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A Microsoft-Speak Timeline - From Altair to Zune

Posted by Zonk on from the always-he-is-looking-to-the-future-to-the-horizon dept.

netbuzz writes "No company has had more to say about software over the past 30 years than Microsoft (for better or worse). How they've said it — the actual language used — reveals a lot about the company's evolution and is the focus of a new timeline. There's a look back at a 'tag cloud' provided by the Seattle P-I. In addition to analyzing the linguistics of about 90 documents, there are also links to such gems as Bill Gates' Playboy interview and his famous 'Open Letters to Hobbyists.' From the article: 'We're talking all the way from Altair to Zune, with stops along the way for every technology the company developed, bought or borrowed, right on through to current entanglements with Vista, Linux and Google. The tool allows for an at-a-glance view of company priorities as they evolve and shift.'"

6 of 114 comments (clear)

  1. Blah? by zlogic · · Score: 2, Informative

    Check out Ballmer's July 2004 speech: the dominant words are "innovation" and "blah" :-)

  2. Re:Typical Gates logic.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    And wasn't Altair BASIC derived from a pirated copy of Dartmouth BASIC, and developed on (then rather expensive) computer time "donated" by Harvard?

  3. Re:Keep on getting away with it... by TheRaven64 · · Score: 2, Informative

    NeXT was doing embedding of objects in different applications seamlessly in a fully functional GUI back when Microsoft was still marketing overlapping windows as a shiny new feature. The earliest versions of ClarisWorks on the Mac, likewise had this kind of functionality. It is certainly not a Microsoft innovation. UNIX may have been behind, but then UNIX was behind in most things in the 80s.

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    I am TheRaven on Soylent News
  4. Re:A key to MS success is exposed here by Nasarius · · Score: 2, Informative
    Linux has tons of powerful applications that do amazing things, but you have to read a manual of highly technical gibberish in order to use the most basic of features; when I'm using linux as a multimedia PC I don't want to have to press ctrl-p to play and shift-alt-r to record, I want something that is simple and straight forward to use.
    Have you actually...used Linux in the past five years? There are quite a few distros and applications that cater to your desires. I click on a video file in Konqueror, and it opens in VLC. I even get little preview screenshots of the video on the file icon, which was in KDE long before Vista was released.
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  5. Re:My favorite quote by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    close, but no cigar

    1) DARTMOUTH BASIC (an open source program!)
    2) the IBM DisplayWriter
    3) VisiCalc & SuperCalc

    how soon we forget...

  6. Re:TDS is a very MIXED bag by Shag · · Score: 2, Informative
    What the parent poster is forgetting here is the fact that TDS is on a network called, "Comedy Central." It in no way purports itself as a news station.

    That's right... in the U.S. Outside the U.S., folks in some areas see The Daily Show on this other network, called "CNN International." Maybe you've heard of it?

    (Yes, there is a little disclaimer message on black at the beginning of the show...)
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    Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.