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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.
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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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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....
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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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.
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