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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...
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
Belief? Hope? Preference?The Existential Vortex
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.
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
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
Microsoft's business is profit, fueled not by innovation, but from quashing competition, customer lock-in, bribery, intimidation, and FUD.
Microsoft has never been in the business of making innovative anything. Customer happiness is not even on their radar screen.
You can have my SIG when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.
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!
An even more terse equivalent: "entropy". Most of the energy at Microsoft is no longer available to do work.
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!
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://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
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.
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.
As far as I know, T-SQL only allows top(). Whereas MYSQL allows Limit X, Y, which allows you to basically "page" results to show, say records 5-10. T-SQL makes it redundant:
MYSQL:
SELECT * FROM records LIMIT 5, 5
T-SQL
SELECT TOP(5) * FROM records WHERE id NOT IN (SELECT TOP(5) * FROM records)
They both select records 5-10, but one is more redundant. (and possibly more memory intensive, slower, etc)
Belief? Hope? Preference?The Existential Vortex
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.
Because you're busy complaining?
So if the GP stopped complaining then MS would make something better than the Zune? I think you have that backwards, son. The squeaky wheel gets the grease, the open mouth gets fed. If I complain about a crappy product (not saying zune is crappy, never used one) the company may or may not take my complaints seriously and change the next iteration.
If no one bitches then they'll pat themselves on the back. I'm not a good judge of my own product, you are.
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?
AFAICS having office suites that interoperate with different companies' suites would smooth business quite a bit. MS Office isn't so widespread because of its quality, it's widespread because only another Office user can interoperate seamlessly with it, and because nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft.
I am not a Microsoft apologist
I couldn't tell that from your post but I'll take your word for it.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
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.
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.
You can do that, just not with a limit keyword:
USE AdventureWorks;
GO
WITH OrderedOrders AS
(
SELECT SalesOrderID, OrderDate,
ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY OrderDate) AS 'RowNumber'
FROM Sales.SalesOrderHeader
)
SELECT *
FROM OrderedOrders
WHERE RowNumber BETWEEN 50 AND 60;
The thing is, where is this alleged research going? We don't see it in MS's products; this was stated in the article summary. This is always the answer trotted out when anyone questions MS's patents and MS Research.
When IBM comes up with some great new technology, like the damascene process (copper on ICs), SOI, etc., we see it in chips pretty soon after. It was only about 10 years ago that the copper process was invented by IBM, and now every CPU has it to my knowledge, as has for quite some time. Intel invented a "strained silicon" process, and their CPUs have it now.
So where are MS Research's efforts paying off? Research isn't any good if it isn't actually applied somewhere. Basic research with no obvious course to application has its place, such as with fundamental science like quantum physics, exploration of Mars, etc., but software isn't one of them. If you can't find a place to use your findings, you've wasted your time. Back in the 60s-70s, researchers invented new programming languages and operating systems, and pretty soon industry and academia were all using C on UNIX machines. But we haven't seen anything come out of MS Research that's made a significant difference in anyone's lives.
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/
Of course, neither of those syntaxes is ideal. An ideal request syntax would provide a similarly simple syntax for making a query, saving the query results temporarily, and parceling them out to you in the requested quantity instead. That way, you don't run the risk of presenting things twice or skipping things as new rows are added to the table and old ones are deleted. It should also be possible to query the current data set against the results of that prior query, generating a new query with any new rows appended to the end (or beginning if you are parceling it out from the end).
That would not only be more correct, but also more efficient (assuming you eventually view most of the records), as you would only need to perform the filtering part of the select statement once per entry in the database instead of, on average, (n/2k) times per record, where n is the number of records and k is the number taken at once.
Quite frankly, I'm surprised such a feature hasn't been built into the SQL syntax decades ago. (Yes, I know that you can always store a complete set of matching primary keys in a new row of a "results" table and then query the query results that way, but that's a lot of extra work and doesn't buy you as much of an efficiency gain as if the database could do it for you under the hood.)
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
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)
To beg the question does not mean "to raise the question."
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
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.
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.
T-SQL always used to annoy me with it's fussiness about the order you specified tables when using JOIN's
I wasn't good enough to notice when I was using SQL Server 6.5, but I've never noticed such a thing in 7, 2000 or 2005.
On the one project I used MySQL for, I was relieved to discover that it finally supported subqueries, but they ended up being unusably slow because the optimizer couldn't seem to do any optimization between the inner and outer queries. I ended up using Java code for what I would've just done with a subquery in SQL Server. Of course, now I'm mainly working in Oracle, and I have an almost opposite complaint; subqueries (and frequently several of them) seem to be the only way to accomplish a lot of things that wouldn't have taken much thought in SQL Server.
T-SQL always had the edge by allowing you bypass its annoyances by using stored procedures and views but this has now changed since MySQL 5.
I've only done stored procedures in SQL Server, Oracle, and barely in Informix. Informix procedures just suck unreservedly. Oracle PL/SQL is a decent procedural language, but the interface to regular SQL can be a bit awkward, and there's entirely too much iterative code needed for my taste. T-SQL is rather limited as a procedural language, but seems to do a lot better at letting you stay within set-based logic.
What are MySQL procedure like?
As for the other things you list, some of them did originate at Microsoft, or Microsoft was among the first. Spam filtering, for example (no Paul Graham was not first with statistical spam filtering--he was the first to popularize it). And they have indeed invented quite a bit of photography analysis tools.
Microsoft Research is basically an academic research lab. The place their results usually go are peer-reviewed journals and conference proceedings (which is why most people here never hear of them). But they also work with the product development side of the company so that the products can include this stuff, whether it was something invented at Microsoft, or something that was invented somewhere else and MS Research simply contributed advancements to the original investment.
Not if I patent it they aren't!