-drawn wagons. It's a genuinely innovative improvement of a technology that everyone thought had been obsoleted by multi-colour high-resolution monitors, until Microsoft invented a way of using it on modern computers.
By the way, they aren't in any way a "rehash" of any sort of "generic" fonts - they are all original typefaces, created by some excellent professional type designers. (For an example of an actual rehash of a font that could actually be described as generic, see Helvetica Neue, bundled with OS X.)
I guess I am the only person that thinks Microsoft's perpetuation of "Proud Ignorance" is troubling.
I find it rather ironic that this was posted by someone who appears to be proud of his own ignorance.
Oddly enough, my sub-pixel anti-aliased fonts (Bitstream Vera Sans, for example) look quite a bit better on KDE (with "hinting" set to "slight") than Cleartype fonts do on XP, on the very same LCD. The X.org implementation is simply superior to Cleartype, which I find makes the text way too fuzzy. If I wanted fuzzy text, I would have gotten a CRT instead.
Even if I use the unsupported Cleartype tuning applet, it simply cannot look as good as the fonts on my KDE desktop.
Eat the rich.
e.g. Apple ripped it off in OS X 10.2, most Linux desktops now use a very poor imitation of it, Adobe has their own ripoff, etc.
>> NO, I think Apple was "ripping off" Display Postscript, which was from Adobe. The NeXT boxes used display postscript to render everything -- but even THAT I think, came from a NeXT innovation in conjunction with Adobe's postscript printing language that they were trying to bring to the screen, but Adobe had the patents on Postscript so tight, they had to collaborate. DP was very resource intensive, and required NeXT to shell out real bucks for every computer that used it to Adobe -- hence, it didn't have much appeal to them when Apple bought NeXT (and was then taken over by NeXT). So it took some time to reproduce all of that in Quartz on MacOSX but this prompted an even bigger innovation by Apple to move these processes to the graphics card (though, AMIGA did all this right years before anyone by breaking down all sorts of CPU-bound functions into specialized components -- but I digress).
Anyway, anti-aliasing to the screen has been around a lot longer than you suggest. The "ripp-off" of clearer font display on OS X, was just the growing pains of Apple trying to re-invent what they had done years before in their previous OS, and also with NeXT computers.
The "Clear-type" technology, cannot compare at all to the quality of Display postscript. It basically rasterized all the vector data to the screen as though "printing" to it. Clear-type just used an efficient anti-aliasing technique that works better "in some situations." And people are confused by the issue because OS X did it wrong for a few years -- whereas NeXT had it PERFECT years before that.
And then there might be some SGI fans who will chime in that NeXT might not have been the first to market with Display Postscript.
"I guess I am the only person that thinks Microsoft's perpetuation of "Proud Ignorance" is troubling.
I find it rather ironic that this was posted by someone who appears to be proud of his own ignorance."
That is really, really Ironic. I'm guessing the previous poster meant; "Proud Ignorance" to mean that; "people think Microsoft Innovates all the time, because they don't know the real history."
They didn't invent DOS -- it was a knock-off of CP/M.
They totally ripped off VisiCalc from a man who didn't understand the need for lawyers to create Excel.
Word from MacWrite.
Etc.
>> Anyway, this is an old, old debate. MS doesn't have the "Pioneer" business model -- and that I can understand and I don't fault them for that. I think this discussion should really be; "Does Microsoft hurt real innovation" and I would have to say; Yes, more than any other company in the computer field.
But hey, I'm much more worried about politics in the US over the past few years to even have worries about Microsoft on my radar anymore.
>>"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.