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How Infighting Hampers Innovation At Microsoft
Garabito writes "Dick Brass, former vice-president at Microsoft, published an op-ed in The New York Times, where he states that 'Microsoft has become a clumsy, uncompetitive innovator' and how 'it has lost share in Web browsers, high-end laptops and smartphones.' He attributes this situation to the lack of a true system for innovation at Microsoft. Some former employees argue that Microsoft has a system to thwart innovation. He tells how promising and innovative technologies like ClearType and the original TabletPC concept become crippled and sabotaged internally, by groups and divisions that felt threatened by them."
Microsoft doesn't innovate. I can't think of a single Microsoft product that was invented at Microsoft. They copy the inventions of other companies, and use cross-subsidization and OS lock-ins to push thir product to the top.
marketing studies to each other to determine the minimum amount of features and quality assurance to put into our products to maximize profit, as if running technology business were the same as running a 50's era factory.
Clearly you could run Microsoft better. More profit, bigger margins, larger market share etc etc etc.
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Microsoft is, was, and always will be about profit for shareholders
well, then, it has failed.
http://www.nasdaq.com/aspx/chartingbasics.aspx?intraday=off&timeframe=10y&charttype=ohlc&splits=off&earnings=off&movingaverage=None&lowerstudy=volume&comparison=on&index=&drilldown=off&symbol=GOOG&symbol=AAPL&symbol=MSFT&selected=MSFT
Well, fair enough. Like I said, I would have taken the grandparent at face level if he hadn't been wrong in pretty much every other detail in his post.
I guess my question then is, did Linux distros have this feature in the GUI before Windows XP came out? Or is it in the GUI now as a response to Windows XP?
(I know this is the unpopular opinion on Slashdot, but I don't really care about the CLI implementation, since it's inaccessible to a high percentage of both users and applications. Only interested in the GUI implementation.)
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That is how it is at Microsoft. I worked in the Exchange group, and later Visual Studio. Our job was NOT to come up with mind-blowing shit that glowed in the dark, it was to build products that give people reason to buy ours instead of THEIR's. Exchange never had to be slick, it just had to be better than Lotus Notes. SIMPLE.
Was Exchange innovative? Fuck no. Was it better than NOTES? Fuck yes.
It seems strange to me that people keep repeating this mantra that Microsoft never innovates, when all around us we see open source projects struggling to duplicate stuff that Microsoft has already done. If Windows Networking isn't innovative, why write Samba? Oh, because everybody uses Windows Networking, and we want Linux to be able to exist on those networks and talk to those servers. But why? Why would everybody use Windows Networking if it has no advantages over any other form of networking anywhere? Did Microsoft come and hold a gun to our heads and say, "You won't use NetWare anymore. From now on you will use Windows Networking." And we all just nodded and said, "Yes, master?" That's not how it happened, and you all know it. Did Microsoft invent networking? Hell no. Did it invent a form of networking that people were willing to use instead of NetWare? It sure did. So how did it manage that, if it innovated nothing? It wouldn't matter if Microsoft gave Windows Networking away for free if it wouldn't do what people needed it to do.
I think part of the problem is that a lot of people seem to think "innovation" means "creating mind-blowing shit that glows in the dark." That's an extremely exaggerated interpretation of the word. According to Merriam-Webster, "innovation" means either "the introduction of something new" or "a new idea, method, or device." That's it. That's pretty much all.
So if Lotus Notes doesn't have a spell checker in its e-mail client, and Microsoft builds a spell checker into Outlook, that's innovation. Did Microsoft invent spell checkers? No. Did it invent e-mail clients? No. Did it invent a version of Outlook that includes a spell checker? Yes. That's innovation. Not innovation like Isaac Newton, but plain old ordinary innovation like companies do all the time, one little feature at a time, one day at a time. Do some of those innovations suck? Probably. Are some of Microsoft's innovations actually steps backwards? Maybe. But Microsoft keeps changing things in its software that introduce things you haven't had before with each new version, and that's what they mean when they talk about innovation. Not missions to the Moon. Just innovation.
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Actually, he didn't misspell Apple, Atari, and Commodore. In terms of the general populace, Microsoft is the one that shipped a GUI to most people. Yeah, there were people with computers back in the 80's but the percentage of the populace that owned a computer then as compared to now is very low. Most people who own a computer today may have a vague notion about Commodore ("Hey! My dorky uncle had one of them Commodore 64 things") and probably know Atari because of the Atari 2600.
If GNU iconv "struggles" to properly support EBCDIC, that doesn't necessarily imply that EBCDIC is "innovative." I'm sure Tridge would rather have spent his time doing a lot of other things than write samba, but people with Linux machines wanted to interoperate with Windows servers. It really wasn't about providing the features SMB does, nobody on Linux actually RUNS an SMB server unless they have to.
I'm sure that's (mostly) true, but there are a whole ton of people who chose to run Windows servers, Active Directory and the whole 9, rather than running Linux servers. If there's nothing at all innovative about that product set, then why? Why would they do that? I'm not saying there's necessarily anything particularly innovative about the SMB protocol, but the products themselves must have something that makes people want to pay for them rather than running Linux. Some IT managers are probably just sheep, but a whole lot of them probably appreciate the innovations Microsoft made to make setting up and managing a network easier, or something. Like I said: It's not rocket science they're talking about here. "Innovation" simply means giving your customers something your competitors don't.
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