A Microsoft-Speak Timeline - From Altair to Zune

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.'"

Comments

Re:Keep on getting away with it...

[kahei]

And just as with politicians, sometimes no matter what you do or say, no matter how much greater the sins of your rivals are, no matter what your contribution, there'll be pasty-faced losers sitting on the sidelines going "But but but... Clinton got a blow job!" or "But but but... Microsoft don't innovate!"

The good news is that in business, these guys don't have votes }:>

And yeah, I'd say that inventing component-based systems after the world had stagnated for years piping streams of ASCII text around was quite a step, and no, I don't really see a competitor to Excel emerging until someone takes that step. Although it would be good if they did. It's easy to dismiss OLE now but at the time, it was such a vast step -- and then when it was backed up by a highly performant component system, COM, that's when the whole thing became unstoppable. With WordPerfect, you could edit a document. With Notes, you could check your calendar. With Lotus, you could edit a spreadsheet. With MS, you could embed an image in a spreadsheet in a document in your calendar -- it was a whole nuther level of flexibility and interoperability.

And lo, they captured the market and made el dollars.

And now, back to your scheduled programme of people sitting around furiously typing about how MS don't innovate! You can almost _hear_ the sweat trickling down their necks!