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Microsoft is the Industry's Most Innovative Company?
mjasay writes "According to a recent analysis by IEEE, Microsoft's patent portfolio tops the industry in terms of overall quality of its patents. And while Microsoft came in second to IBM in The Patent Board's 2006 survey, its upcoming 2007 report has Microsoft besting IBM (and even its 2006 report had Microsoft #1 in terms of the "scientific strength" of its patent portfolio). All of which begs the question: Just where is all this innovation going? To Clippy? Consumers and business users don't buy patents. They buy products that make their lives easier or more productive, yet Microsoft doesn't seem to be able to turn its patent portfolio into much more than life support for its existing Office and Windows monopolies. In sum, if Microsoft is so innovative, why can't we get something better than the Zune?"
265 comments making "humorous observations" about Microsoft and innovation being used in the same sentence. 0 that contain any actual humor.
Just call it a hunch...
It must all be going into the handheld OS or maybe into the game console. Those are about the only MS items I don't deal with on a regular basis. I do have to admit that the latest SQL server has some nice things in it.
I wonder if they included Microsoft patents such as their Virtual Desktop Pager patent? (http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-adv.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&d=PTXT&p=1&p=1&S1=(Microsoft.ASNM.+AND+%22Virtual+desktop+manager%22)&OS=AN/Microsoft+and+) Honestly, a vast portion of Microsoft's patents are complete bullshit that should NEVER have been awarded. Remove cases of OBVIOUS prior art (Linux has had virtual desktop pagers as described in that patent forever, and when they received this patent Microsoft had never used such a thing), and Microsoft's patent portfolio is shit. ~nog_lorp
...that patents have jack all to do with innovation. Thanks for the great example!
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
the innovation is going to vista techs that no one seems to want like there crappy DRM system that mess up networking when you are playing a .mp3
Does not mean making products. It is in regards to what they are doing with their money and what they are developing. Nowhere in there does it say "worthwhile" or "what people want" Hurrah for flaimbait.
Deleted
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
That's the phrase to describe Microsoft. They patent the obvious, the things that have existed for decades purely to get one up on their rivals and to be able to say Linux stole their idea.
Also having a good idea doesn't mean you can make it a product.
I couldn't argue (much) against them being the most innovative company, but I see much of what they do as coming up along the lines of cloning.
It CAN be done, but SHOULD it be done? And in that way?
-- I really need to bleed off some of this
Just because someone comes up with a patentable idea, doesn't mean it's a GOOD idea.
Just call it a hunch...
Yes, but does that hunch beg the question, or raise the question? Inquiring minds want to know.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
I want a pony and a red truck and a Mac and... :) Happy holidays.
The article, I notice, is rather light on details about what sort of patents they're talking about. As the OP says, people don't buy patents--they buy products. So concretely, what sort of innovation is Microsoft involved in? The article doesn't really go into that.
Frankly, I think the patent system hasn't been a good gauge of innovation in many, many years. Patents are issued for everything from BS "perpetual motion machines" to the grilled cheese sandwich are granted routinely.
Gifts for Geeks - Stuff that really matters!
Wow, it seems like the OP's view of microsoft is completely informed by Slashdot. Perhaps she ought to do a little more research. Microsoft has a slew of other products (http://support.microsoft.com/select/?target=hub) and seems to be doing better than keeping Office on life support (http://finance.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&chvs=maximized&chdeh=0&chfdeh=0&chdet=1198184400000&chddm=492269&q=NASDAQ:MSFT).
I'm sure that there are lots of "innovative" patents in MS's portfolio, though I'm certain that many were purchased elsewhere rather than developed in house. Also, just because they are producing "innovative" patents, does not necessarily mean that their enduser products are. They seem to fall hopelessly short of the basics in reaching for the new and flashy. Example: wouldn't you think that an automated troubleshooting wizard for internet connectivity problems would flag a blank entry for the gateway? I recently found that it did not.
Here's a recommendation for MS: when you create a troubleshooting wizard, perhaps you should sit an IT expert down and watch them trouble shoot a problem and record the steps. It would probably help a great deal more than asking if the toaster is plugged in and then declaring the problem unsolvable.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Of course, the submitter wasn't able to suppress his need to supply us with inflammatory comments. The Zune is probably as innovative as it gets when it comes to MP3 players. Does the iPod come with wifi?
Maybe the execution wasn't terrific, but yes, this certainly is innovative enough.
As I've seen that people are more likely to get heard when they add a disclaimer that they use linux while saying something positive about an MS product, I'll do the same:
My UserAgent is Opera/9.50 (X11; Linux i686; U; en), and I'm proud of it.
People dont like to admit it but MS actually does have patents on some fairly innovative things (example: ClearType) that are pretty clever. Whether its good or bad that you can patent a lot of these things is debatable but at least they are producing some useful stuff as opposed to just using patents as a money grab like a lot of patent troll companies.
omg ponies!
What more can I say...
In sum, if Microsoft is so innovative, why can't we get something better than the Zune?
Because you're busy complaining? Please, enlighten me as to how much more would get done if people who do ACTUAL WORK had OpenOffice to use on a daily basis. I am not a Microsoft apologist, it's just pretty damn low when you try to set up the Zune as the pinnacle of their accomplishments. Open your eyes.
Microsoft makes innovative software that causes the super-fast multi-core CPUs to slow down to hide the fact that programmers can't create innovative software to keep up with the hardware. :P
All of which begs the question: Just where is all this innovation going? To Clippy?
Microsoft has turned the business of chair throwing into an art. Nobody does it better than them. Why just a few short years ago, we were lucky to launch chairs more than a few meters. Even then they usually ended in a destructive fireball. Then came that luminary Ballmer. He changed everything. Next time you stand in awe of perfect chair-to-low-earth-orbit (CLEO, another MS patent), you thank Microsoft.
Where does the innovation go?! PFFF!
I got a catholic block.
Life support? For a monopoly?
/. ...
Life support not mentioned anywhere in the linked article.
Oh
65' Mustang
Microsoft is a Ginormous company and at each level innovation can prosper or languish due to management. Microsofties are by all accounts some of the smartest people in the field, so lack of innovation isn't because of the individual contributers.
So what? You're not Batman!
The blog entry looks like some roundabout way to try to plant the (erroneous) idea that patents equal innovation. The number of patents a tech company obtains depends mostly on how much money they are willing to spend on patents, nothing more. Microsoft made it their goal to get lots of patents to fight open source a few years ago, they have the money to do it, and they are following through. They are no more innovative now than they were a few years ago.
Microsoft Research is really cool. They crank out cool stuff all the time! Take a look! The problem is that most of their stuff never sees the light of day. MS just gets the patent then bury it and move on. WinFS and other neat things came out of there. They hire a lot of PhDs, too... James Larus, the guy that wrote SPIM (MIPS simulator) works there now...
Gotta get me one of these!
Just where is all this innovation going? To Clippy?
Clippy has been gone for so many years now that when ever I see someone bring him/it up, it automatically diminishes my respect for the author. The only thing more lame than dragging out Clippy would be dragging out Bob, or the hoax/cliche phrase "640k is enough for anyone" crap.
I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
http://begthequestion.info/
The article only mentions innovation once. At best, MS is very good at making sure their ideas are covered in terms of legal paperwork. That does not mean that they are innovative or inventive. Like IBM and other tech companies, how many of their patents are defensive in nature given the state of Intellectual Property today? True innovation means more than patents.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Monopoly maintenance.
Microsoft's patent portfolio tops the industry
Just where is all this innovation going?
Repeat after me: Patents != Innovation.
Patents are just a PTO bureaucrat's way of faking being a scientist who has spent a lifetime learning and extending a narrow field of knowledge.
---
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair
TFA says Microsoft has a bunch of patents - but then infers that this means Microsoft is innovative, which any Slashdotter knows to be false.
Innovation is a product of bright engineers, who are doing it for the love of engineering. Patents are a product of lawyers, who are doing it for the money.
I'm deeply indebted to Microsoft innovations.
For example, source control. Sure, Subversion, CVS etc all have their good points, but only VSS will randomly corrupt various setup scripts, thus giving me a free afternoon reading facebook while the the developers and DBAs try to fix our QA environments.
SQL Server. Can MySQL offer the same guaranteed crash every time I haven't saved my foreign key scripts? Can it bollocks. Restore from live, please.
Does Firefox have the ability to collect enough spyware that I can derive malicious pleasure from getting an underling to spend the entire morning reproducing a bug that was actually caused by some toolbar he'd inadvertantly installed? No
Fuck open source. Microsoft is the only thing standing between me and actually having to work to earn my paycheck.
If you haven't made a developer cry, you've wasted a day.
Microsoft BUYS the Industry's Most Innovative Company
Maybe he's Rick James, instead...
OCO is Loco
What the hell is wrong with the Zune 2? The reviews have been overwhelmingly positive and it beats the hell out of the iPod classic.
This is old news if anyone here has read "The world is flat" by Thomas Friedman (highly recommended). He had a chapter in there in which he speaks about his visit to one of Microsoft's research facilities in China. Every well educated 18 year old across the country competes for a few highly prized non-paying internship slots in these facilities. On top of each intern's cube were little toy cars which one intern explained they get as gifts from the company anytime a piece of their research led to a patent claim in the U.S. And you wonder why the U.S. is falling behind globally...
Yes, because everyone on Slashdot hates Microsoft. So just vent it all out bois. A large, successful, multi-billion dollar, international company, like Microsoft couldn't possibly have any good ideas or products that anyone would want to buy. How else could they get so rich and powerful? Sheesh.
it's a new science dedicated to proving ones innovation lead
It's pretty simple really, Microsoft has grown to large to truly innovate in the way that leaner companies with less of an internal bureaucracy can. Changes to code have to go through so many levels of approval that it's maddening.
One only has to look at the length of time it took them to produce Vista to realize that.
There are many ways to fail, to suck, or to do something wrong, and only a few ways to do something successfully, well, or right. I think, with this in mind, there's no need for further investigation into the size of Microsoft's patent portfolio.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Why is the IEEE giving cred to software patents?
Things that I have either heard of or seen coming from Redmond:
Any of which could have had multiple patents. A lot of what they do is impractical as a product now (the wall for instance), but is an investment in the future. Like in the early 90's when they purchased tons of digital rights. And some, like the Network LOD, are designed for developers to tie them into MS products.
But Microsoft, like AT&T when it had too much money, take a bunch of academics, give them money, and tell them to do cool things. After all, the whole deparment will pay for itself with a couple of nifty inventions.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
I don't know if this figures into the decision that MS is the "most innovative company", but you should check out what Microsoft Research is doing before you dismiss them as not doing anything innovative. Sure, they're not Bell Labs or PARC, but in the age of dwindling coporate research budgets, MS is one of the few companies left who seems to have a lot of research activity going on. I mostly pay attention to theoretical areas like programming languages and automated reasoning, and MS has made significant contributions in those fields over the last few years.
The summary cleverly shifts the subject to Microsoft is Evil, steering away from the real issue of software patents. Nice troll
I wish once in a while people would note, at least parenthetically, that the U.S. Patent Office has become something of a joke under Bush. It's even been known to ignore its own rules from time to time.
Could I be forgiven for wondering if this might explain Microsoft's preeminence?
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
The software companies that amass the most patents these days, are typically those who do not innovate. This is a perfect example of that.
I'm astonished that there is still any real belief that number of patents filed is any kind of measure of innovation. It's pretty much orthogonal as far as I can see.
Just because the patent systems original intended purpose was to stimulate innovation, doesn't mean that that's what it's actually used for.
-- MartinG To mail me: echo kewyjlcxyzvjfxbqwh | tr bcefhjklqvwxyz
I think since Anders came on board there have been dome great innovations at least on the development side at Microsoft. With the addition of Visual Studio 2008 and LINQ it could revolutionize the way a developer creates applications to take advantage of multiple cores.
They are inventing the technology that will put them out of business.
It is the nature of disruptive technology http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disruptive_technology that the company that invents it can't make money on it. Someone else takes it, develops it and puts the inventing company out of business. It has happened time after time.
The guy who has studied this most is Clayton Christensen http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clayton_M._Christensen . In his book 'The Innovator's Dilemma' he cites many cases where large companies are killed by disruptive technologies even though they were aware of them and tried to take advantage of them. I'm guessing that the same thing will happen to Microsoft. Its best hope is to learn from IBM and re-invent itself.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
We CAN get something better than the zune... its called an iPod
NO SIG
It just goes to show that the relationship of {number of patents : innovation} is a similar one to number of {number of security patches : security of the system}. It's not how many {patents/patches} you have, it's what they do for you. Apple, for example, is in the process of building another $10 billion/year business out of the multitouch patents that it has. One idea, a few patents to ring-fence and expand it, 10 billion dollars. That's a *good* idea. Microsoft has clever patents too, (eg: cleartype), but all that leads to is an argument over whether the alternative is "blurry" or "accurate", and whether cleartype text is "clear" or "anaemic". In other words, they gained support on their own platform, but they didn't managed to leverage it too much elsewhere.
Microsoft is *not* that innovative a company - it's bread and butter (80% of profits or so, I believe) come from corporations (not people), and corporations generally like "more of the same, please". There's nothing wrong with serving that demand, and [insert deity] knows they have clever people working there - the conclusion is that they don't *want* to be an innovative company - they're happy with the status quo, because it brings in gazillions of dollars for them. Sure, they'll have the occasional exciting new thing (how could they not, given their staff ?), but that's not the *company* focus.
In comparison, Steve is fond of saying he likes to run Apple as a small company, with the resources of a large company. That the cash-in-the-bank at Apple is because they *do* take risks, they *do* push the envelope that little bit farther, and that having a large wad of cash to fall back on is very useful, you know, just in case... Apple is ~1/5th the size of Microsoft (I think) in terms of staff, that's a lot of people, but they're spread pretty thin ("small company", "siege mentality", "more productive"), considering they produce computers, consumer devices, a major OS, several consumer apps, several pro-apps, as well as design their own hardware, operate a chain of retail shops (where most of the staff are), etc. etc.
Bottom line: Bill Gates said that Microsoft were one innovation away from being made irrelevant, and they work to protect their monopoly because of that. Apple's focus is more on the 'next big thing'. They take risks, and to do that you have to execute on new ideas. Apple is innovative, and its customers are people. Microsoft is protective, and its customers are corporations.
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
Really, all the article manages to say is that IBM and Microsoft patent a ton of shit, which is news to no one since they're enormous tech companies. The news post probably should be flagged flamebait or troll.
All that aside, I could buy Microsoft being one of the companies that generates the most innovative ideas each year. That's more a statement of just how much different crap the company is into than any innotation per capita assessment. For example, I'd say the Wii shows more innovation than the 360, but video game console stuff is about all of what Nintendo does but it's only a fraction of what Microsoft does.
That's because innovation isn't measurable by the number of patents you produce. Let me tell you my patent story.
I used to work at a company that made a widget. Details left out because of possible NDA/lawsuit goodness.
There were 3 or 4 other players in this widget space. There are about 3 or 4 useful functions any of these widgets can do.
One of the other players decides to patent "feature A from this widget, combined with feature B from this other widget". A multi function widget, merely taking two functions from two widgets and combining them. In other words, peanut butter is ok, and jelly is ok, but putting peanut butter with jelly is *hugely innovative* and deserves a patent.
We held meetings and began to file patents too. They were all equally insane.
There was NO INNOVATION going on in these meetings. Just carving up the widget patent space - that has existed for years - with each of these little companies nit-picking each other to death with patent suits and royalty fees.
Patents do not equal innovation.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
I have extreme difficulty to read ClearType text. I think this is related to the way the eyes of some people work and that other people also have similar problems.
I always thought that everyone was seeing the same things as me (fuzzy text hidden in an abyss of colours) and I thought well, maybe the whole world turned crazy or what, until I told what I were seeing to some other people and I asked them what they were seeing and they said "soft black letters", and then I read about the issue a bit and confirmed that yes, I am one of these people who can't read this stuff.
One would assume that the purpose of text is to be read rather than to look pretty. In this regard, ClearType creates difficulties for some people whose eyes can discern colour in more "resolution" than other people (ie it penalises people who have better eyes).
http://thesaurus.reference.com/browse/patent
?-Matthew Riley "TofuMatt" MacPherson
I have a website
I know this is slashdot and all, but the person who wrote this summary is so hopelessly biased against Microsoft its not even funny... What ever you say, think or believe about microsoft. They are an extremely successful company. Your summary makes it sound like Microsoft is crumbling and worthless, but Microsoft is as dominant as it ever was, and there are NO signs of that changing any time soon. Yes there are competing products popping up here and there, and thats really a good thing.. but not one of those competing products has yet been able to overthrow Microsoft's dominance in its core fields.
.NET. When it saw Netscape becoming an issue to its dominance, it came out with IE.
Microsoft doesn't release more innovative products, because it simply doesn't need to. Its not trying to gain the upper edge on anyone.. When Microsoft saw Java becoming an issue to its dominance, it came out with
When you're in first place, you dont really have to run harder to increase the distance between you and second place.. you just have to run hard enough so that second place doesn't take over your first place. Instead you just conserve your energy, and use it when its necessary.. Just because microsoft CAN do more, doesn't mean it needs to. In fact, its in the companies best interests not to crush all its competitors.
- Tempestdata
Microsoft does have a lot of smart people working for it - the problem is that those smart people are not in charge of designing and delivering products. Instead, these ideas are usually lost to the broken corporate model.
Why did MS make the Zune? Was it because smart people were running the show? No, it was due to ego. Microsoft wanted to be in a "hot market" corporate-wise - not culture-wise. Same thing with the XBox. Microsoft isn't about innovation - their innovation is just a happenstance of wanting to build a huge patent portfolio with their huge sums of cash.
Instead, Microsoft's corporate culture revolves around delivering boring retail products into an existing market in hopes to build a new monopoly.
AT&T was in a similar position. There was no doubt that AT&T's innovation was very high - hell, I know lots of people who totally wanted to work at Bell Labs and do the coolest stuff (like mistakenly discover the Big Bang, for example). Then again, from their customer's perspective, AT&T was the company that made and rented out the 500-series desk telephone for like 25 years without any change in technology - for $1.21 per month.
Taking away AT&T's monopoly position resulted in a ton of practical innovative products hitting the market... an innovative market that gets far stronger every year.
The typical conversation between the ivory tower academic and the front line engineer goes like this:
Academic: I've got this great idea <blah> which *might* be incredibly popular with your customers. Here's a spit and bailing wire prototype that we lashed together.
Engineer: Looks very promising. When will you have something that's ready for production use?
Academic: Well, it will take another twenty million dollars and two years of effort to get it to that stage. But isn't it so cool?
Engineer: It sure is. However, I don't have that kind of resources to risk on a "might be". Plus the release schedule is already set in stone and we're already cutting features frantically to make it. But call us back when you've got something in a more advanced stage of development. <click>
Academic: Shortsighted @%$&)@$ fools.
"Clippy?"
The Geek never learns to retire a joke that was never particurlarly true or funny to begin with.
Slashdot will probably be still using the Borg icon for Bill Gates when the Gates Foundation wins him the Nobel Peace Prize for the fight against Malaria.
"Life support" for Windows and Office?
The OfficeMax gift special is an $800 widescreen Vista Premium HP laptop, dual core AMD CPU and 2 GB RAM, bundled with an HP multifunction printer, and a 6.2 megapixel HP digital camera.
MS Office dominates retail software sales. If OfficeMax has a lick of sense, Office Home will be positioned to leave the store in the same cart as those $800 laptops.
Microsoft took off like a rocket in its first quarter and doesn't show any signs of slowing down in the second.
http://www.research.ibm.com/areas.shtml
http://research.microsoft.com/research/default.aspx
There's no real contest though. If they were course listings, one reads like MIT and the other like a community college.
"Gold still represents the ultimate form of payment in the world." - Alan Greenspan, 1999
Unfortunate that this is used towards quantifying this as it's probably only good to gauge how well funded your army of lawyers is.
Lost in the Bureaucracy
D6 63 0D 70 89 81 BB 8E 7B 7C 5F 5D 54 EA AB 73
Words describing the article: 61
Words bashing Microsoft: 74
Comment of the year
If I pay a few millions and buy or even build an innovative R&D lab and let the PhDs there crank out super ideas every day and I never use them, I am not an innovative company. One department does not represent the whole company.
that microsoft still exists means humanity has failed any acid test
sober individuals are tools of the corpo...
sorry, wrong meeting
"SUCK SATAN'S COCK!" - bill hicks
I'm Santa Claus
Oddly enough, so am I! Just ask my daughters, they'll tell you who Santa Clause really is.
I'm thinking they probably have patents on Bob, Clippy, stuff like that. I remember reading about a lawyer who filed a patent for his kid on swinging on a swingset and the Patent Office granted it.
I remember something about some lame online bookstore patenting one-click shopping. Microsoft holding a shipload of patents? That doesn't surprise me. Innovative? Having a shipload of patents doesn't mean you're innovative. Does anyone really think Amazon's one-click patent was innovative?
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Well, they got people to pay hundreds for a box with a 300 page book that nobody read and a CD.
They practically invented the EULA for the masses.
They entered new markets by simply buying companies and their portfolios.
They probably weren't the first in any of these, but they perfected integrating these into a government-proof business strategy.
So yeah, they're pretty innovative.
The size of a patent portfolio cannot be a reasonable measure of innovation, especially in this case given that much of the Microsoft patent portfolio comprises bought patents: patents are bought and sold just like any other commodity.
Secondly, a patent doesn't guarantee the given innovation ever reaches the market. To the contrary, patents are often used to protect an existing inferior product from going to market by having a monopoly over a potentially superceding product. As a result it's possible to argue that patents discourage actual innovation rather than encourage it.
It's very simple. All of the good ideas and good intentions get leveraged by some PHB to make a product embrace, extend, extinguish, or stand out in some other proprietary way. Every good thing is twisted into a way to extend their monopoly. IE7 could have passed Acid2, but they wanted to see if they could get "good enough" to fly, without spending extra money to do more than stem the flow of users away. I get the feeling that anything that is purely good on its own, and doesn't contribute to the monopoly, gets buried behind cancelled projects and updated priorities.
You can't equate patents with innovation. Sometimes it's just an indicator of how big their legal staff is. If you want to use the number of patents as an indicator for innovation, let me suggest this formula I just pulled out of my ass:
Tripp's Law of General Innovation
Innovation = (patents / lawyers) * engineers
This formula obviously doesn't apply to companies which don't employ lawyers, but I can assure you, such an innovative idea can only help their score.
At the risk of being labeled an insufferable know it all, the submission should read "...raises the question...," not "...begs the question...." If you think I'm being a English usage Nazi, ask yourself(raise the question), "Why would someone use 'begs the question' instead of 'raises the question'?" The only answer I have to that is that "begs the question" sounds fancier. Well, it sounds fancier, because it is fancier, or at least a little more complex. "Begging the question" is a logical fallacy where the only proof of an argument is a restatement of the premise. A simple example...
... "Why do you think that?" ..."Because he's not smart"
"I think George Bush is stupid"
So, why does this matter...because it's important. That begs the question...
It matters, because when people misuse the expression they dilute the actual meaning. Some people people reading the line above might ask, "That begs what question," because the incorrect usage of this expression over time has conditioned them to have a different expectation when they hear the expression. The correct response to hearing that a question is begged, is to assess whether or not this is the case, not to wait with bated breath for the question.
All of this raises the question, when do I use beg, and when do I use raise. The simple answer is if your asking a new question, you're raising it, but if your trying to point out that no real proof has been provided to support the premise except for the premise itself, you're begging the question.
Flame On!
My other sig is extremely clever...
I don't think that means what you think it means. I'm sure that there are lots of "innovative" patents in MS's portfolio, though I'm certain that many were purchased elsewhere rather than developed in house.
It does not seem that you are qualified to comment on the shortcomings of others, you need to work on yourself first. Those interested in what MS actually does in house might want to look at Micorsoft Research's project page: http://research.microsoft.com/research/projects/default.aspx.
Also, out of house research is not necessarily patented. A friend did research on distributed shared computing in grad school. The project was supported by Microsoft, they had access to Windows source code, they were not restricted from publishing their research.
The author of the posting clearly has no knowledge of the state of Microsoft software and development tools today. Take one look at the .NET Framework and not only is it a ripoff of Java, but it made huge improvements like making a language-agnostic programming platform (parially due to CTS and CLI) and allowing multiple syntaxes (yes even Java-like syntax) to interoperate. Programmers can work in their language of choice and the compiled code will interoperate with all the other .NET languages which were other programmer's choices. That's one example.
We have to be careful about snuffing off Microsoft because it's the right thing to do in this forum. We won't be laughing long if Microosft runs over the industry through innovation. Their latest IE8 web browser is already passing the ACID2 test. Watch out they're coming with tools that interoperate and make life easier. Sure they make a lot of mistakes on the way but if you're an innovater that's what you do. The end result is better despite the problems. You learn from problems.
Clippy? Zune? Indeed that kind of attitude shows complete ignorance.
Maybe the bigger issue is that slashdotters, and more importantly, Red Hat should think twice about dismissing Microsoft's patent claims wrt Linux distros as lies.
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000
I mostly pay attention to theoretical areas like programming languages and automated reasoning, and MS has made significant contributions in those fields over the last few years.
Yeah, and not only that, Microsoft seems to have understood that the first company to crack the parallel programming nut will be at the forefront of computing in this century. Lately, they have hired a few world-renowned experts in parallel programming and supercomjputing. Dan Reed (formerly of the Rennaissance Computing Institute) comes to mind. However, I doubt that this is going to be enough to solve the parallel computing conundrum. Sadly, computer science is dominated by a bunch of aging computer geeks who still think like Charles Babbage when it comes to computer programming and CPU design. Solving the parallel computing problem will take a strong willingness to break away from the orthodox fold. In my opinion, it is time to declare the algorithm dead and embrace a non-algorithmic computing model. We must reinvent the computer, especially now that the industry is taking its first painful step away from sequential computing to massive parallelism. We made a mistake fifty years ago when we chose Babbage's model but, it wasn't so bad because most of our computers had single-core CPUs. Unless we choose the correct path now, we will pay a heavy price later. Eventually, we will be forced to change. Better now than later. Is there anybody at Microsoft who can see the writing on the wall? Who know?
Okay let's be fair. I am a Linux user but Microsoft does have some innovative and very good products.
The Flight Simulator line that they bought from SubLogic is actually very good. I love it and it is one of the reasons I keep Windows on my system.
I remember Word way back when No one used Windows and WordStar and WordPerfect ruled. It required a mouse and no one used it because it was SO different. Excel was another really innovative product. It was so much better than Lotus123 that it made your head hurt. I wounder how many Mac where bought just to use Excel before It was ported to Windows.
Visual Basic for all of it's proprietary nature did let a lot more people write code for Windows. Of course it let a lot of people that should have never been allowed to code to write code but that is another story.
Visual Studio is a very good IDE.
The calendaring features of Outlook/Exchange are very good.
The XBox 360 seems to be the right balance of HD graphics and cost.
XBox Live from what I hear is very good.
So yea give the devil his due.
The real truth is that everything is going to look like small beans compared to Windows and Office.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Geez, you guys really can't see why Microsoft is innovative? Are you that blinded by your open source pride? First of all, the person who wrote this article obviously hasn't ever used a Zune, it's actually a great MP3 player and IMO better than any ipod (although I have yet to try an ipod touch). Half of the linux software out there is just a bunch of clugy hacks to standards or protocols developed by Microsoft. And the retard who wrote this article might not know this, but Microsoft makes more than Windows and Office... and the Zune. The person who wrote this obviously isn't a developer, or at least have never touched any development tools written by Microsoft. Visual Studio is a far superior IDE to anything out there, especially anything open source. And as a .NET and ex-Java devleoper I can easily say that .NET is a far superior programming language too (not to say that Java doesn't have it's place, too, though). Btw, try making a living off Open Source... have fun living in your studio apartment too.
Short answer: No
Long answer: Nnnnnnnnnno
Yeah, innovation that goes to things that don't exist (hint: your "example" isn't true for all Vista installs, thus it isn't true) is pretty crappy innovation.
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
One survey found something like:
This sounds contradictory, but think about it. Who were always considered the "top dogs" of sheer numbers of patents? IBM? AT&T? Maybe even 3M?
All have some success stories from their respective research divisions, yet nothing remotely comparable to the number of patents they filed for.
Truthfully, a lot goes in to taking a "innovative idea" and taking it all the way through to become a marketable product in mass production. I think some of these big firms just like to pay a "think tank" to work on "anything you like", throwing all manner of things at the wall to see what sticks. This ends up being profitable for them because of all the lawsuits they can file over the trivial patents other people end up infringing on by accident - and means they're likely to eventually come up with something really innovative, at SOME point in time. (EG. Post-it notes!)
Smaller, more efficient businesses will do the R&D only on things focused squarely on a specific goal they've defined. They won't have huge numbers of patents, but will have ones relevant to their task at hand. These folks get more products to market per patent than the "big guys" do.
I don't know if anyone else has delved into Microsoft's new Natual Keyboard line, but these are some of the most comfortable split/ergo keyboards I've ever used. And kudo's to MS for bringing back the front kickstand so we can actually type in an ergonomic position. I never understood why companies decided to just offer back kickstands for keyboards. This just leads to wrist aches.
Other than that, I'm sure that media center and xbox live add a ton of patents to their portfolio. We can sit back and bash MS all we want, but they do a lot of things right (even if writing an O/S doesn't seem to be one of them these days), especially in the HID market. Their mice and keyboards are A+ gear.
Wise men say, "Forgiveness is divine, but never pay full price for late pizza."
Along the lines of other comments, quantity does NOT necessarily equate to innovation or quality. A very tangible and relevant case-in-point would be in the scientific research realm. This is an anecdote on of my professors dropped in emphasizing the importance of doing GOOD work rather than LOTS OF POOR-QUALITY work.
The most prolific published author of biological research papers lived around the turn of the 20th century. His name eludes me at the moment, and the reason is that his work didn't stand the test of time, and his name has sunk into obscurity. He churned out research papers at an incredible pace, mostly classifying new species, but unfortunately for his legacy, his work was rather shoddy. A large percentage of his papers failed to remain standing after enduring the rigors of peer review, many falling even when he was still alive.
At the time I heard the anecdote, a researcher named Hobart M. Smith was overtaking that 'record' of quantity, but the vast majority of Dr. Smith's papers hold-up to scrutiny. His work is just higher quality, which makes it inherently more meaningful than the sheer volume.
So what's more meaningful to us today? Microsoft innovation, or IBM's innovation? IBM has revolutionized the tech industry time and time again with stunning advances in hardware technology, whereas Microsoft screams about how Linux 'infringes' on hundreds of its patents, which it won't even elaborate on because its execs are likely well-aware those patents would get revoked because they either wouldn't stand the tests of obviousness or prior art. Would Microsoft really rival IBM if it was suddenly stripped of all its dubiously-valid patents?
The differences here are primarily quality. Patent-bully Microsoft doesn't hold a candle to IBM innovation.
MS Research produces quality research, and I suspect many of the patents get issued there. Of course MS engineering is notorious for not being able to capitalize/monetize the work that MSR does.
I have a friend that's a patent lawyer with an ms in cs that has handled both Amazon and Microsoft patent filings. He's told me that Amazon's tend to be pure crap, but MS's are actually pretty good. That said, Amazon's distributed systems work is actually so supposed to be pretty good, but they rarely publish on it.
No matter what, anything that comes out of Redmond sucks. We've seen too many examples over too many years to believe this. Someone at MS must have blown someone at IEEE to make this possible. Or, MS just bought a bunch of companies and then claimed their patents.
In sum, if Microsoft is so innovative, why can't we get something better than the Zune?
Because craploads of our innovation isn't going into consumer-oriented products. One of the drawbacks of having such a ubiquitous platform is that it tends to overshadow a lot of the work we do. Also, there are lines of work here that consumers will simply never see directly, like our work in security, testing, IT management, development, and all sorts of other areas where we're making massive strides, with our target release dates being 2009 and beyond.
While you may think that microsoft's world revolves around the consumer giants, office and windows, the reality is, these two stay afloat because it's supported by ever more effective pontoons of tools like visual studio, system centre, identity lifecycle management, WPF, WCF, WF, Cardspace, Biztalk, and Unified Communications, not to mention several others..
I know that's a giant link salad, but it's pretty clear to see that almost all of those tools aren't in any way aimed at consumers, and most will do a lot to drastically increase microsoft's business dominance. Without them, much of the third party products and inhouse tools that are going to come through the pipeline in much less connected and interoperable fashion. While some of these products may not be the winners we hope they will, they all add up to a pretty strong whole.
ash
I thought that it was a well established general opinion in geek circles that MS has never been innovative? A decade ago I think the concensus was that MS stole, copied or bought anything remotely new (to them, that is) in their stuff and usually screwed up the implementation. I seem to remember that the only thing really credited to MS was ODBC, everything else had been traced back to some already existing thing. There was some credit for TrueType, but I think there was some contraversy about that too (I don't remember what, so I'm not sure about that).
/. ?
Their business tactics were not new either. However, unlike their software, those were implemented very, very well. That was the key to their growth. The innovative company is just an image, sheer PR, nothing to do with actual innovation. A patent portfolio is a business weapon, not an indication of being technically creative.
So, I wonder, what happened in the past 10 years that shifted the opinion so much that 'Is MS the *most* innovative company?' as a question can even emerge and appear on
It does not "beg the question." Argh!
http://begthequestion.info/
True, there are rip-offs of OSX, Linux and every other OS out there in Vista, and the Zune does feel like a Windows Live Frankenstein with all the worst bits of every mp3 player in existence, but M$ has come up with some great software lately.
Office 2007 is very innovative, and while the ribbon interface has its detractors, I think it's great and IMO you can't blame them for trying something new. True, OOXML is a steaming pile of Ballamer's excrement, but it's a brilliant app. It still does turn up the occasional gem in the Downloads section that makes Windows experiences slightly more bearable (although for some reason it doesn't work on Vista).
While patents != innovation and M$ has certainly been involved in many questionable business practices lately, Office 2007 shows that it still does have the ability to innovate - and I fear that if they lose that (which is the way Microsoft seems to be going) then the company will eventually fade away. Although, with people like Ballamer at the helm, that's no bad thing.
Those using pirated Tinysoft signatures(TM) are a real threat to society and should all be thrown in jail.
Formatting while copying ...
Does anyone else get the feeling that the editors actually do know what "begs the question" means, and are just screwing with us to get a higher post count?
Write your own Choose Your Own Adventure. http://www.freegameengines.org/gamebook-engine/
They aren't the source of innovation, the buy it.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
Is it just me or does this actually make sense to someone? What is to stop someone from watching the live broadcast (because they already have the sports pack from joe-blo-cable company) and blogging about it live from the comforts of their own home? No laptop or press pass required! It's the internet man, nobody knows you aren't at the game physically. What is the NCAA gonna do about that?
I've admired some of the results coming out of MSFTs R&D lab. But I rarely see them becoming supported products. For example they (and other groups) are working on image-based construction of 3D models. This means if you shoot a bunch of overlapping photos, you may be able to construct the 3D geometry behind them such as buildings along a street via stereo matching. All the mapping companies are starting to use this now for street views. MSFT finally released a version of this for NASA so they could QC space-shuttle defects more quickly and accurately during a mission.
Methinks Microsoft Research need to do a little "research" into modern content management systems that correctly resize images on the server side:
Image is 560 x 54 px. Schoolboy error.
Having a large patent portfolio does not make them innovative. Microsoft gets many patents by buying smaller companies and patenting things that other people did but forgot to patent.
I made a list once, that shows very clear, how "innovative" MS is...
I listed pretty much all MS products and similar products that existed earlier. for each ms product there was a "prior art" product 14 months to 34 years earlier (ok, there are products that were the first in their sector - these are ALL products that MS didn't invent either, but that they bought from others)
the list is in german, though (I didn't think I'd ever mention it on an english discussion board)
http://www.algorithman.de/freedom/ms_quality.htm
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
Great lab, poor productizing. AT&T invented UNIX, but really couldnt figure out what to do with, so gave it to universities almost free. Xerox pretty invented the GUI, yet couldnt make money off it. I heard a complain of "culture war" between shipping product devlopers at MSFT and their R&D lab. The research people are undsiciplined prima-donas.
""According to a recent analysis by IEEE, Microsoft's patent portfolio tops the industry in terms of overall quality of its patents"
uh... it states the overall QUALITY of their patents not quantity....
sig goes here!
Lot's of comments by people who don't make money and are angry at anyone that does- my prediction.
... that is, a few years of loses followed by profits and shared dominance with 1 or 2 other players.
BTW: Is the Zune bad? Because considering its penetration in an already crowded market space (check similar configured devices) we're in for a another X-Box 360
Are you sure your monitor just doesn't have reverse ordered pixels? Most LCDs have BGR color ordering... but some have RGB. Sounds the same? It is very different! The following is a very zoomed in example of some backwards y letter I just made up. In the first, the font algorithm (Cleartype) thinks (correctly) you have BGR color order. In the second, the screen has RGB color order, and Cleartype thinks it is BGR (which is BAD!). Notice that the first one looks like a backwards y, like it should. The second one has separated pixels. On screen, this would look like a color halo "fringing" around the letter. Remember that in both examples, that 3 letters make up a single pixel, and the letters in each group that are turned "on" are the same in the first and second example.
BGR..RBGR
.GRBGRB..
..RBGR...
...BGRB..
....GRBGR
RGBR..RGB
RG.RGB..B
R..RGB...
...RGB..B
...RG.RGB
If your video driver supports screen rotation, try inverting the screen, then looking at the result of Cleartype upside down. (temporarily of course... it is not very comfortable to hang from the ceiling and type). If this is significantly better, look for the MS Cleartype Tuning utility, which can change the logical pixel ordering, and gaussian values to make the text look good when the screen is right side up.
The BIG pain is when you have two monitors, one is BGR (my laptop) and one is RBG (external SONY) in dual head. Windows XP cannot set the logical pixel ordering for the monitors separately, meaning one looks good (I can pick which, of course), the other like ass. To remedy the situation, I currently have the SONY monitor propped upside down on my desk and have the screen rotated on it. Sounds dumb, but it works.
Best of luck! (and I hope my monospaced example does not get messed up)
The corporate culture of Microsoft prevents them from producing anything of use to common market because, well, they're a bunch of out of touch dorks who wouldn't know something useful to their non-geeky neighbors if it landed on their faces and wiggled, so to speak. (I had the pleasure of making the acquaintance of the culture of Silicon Valley this year, and I know this to be true.) The need to hire "cool" product people, give them bucketloads of money and unlimited creative license. (And I mean cool, as a point tangential to any coolness their particular corporate culture can perceive.) I am also available for children's parties.
To beg the question does not mean "to raise the question."
Anyone know what sort of incentive system M$ offers for employees to get patents? What sort of limitations there are (i.e. does it have to be a patent that has merit)?
If i had to venture a guess, I would say that M$ employees probably get slightly better incentives than IBM (runner up) or at least a little more time to work on them. I can't back that up at all, can anyone else?
Prediction: The real iPhone killer is going to be sex robots from Japan. Think about it.
Are software patents.
I wonder how their quality could be any good, when ones like 'string comparison based on address' can sneak in their portfolio.
Or some of the FAT patents.
DOH, they just bought one more research.
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
Sure lets take the idea's of other innovative companies after engaging in a "licensing agreement" or "Non disclosure agreement", claim the idea as our own, patent it, and then implement it full of bugs as security holes........ innovative! Mirosoft has even patented the concept of watching a television broadcast and having a chat window open on the same screen as their intellectual property. Please. Will the patent reform laws please teach those with small idea's and big legal teams that stealing is wrong and absurd patents are not meant to be a means of suing the more innovative competition. Will someone please slap their wrist so hard that they stop bullying the industry!!!!
Slashdotters are largely clueless regarding Microsoft, and willfully so.
.NET Parallel Extensions, allowing easy use of multiple cores in .NET code, including PLINQ (Parallel LINQ).
First, Office *does* have lots of innovations, particularly Office 97 and Office 2007.
Clippy *was* innovative. Yeah, it failed, but a lot of research went into it.
LINQ *does* rock.
Which reminds me that Microsoft just recently released a CTP of the
VC-1 *is* the most efficient hidef video codec.
XNA *is* an innovative product.
See the 2006 DEMMX Awards and see that Microsoft won Best of Show - Innovator of the Year (beating out the likes of Apple, who won a lesser award for video iPod) and Game Innovation of the Year, both for XNA.
Microsoft *has* been commissioned by the JPEG working group to develop JPEG XR (aka HD Photo aka Windows Media Photo) as the next-gen photo image standard (where JPEG2000 failed).
Industry Standardization for HD Photo
Check out this article on SIGGRAPH 2007 and learn that Microsoft is leading the way regarding graphics technology.
Siggraph: Microsoft the new research powerhouse in graphics?
F# *is* being "productized" and is already used in Xbox Live.
Vista *does* have excellent speech recognition (despite a failed demo of a beta), even admitted to by Mac fanboy David Pogue.
Telling Your Computer What to Do
Windows 2 Apples
TabletPC'S *do* have the best handwriting recognition in the biz.
It goes on and on.
Microsoft Research is this era's "Bell Labs" and "Xerox PARC", but much of Microsoft Research's stuff does wind up in products. Microsoft Live Labs is also doing interesting stuff like Volta (which is being productized), Photosynth, etc.
Just because slashdotters don't are totally ignorant of Microsoft tech doesn't mean that such tech doesn't exist.
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000
MS spawned whole industries in Virus Writing and Virus Fighting. Without MS, security consultants world-wide will go hunger.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
About 10 years ago, I "foolishly" predicted that in 20 years Microsoft would be out of business. I'm happy to say progress is being made, day by day!
From an engineering perspective, sub-pixel rendering is implemented in the font engines rasterizer. It has nothing to do with the font, text or glyphs. ClearType is an application of an old technique that works best with high contrast images (eg: text) to a modern display device with an accurate pixel grid.
There is nothing innovative in ClearType and even if you say that MS "invented" it first; how many hackers do you know who had LCD displays prior to 2001? Which commercial companies were investing in R&D in the field given Microsoft had a monopoly on computer operating systems? Are you sure you're prepared to call this "innovation"?
Just because someone is patenting huge amounts of stuff, it does not indicate that they have innovated anything.
It means only that they have a large number of people whose job is to take existing ideas and patent them.
In Microsoft's defence, this does not prove that they have not invented anything either.
I think it is quite likely that some of the very clever people that they have working for them did create new ideas. It just hasn't got much connection with this abuse of the patent system.
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
The marketing folks decided it wasn't coming up enough (who want's a revolutionary feature hidden away most of the time?), and so made the development people dumb Clippy down, so it would think you were in trouble at the first sign of anything slights wrong, and pop up.
I suspect that this happens a lot with Microsoft products. The research version of Clippy was probably one of the best online help aids ever--way ahead of, and far more useful than, anything you'll find on Linux or Mac. Then marketing turns it into a joke.
Innovation cannot be measured by counting patents.
http://outcampaign.org/
Maybe Microsoft needs a catchy bumper-sticker slogan all the FOSSies can swoon over. Something like "TEH DUNT BE TEH EVIL!!11!!". That way, when they do something evil, all the retards can just say "BUT DEY SEY DEY DUNT BE TEH EVIL, DEY KANT BE TEH EVIL!!!?!?!"
I'd expand on this to say that it goes beyond resolution and pixel size, the primary difference is that some folks' brains also don't process visual inputs the same way. Quite a lot of what we *think* we see is not reality, our brains smooth over gaps. What's particularly interesting about most display technology is that it takes (what I'm guessing is) a representation of a pure, colored image in the machine, blasts it out to a screen that's comprised of lots of primary-colored dots, and those dots are picked-up by many more primary-color sensors in our eyes, and then re-assembled into a pure, colored image by our brain if all goes well. Even though that image never existed in the first place, and even if it did, our eyes never even actually saw it as such, either.
ClearType has always looked a little fuzzy to me, probably because even on the most fine-grid-pitch/tiny pixel LCD displays (such as the 1920x1200 17" Dell LCD I use at home), I can see the grid, and I can see those tricks that allow parts of a "pixel" to fall outside of the grid enclosing that pixel. Conventional type rendering, even if the curves and some strokes are a little jagged due to the limitation of displaying diagonal lines or curves in square-pixel blocks, appears very clean and sharp to me, even though I can see the flaws. It's just a greater flaw, as far as my own perception goes, to color outside the lines.
Innovative in finding new ways to get our money in their pockets.
So where does this sit with the article on Slashdot the other day where Vista is viewed as the most disappointing product of 2007? It strikes me that the two articles are entirely contradictory of one another.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
It's not about innovation, it's about implementation. If you are not going to implement the numerous great ideas that your research group develops and get those innovations into products then all those innovations might as well have never happened.
It used to be that companies would spy on each other, steal idea, etc, to try to be first to market. A patent would help protect you from that, as it gave a baseline date for innovation. Anymore, it's like mass registering URLs. You know someone is doing it, or has done it, and you can either wait for them to come to you with money, or have your lawyers tell them to come to you with money. Sounds like Microsoft's portfolio is a lot of the latter anymore. Some of them in there look like honest innovations, but the last spate of mass patenting appears nothing more than legal posturing on existing technology. The actual innovators now face an uphill battle to be able to do anything with their ideas, or hope that MS will let them continue on out of their good graces. (try to say that with a straight face.) Patents don't protect anything anymore. It's the latest corporate sword that the lawyers are wielding.
From your referenced article:
"The following is a partial list of other technologies that began in Microsoft Research and later moved into Microsoft products, demonstrating the extensive success of the company's distinctive technology transfer approach.
[...]
- IPv6 is an implementation of the Internet Protocol version 6 that is fully supported in the shipping version of the operating system
"(emphasis mine)What in the everliving FUCK!? Am I reading that wrong, or is Microsoft literally claiming to have come up with IPv6?
Among other things, they apparently claim to have invented public key cryptography, text-to-speech, spam-filtering, clustering (at least insofar as SQL), and photography analysis tools...
Dude, something ain't right, there...
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
The full article does explain that the standard of "quality" is determined by "who won in court in a patent defense suit". IBM and Microsoft both have comparably deep pockets to wage legal wars of attrition against anyone who wishes to challenge them. They probably also have the wisdom to not pursue lost causes, which is why Ballmer is quick to spread FUD on how Linux infringes on Microsoft IP, but refuses to cite even a single patent. The point I'm making is that the IEEE is judging the strength of Microsoft's entire patent portfolio based on the percentage of successful defenses, coupled by the sheer number of patents it holds. Failure to defend a patent because it may not be defensible in the first place isn't reflected in the figures.
Having watched both companies over many years, I see a lot more substance and innovation behind IBM's R&D and its products, and markedly less so from the Microsoft camp. Anecdotally, I can't recall IBM EVER having a spokesperson come out and bluster that another company or project is infringing on their patents, they act on those things. Microsoft's propensity to bluster says a lot; sure, a lot of their patents stand-up to scrutiny, but there are likely quite a lot that are utterly indefensible and they know it. They just want to cling to the empty patents and so they don't even attempt to defend them. It would be impossible to truly judge the strength of a patent portfolio until every last patent was either confirmed or tossed-out.
If you're going to put such an obvious joke up as a story, at least put the Monty Python Foot Icon, so I know. I almost spit my coffee all over my new flat screen.
Innovative, by copying a copy of a copy? Hadn't that already been done? Define innovative. If owning patents is innovative, I would suggest the patent office itself is the sole proprietor of all innovation. I'm not a Windows hater, but innovative really doesn't even begin to enter into it. How about "easy to develop for", and "clean simple well understood layout" with "good driver support and tons of games".
Innovative.... LOL I do not think that word means what you think it means.
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
VC1
XBox Live and XNA
C#
Ribbon
Sharepoint
or those nice mice/keyboard that Microsoft makes, they get a lot of patents for those, or if SQL Server does something better in the next release, well they get patents for the new algorithm/method that helped them achieve better performance.
Of course, if you open your eyes, there's a lot more, and they are affecting millions of people.
They might have lots of patents, but their products suck. They can't create decent products for toffee.
...234 more to go. if this is the quality of the ms patent violated by linux, i wouldn't tell linux which patents were violated either.
I'm don't know much about other areas but when it comes to programming languages MS has been pretty good at moving stuff from research to production.
I've been following Don Syme's work for a couple of years. Here's a guy that wrote the foundation for CLR generics, then he created F# which is now being moved into production.
Or take a look at Comega which laid the foundation for C# 3.0 and will probably also form a foundation for pragmatic parallelism in C# 4.0.
Or take a look at the Task Parallel Library which does some cool research topics like task stealing that I haven't seen implemented anywhere else yet.
When it comes to other MS software I don't see much improvement but I use very few MS products. The Office Ribbon definitely looks like a giant improvement over the toolbars and menus but that's cosmetic.
The depressing thing is that I see way more cool stuff coming out of Microsoft than from the GPL-loving crowd. FireFox 3.0, provided that it delivers on better bookmarks management, may be the first big thing I've seen in years. OpenOffice is still a bad clone of MS Office, Thunderbird is a giant fucking disappointment (how a product may be worse than Outlook or Outlook Express is beyond me), and the multi-protocol chat clients have more switches than a Boeing 747.
So how about something that impresses us you GPL-loving freaks? ;) Take something like face recognition which has been proved to have too many errors to be useful for finding terrorists at airports and create an awesome application that can tag my pictures by people who are in them automatically.
Dejan
Duh.
Turning a patent into a product is expensive. Not only that, but you don't play your best cards when you don't need them--you hold them for a play where you need a strong hand.
This is again the failure of patents to actually produce good results at the market level: instead, they allow the strongest companies to buy the best ideas (through research or outright purchase) and simply hoard them, preventing smaller competitors from bringing the innovative ideas to market.
If you read that page's quote from Wozniak, he's talking about NTSC signals, not phosphors. It was an electronics hack. The Apple ][ didn't have completely randomly programmable colors for every pixel, which was a pain. On the other hand, you got what? -- 6 or 8, I don't remember because I was an Atari guy -- colors instead of just 4, which was the tradeoff. Atari graphics mode 8 (320x192) was similar -- and get this -- when Atari switched from the CTIA to the GTIA, the blue/green colors swapped! The original Jawbreaker, a Pac-Man rip-off, rendered as a green maze on machines with GTIA chips.
I think we have amply demonstrated, in many articles here, how little innovation is needed to get a patent. a large patent portfolio simply means that the company has spent a lot of money on patent lawyers.
Why don't you read the damned claims from US patent# 6,307,566 yourself?
There are no "different and substantially more advanced" algorithms in the ClearType patent. They are scaling an image to map it's data to all the sub-pixel elements, then super-sampling it to calculate the intensity of the sub-pixel elements. In other words.. simply render a bitmap using sub-pixel elements, then anti-alias. It's no more complex than that.
Here's pretty pictures for you morons.
[ X ][ X ]
[ X ][ Y ]
[ Y ][ Y ]
Scale.
[X][X][X][X][X][X]
[X][X][X][Y][Y][Y]
[Y][Y][Y][Y][Y][Y]
Super-sample.
[X][X][X][X][X][Y]
[X][X][Y][Y][Y][Y]
[Y][Y][Y][Y][Y][Y]
I'm sure bitmaps have been rendered using sub-pixel elements in the past, but maybe the combination of anti-aliasing makes it somehow technically patentable.
Whatever, just don't call it "way different and substantially more advanced" because you can't read a patent.
So the DRM is only operating "correctly" on some installs. Sounds just like M$.
Yeehaw! Go go go Amerikkkkkka!
WTF does Microsoft's patent have to do with fonts, other than it is a useful method of rendering them.. or ANY BITMAP using sub-pixel elements.
From US patent# 6,307,566
Abstract
Methods and apparatus for utilizing pixel sub-components which form a pixel element of an LCD display, e.g., as separate luminous intensity elements, are described. Each pixel of a color LCD display is comprised of three non-overlapping red, green and blue rectangular pixel sub-elements or sub-components. The invention takes advantage of the ability to control individual RGB pixel sub-elements to effectively increase a screen's resolution in the dimension perpendicular to the dimension in which the screen is striped, e.g., the RGB pixel sub-elements are arranged lengthwise. In order to utilize the effective resolution which can be obtained by treating RGB pixel sub-components separately, scaling or super sampling of digital representations of fonts is performed in one dimension at a rate that is greater than the scaling or sampling performed in the other dimension. In some embodiments where weighting is used in determining RGB pixel values, e.g., during scan conversion, the super sampling is a function of the weighting. During a scan conversion operation, RGB pixel sub-component values are independently determined from different portions of a scaled image. The scan conversion process may involve use of different weights for each color component. Processing to compensate for color distortions, e.g., color fringing, introduced by treating each pixel sub-component as an independent element is described. For horizontally flowing text applications, screens with vertical as opposed to horizontal striping are preferred.
It's not fucking complex. The patent's claims cover horizontally scaling an image to be rendered using sub-pixel elements, then super-sampling (antialiasing) it to produce shades of gray. Here's pretty pictures for you morons.
[ X ][ X ]
[ X ][ Y ]
[ Y ][ Y ]
Scale.
[X][X][X][X][X][X]
[X][X][X][Y][Y][Y]
[Y][Y][Y][Y][Y][Y]
Super-sample.
[X][X][X][X][X][Y]
[X][X][Y][Y][Y][Y]
[Y][Y][Y][Y][Y][Y]
Sure, bitmaps have been rendered using sub-pixel elements in the past, so maybe the combination of anti-aliasing makes it somehow technically patentable.
Don't mean it's AT ALL innovative. Microsoft didn't "discover" jack shit about rendering anything using sub-pixel elements, they sure as fuck didn't discover antialiasing, and you all damn well know they weren't the first to realize that scaling and super-sampling are useful together. Fucking nimrods. They were awarded a patent, but don't give them any credit for shit they didn't actually discover.
... and look how much good that did Xerox. Turning real innovation into competitive advantage, or new products, is hard.
Anecdote from Fumbling the Future (book on Xerox PARC in the 1970's and 80's):
Xerox held a big coming-out party for the Xerox Star office system - personal workstations with mice and WIMP interfaces, networked file storage, laser printers. They set up a big demo Office Of The Future, and invited all of Xerox's top brass to see it. Because this was 1980, they were all male, and they brought along their wives, who had all been secretaries at one time or another.
The executives walked around, looked at stuff, and nodded their heads thoughtfully, but did not get excited. Their wives sat down, rolled the mice, clicked the buttons, typed stuff, created documents, printed them, and basically got excited as all hell. The users knew that this was the future - the business decision-makers didn't have a clue.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
"Beg" is simply an old-fashioned way to say "ask".
So, given a particular question, "beg the question" can legitimately mean:
to provide an answer that simply reformulates the *same* question over again,
or
to provide an unsatisfactory answer that immediately raises a *different* question.
They employ something like seven hundred people in Microsoft Research alone. And MSR produces some top notch scientific work. Take nearly any top scientific conference related to CS, AI or linguistics and you'll find some good papers from MSR there, every year. Some of it makes its way into Microsoft products (Clear Type, .NET Generics, a bunch of search related stuff, some SQL related stuff, speech technologies, video/audio compression, some stuff in XBox), but about 95% of the output is, sadly, wasted for all practical purposes. The only benefit to the company is patents.
So I'm not surprised at all that the portfolio is strong. Everything MSR invents gets patented. Patents are its raison d'etre. It's just that the consumer rarely sees the ideas implemented.
MS is known as the company that purchases other innovative companies and assimilates them into the collective that is Microsoft. Is Microsoft really innovative? Not really. Look at all their innovations from Windows ME, Robert, Barney, Plays for Sure, Origami handheld PC, SPOT watch and on and on. Even Zune, Vista and the Table Surface PC are not being accepted into the marketplace. Shoot, even XP has been touted as an UPgrade to Vista.
Innovation has be be an improvement or a usable new product that makes sense to both the vendor and the consumer. While Microsoft has accesses to some of the best, they are a lot like Boeing Aircraft that bought up all the cool innovative military companies like North American Aviation (F-86, F-100, P-51, XB-70, etc) and killed off most of America's competitive fighter aircraft manufacturers. Only Lockheed/Lockheed Martin remains. Is Boeing more innovative or did they purchase their innovations? Maybe but at what cost?
Spending millions on research doesn't mean anything really, Look at Xerox and their PARC facility. How much of that innovation made it to market? Probably less than 10%, if that. Did all that research make Xerox into an innovative company? Maybe but, Canon, Sharp and other copiers are taking over the world.
MS can be innovative but, I would much rather they become ethical. That's how to become a good corporate citizen and a company that people like and respect. Xerox is such a company. Microsoft is not. Apple is. Halliburton is not. It all has to do with ethics -- not innovation.
Banjo - The more I know about Windoze, the more I love *nix
Only explanation is that the IEEE is being paid off by Misfit. Come on, anybody who has been in software for any length of time knows that Misfit has not produced anything noteworthy ever. Even PowerPoint - Gates' pride and joy had a precursor - Harvard Graphics.
The first thing that came to mind was the optical mouse. I know they existed before, but the MS design definitely brought it to the masses.
Visual Studio. Though I haven't used it for a while, my last encounter was quite pleasant. I still feel that MS makes some of the best development tools for quick development.
Not sure how to count this, but MS bought/made some of better 3D tools (didn't they buy Silicon Graphics patent portfolio?)
Game engines. This is second hand info - I don't get to play too many games
considering I run Linux at home and work computers are secured - or overrun with crap if not - I don't have too much experience with MS software directly. I have big issues with Windows and MS philosophy, but they have done a few things worth noting. One must merely keep things in perspective - a company of thousands of people can provide great innovation while still being an abusive monopoly.
One thing of note. Patents don't require a real working product. They merely require a vague description of a working product, so if you have a good idea, its in your interest to patent it, so when someone else makes it, you already "own" it. Its what patent trolls do. For all we know, the MS patent portfolio could be smoke and mirrors - with MS ready to pounce on a real threat to their interests.
When all else fails, try.
Find software that is good and make software that does the same thing or worse, or just buy the company. Who needs originality with a business plan like that?
I mean.. taking Novell's NDS and making Active Directory was probably the most innovative thing ever.
All of which begs the question: Just where is all this innovation going? To Clippy?
And of course just where is all this innovation going? To Clippy? Follows. Thus, And of course just where is all this innovation going? To Clippy? Follows. Thus, And of course just where is all this innovation going? To Clippy? Follows. Ergo, And of course just where is all this innovation going? To Clippy? Follows. So it continues following: And of course just where is all this innovation going? To Clippy? Follows. You see? That's what you get for invalid logic. Infinite regression.
Ok. So now it comes to Microsoft and patents and innovation. Hmmm. Now that's interesting isn't it? If we went through the mountain (mountain, is that correct?) of paper that Microsoft spent all of this money locking down, and went and got a full set of copies of Don Knuths "The Art of Computer Programming", then added to that mix, Doug Englebarts "The Mother of All Demos", and then add to that all of the innovation done by the Internet Engineering Task Force, then add all of the innovation done by Xerox PARC, DARPA, and the good folk over at the University of California at Berkeley (BSD Unix), and go hunting through that big pile of paper Microsoft bought, with the clear thought that PRIOR ART is not patentable, and the US Patent Office had been extremely sloppy in the past few years in its lack of looking for prior art, then I bet *BET* that we will be looking at patents belonging to the wrong people. The US Government has made a lot of money taking money for patents, leaving it to the courts to overturn patents from offended parties. So then it comes down to what was created. What has Microsoft actually created thats credible? Surely if they figured out cold fusion, we would have heard from them. So where are all of the marvelous trinkets that we are to expect? Is it related to only pushing the mouse button once instead of twice? Does it involve animated paper clips? IBM has a systems journal where people (PhD's who work for the company) publish papers. Microsoft? I remember IBM developing the tunneling electron microscope. This is super cool technology that has saved the lives of millions and does for science what Toy Story did for 2D animation (HELLO 3D!). There isn't any real innovation in Microsofts paper. Its just paper to trip people in trying to implement the obvious. I'm quite disgusted by all of this (and I know I'm not alone).
They are an extremely successful company.
...but not one of those competing products has yet been able to overthrow Microsoft's dominance in its core fields.
So? Budweiser is the best-selling beer in America. That doesn't make it any good, let alone the best quality.
Aye. And the reasons behind this (ruthless, immoral, and illegal business activity) have very little to do with the quality of their products.
When you're in first place, you dont really have to run harder to increase the distance between you and second place.
Or you can use the power that comes with being in first place the ensure no other runner can enter the race. That is the power Microsoft has wielded in the past to great affect: by restrictive licensing agreements, they were able to keep out DR-DOS, OS/2, Geos, BeOS, and a host of other early competitors. (IBM really fucked up with OS/2, so it's only on the list because Microsoft *still* had to pull some questionable tricks to keep it at bay, even when IBM had OS/2 locked in the basement, feeding it through the crack at the bottom of the door.)
So, now we come to the first line:
I know this is slashdot and all, but the person who wrote this summary is so hopelessly biased against Microsoft its not even funny...
It's not bias when your opinion is based on truth. Just because I want Charles Manson locked safely away doesn't mean I'm biased. It means I know what Chuck is like. Just because I wouldn't go to dinner with Jeffrey Dahmer doesn't mean I'm biased against him. Just because I wouldn't have sex with the most beautiful woman in the world who has aids, that doesn't mean I'm biased.
See what I'm getting at? Even your post in Microsoft's defense had nothing good to say. The best you could say was that they were "successful." That's certainly not untrue. The summary was actually pretty to-the-point, except for the swipe at Clippy. (C'mon, folks. That was a long time ago. Let it pass. Even Microsoft was embarrassed enough to dump Clippy. But they had to do *something* with MS-Bob.) For instance, the Zune is not a good MP3 player. It's decent, but not that great. MS-Vista rather sucks, as an upgrade 5 years in the making. MS-Office 2007 is essentially MS-Office 2003 with a facelift and new proprietary document format.
So far, the *only* product that is half-decent from Microsoft in the last couple of years is the XBox 360. It's hobbled by lack of high-density media (HD-DVD or BluRay), but they had to do that to keep the price down, so maybe that was the right call. It's still a decent game console. (I hated the original XBox, which was nothing but a cheap PC in an ugly case. At least they took the time to figure out how to make a *gaming* console this time around.) Even with the 360, there's no real innovation. It's a good, solid system with some quality control issues, but otherwise not very spectacular.
I guess my point is this: the summary was simply saying that, with so much regard for the quality patent portfolio, why is Microsoft still making Budweiser? Why can't they get up to Anchor Steam quality? Or Great Lakes Nosferatu? Or (insert your favorite ale or lager here. But not lambics. I hate lambics.)?
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
like AT&T when it had too much money, take a bunch of academics, give them money, and tell them to do cool things. After all, the whole department will pay for itself with a couple of nifty inventions.
Which sparked UNIX and its clones, which ironically ultimately may be what kills MS. Pig lab kills a pig.
Table-ized A.I.
I'll give Microsoft and the USPTO the benefit of the doubt here (insanity!) and assume that they really do produce the most great patents.
It just goes to show that there's a world of difference between a good idea and viable execution. Reminds me how Xerox had, by far, the best set of ideas in the industry in the late 70's and almost totally failed to do anything with them.
As someone who leans more toward the creative side as opposed to the marketing side, it's humbling to see how much we need each other. "If you build it they will come" isn't true. You need someone who understands how to make great ideas into practical products, then find the right people to market to and get it in front of their eyeballs. It's not easy or cheap.
Really, this kind of marketing ability is Apple's greatest innovation. They have great ideas, sure, but their ability to get them out to people is what sets them apart. Hopefully Microsoft can figure out how to do this before they start slashing their R&D budget in a downward spiral.
Cheers.
Well at least they are encouraging developer to be creative, like..
1001 ways to make your page work in IE
AAHAHAAHAMOUAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH! Please kill me! AHAHAAHOAHAOHOHOHOHAHAHAHAHHRRRRAHHHHH!
First, as people said here, patents aren't always directly related to innovation as a lot of people see it. However, they do provide new ways of doing things.
.NET, DirectX, all kinds of platform products that end users care little about. I'm sure Vista's kernel includes a lot of patents, and few users know or care, because users just see the UI and interaction, not what's underneath.
Classic MS patents are the extended filenames for FAT/FAT32. Say what you will, MS invented a way to encode long filenames. Not anything major, but worth a few patents (in an industry that has software patents as they are now; not getting into *that* argument). I'm sure that Windows Media encoding of audio and video has a few patents, and these are true patents. Sure, there are other ways to achieve the same goal, but that's what patents are about.
A lot of other research goes into things like
Some research goes into products like Microsoft's image editing (defunct product that is now partly integrated with Vista). Probably others are integrated into other products that few people use, relatively speaking. Of the many products that Microsoft publishes, most people only think of Office and Windows and what's included with them. Even then, they refer only to a subset of functionality. Few people will think of Office's collaboration tools or OneNote, and probably nobody has heard of Forefront Client Security (I just downloaded the Microsoft product list, and there are lots of products there I've never heard about).
A lot of patents of course don't yet have products incorporating them on the market, which is just the nature of patents. The time from patent creation to product is a few years, even when a company immediately starts creating a product around it. A lot of times the company doesn't have a good product to incorporate the patent into. Though Microsoft has a lot of patents in graphics, image processing, etc., it doesn't really have mainstream products there, so what doesn't get into the OS via the likes of DirectX might remain in the patent portfolio without implementation.
Microsoft is the Industry's Most Innovative Company?
or
Is Microsoft the Industry's Most Innovative Company?
Fuck it, karma to burn. A summary of this thread.
> "Microsoft did X and that was pretty cool."
15 replies> "That's not cool! Everything Microsoft do is SHIT!"
8 replies> "Actually, Apple/IBM/XEROX/My Dad did X first!"
4 replies> "That's so obvious. Anyone could've done that."
Actually, that's almost a summary of this entire site.
erroneous: look me up in a dictionary
Having worked at Microsoft before.... there is an amazing amount of wonderful stuff that gets generated, internally, but never sees the light of day outside the company. This is another indication of how jaw-droppingly bad the mismanagement situation has been for the last decade (at least). There's no political gain in it for the legions of "managers" at any of an amazing number of levels. The innovation and general lack of productive control (i.e., harnessing and utilizing creative energy and ideas to create kick-ass products) and the tension between the (low-level) folks who come up with the cool stuff on the one hand, and the business/internal political chosen realities on the other, make for a fatally dysfunctional company. Part of why Vista sucks with absolute zero partial pressure and took a dog's lifespan to finally get out the door is because all the "neat stuff" got put in, taken out, put in, taken out, and then the whole crap sandwich got taken apart and made with a different loaf (Server 2003). The higher you go in the organization, with very few exceptions (mostly people like Ozzie who've been brought in from outside within the last ten years), the lower the quality gets, until it reaches absolute zero a couple of levels below SteveB - and keeps right on going.
I think I speak for most of us software professionals when I say that Microsoft pwning the world the way they do really wouldn't be so bad if their cash-cow products didn't give shit a bad name. I'm positive I speak for a large number of small shareholders when I say I wish that the Board would take a broom to the top several layers of management, cauterize the middle 20 or so out of existence, tar and feather SteveB and run him out of town tied to one of the chairs he likes to throw around, and get Microsoft into the business of creating great software. We know it can be done; we're just tired of seeing everybody else doing it instead.
after all they "invented" .NET
But seriously, looking at other aspects (like CG, robotics) yes, they do deserve a pat on back.
Once commercial considerations become the priority real 'Innovative' goes out the window. You see there is no incentive in producing anything new while the current product is still making revenue.
davecb5620@gmail.com
"it started out based on very serious research in machine learning and human/computer interaction"
.. :)
..
was: the original Clippy was very innovative .. (Score:3, BS)
Like, do you have any citations or URLs pointing to this research. I understand it started out as part of the Microsoft Bob project headed by Melinda French, which is probably why it was foisted on an unsuspecting world.
"made the development people dumb Clippy down, so it would think you were in trouble at the first sign of anything slights wrong, and pop up"
I understand that in earlier versions of clippy you could disable it by removing certain 'actor' folders. This was changed in later versions so it is impossible to stop the annoying paperclip poping up. That about as innovative as it gets
"The research version of Clippy was probably one of the best online help aids ever"
Where can we see it
davecb5620@gmail.com
... or have the IEEE and ACM become less and less relevant. Vicious content walls and now crap analysis.
Who will fill the gap ? Maybe somebody at PLOS ? Or
USENIX ? Maybe some other project ? Any pointers ?
"Microsoft seems to have understood that the first company to crack the parallel programming nut will be at the forefront of computing in this century"
..
..
"The transputer (transistor computer) was the first general purpose microprocessor designed specifically to be used in parallel computing systems ", circa 1980s
I figure we haven't seen any advances as so much resources have been invested in advancing the WinTEL platform, to the detriment of real Innovation
Re:Parallel Programming Research at MS (Score:5, BS)
davecb5620@gmail.com
"Microsoft *has* been commissioned by the JPEG working group to develop JPEG XR .. as the next-gen photo image standard"
.. ;)
"One important aspect regarding the standardization of HD Photo is Microsoft's commitment to make its patents that are required to implement the specification available without charge"
I do believe I see where this INNOVA~1 is going, total control of the TUBES
davecb5620@gmail.com
"Excel was another really innovative product. It was so much better than Lotus123 that it made your head hurt"
.. :)
Yes, it was so much better that MS had to copy it in the earlier versions of Excell and withold Windows API specs from Lotus. Lotus concentrating on OS/2 probably didn't help either. Promoting switcher messages to disrupt the SmartSuite launch. Not publishing extension as they can't with compete with Lotus and Wordperfect, Yea lots of 'innovation' going on here
"Q+E 2.5 will use some fresh product news to talk about in June, but is a parity feature with Lotus"
Not that bad. (Score:5, BS)
davecb5620@gmail.com
"MS actually does have patents on some fairly innovative things (example: ClearType) that are pretty clever"
..
Cleartype aka 'subpixel rendering' borrowed from Apple
"Sub-pixel rendering was actually first implemented in 1976 by Steve Wozniak at Apple Computer for the Apple"
Re:MS does have some valuable patents (Score:3, BS)
davecb5620@gmail.com
Maybe it's the same guys who already gifted the world with the WEP fiasco
Make no mistakes, people. There are complete idiots in the IEEE as well as outstanding geniouses, just like in any other organization.
Best Regards,
Durval Menezes.
I have never met a computer that didn't like me.
"A friend did research on distributed shared computing in grad school. The project was supported by Microsoft, they had access to Windows source code, they were not restricted from publishing their research"
.. ?
... (Score:5, mod everything up)
Where can we see this project, what was your friends name
Microsoft actually does real research
davecb5620@gmail.com
I don't know about all you other hackers out there, but over my thirty years of experience, I have probably developed over a hundred ideas that would have been patentable under todays standards, maybe hundreds if you sink to the "one click" level. I do not have a single patent. If I had taken time to develop a patent or patents on one idea, it would have taken months and screwed up my creative processes for a good long time. In the small company I work for, that would be fatal.
You fucking freaks are bashing the Zune without even owning one. I have the Zune and it's excellent. Fuck you all you filthy humans!
Microsoft (like ATT, IBM, HP, Dupont, etc.,) does research in their fields of endeavor. That is a part of most large organizations budget. They don't release it until it fits into a strategic place for them. That is also SOP (Standard Operating Procedure) for most companies. If you want free research go to either Academia. Pay isn't great though.
http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/11/18/1853254
'nuff said
My other sig is extremely clever...
Please allow me to point out three major reasons the secretary might have hated switching to Word from WordPerfect:
1. Reveal Codes: This is the ultimate editing tool; reveal codes allows a WordPerfect user to see exactly why a document appears the way it does, showing every nuance of the document in a very simple, straightforward fashion. This was impossible to properly implement in Word because they use a document format that is makes adding codes to the text impossible; Word's format is 'object oriented', a text string followed by a mess object pointers (this also slows the editing process, since each object pointer has to be updated anytime text is added into the middle of the document). WordPerfect's file format, on the other hand, is stream based, the entire document is presented as a long data string, much like an HTML or XML document, with codes interlaced within the text, which makes editing much faster, since all you have to do to add text is just shove everything below it down (graphics and other objects are stored as separate objects, but since they don't have to be changed as the document is edited, editing remains quick and simple).
2. Specialized Formatting: WordPerfect included several codes that I've never seen in any other word processor, including 'Center on Margin', 'Right Flush', and two forms of 'Indent', which allow the user to make small changes to a line or a paragraph without changing any of the document settings. 'Center on Margin' and 'Right Flush' give you a single line of center justification and right justification without changing the justification settings, and both can be used on the same line, which gives you the ability to create three columns without changing any document settings or creating a table. These specialized formatting codes allow users to do simple things with their documents without wasting extra time fiddling with tab settings or creating a table; there are very, very few documents I create in WordPerfect that I don't use Center on Margin at least once in, and I often use Center on Margin in place of Center Justification.
3. The Mouse is *not* required, except for things that would be completely illogical to do without the mouse. I frequently use keyboard shortcuts to do all sorts of things, simply because it's easier, faster, and more efficient than screwing around with the mouse. Furthermore, you can make sweeping changes that effect the entire document simply by putting the cursor at the beginning and applying the change there; there's no need to waste time highlighting the entire document. From my somewhat limited experience with Word (I've detested every second I've had to deal with the app), I've had to use the mouse for a number of things that I'd just have used the keyboard for in WordPerfect, and find myself wasting a lot of time trying to cope with the numerous frustrations.
These three reasons, and possibly many others, may have been reasons for the secretary's frustrations and displeasure at being forced to switch to Word. I know these have been the most significant reasons I've found Word to be a substandard excuse for a word processor, and I know many others who refuse to make the switch for the same reasons.