Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
Try embedding an Excel spreadsheet into your non-MS calendar, or pasting a MS Word doc into a non-MS email app. It doesn't work so well, does it? The incredible inter-operability and compatibility that you're describing exists because MS has direct control over all the specifications and interfaces for pretty much all the apps most people use today.
MS didn't "innovate" the idea of getting everyone to use only MS apps for everything. If any company held such a powerful monopoly, they could do something similar. MS enjoys a greater degree of compatibility and interoperability in their software because they control the whole game - the OS, the browser, the word processor, the spreadsheet, etc. are all totally under the control of MS. If a small company has a truly innovative idea, they have to fit it within the existing inflexible MS specs and APIs, or they're out of luck. Meanwhile, if MS has even the slightest idea for a new feature, they can just re-mold the entire OS and application architecture to implement it.
What if you could get better gas mileage in a Ford, but you could only use Ford gas and drive on Ford roads? Would that be considered "innovative"? Requiring people to commit themselves to a restricted proprietary environment in order to get the benefits of interoperability is a sign of lazy development at best and anti-competitive profiteering at worst - but if that's what they call "innovation" these days, who am I to argue?