While anyone losing their job is a bummer, the tone of the submission is a little histrionic. What actually happened here is that Oracle laid off two people who were working on accessibility. Again, that's a shame... but as the OSTATIC article points out, if Gnome accessibility work was really just two layoffs away from ending for all time, there were problems with the project before Oracle ever got here.
Also, Oracle already sponsored an OpenSolaris accessibility group, and now they're in charge of the OpenOffice accessibility work as well, to say nothing of making sure their business applications are up to government standards... is it really fair to expect it to shoulder the burden of accessibility for Gnome, too?
Maybe Novell wants to hire these guys? Or Red Hat?
May I ask why? When I'm talking about cheap Web hosting, I usually think in terms of their network connectivity, not their geographic location. Hostgator, I believe, is in Texas.
Nope. Why should I? You started out by talking about how something was slow "even with an SSD," and now you're asking me how many things I've disabled to make a Eee PC run like normal computer? Whatever, man.
You could have been responsible for mine, or maybe not. I have a friend who is a scrupulous anti-pirate. I actually brought him a copy of the latest Nine Inch Nails album (one of his favorite bands) before release, and he refused to listen to it until he could get the CD in his hands. That said, he got himself bootleg copies of the original Star Wars movies, just like I did. I said, "Isn't it great to see them the way they were meant to be seen?" He said, "Yeah, way better than watching the stupid special editions. Except for the part where the screen goes blue when they change the laserdisc sides. That's pretty lame." I said, "What? Mine don't do that." He said, "Yeah, but mine were made by guys who worked at Lucasfilm, so they're the best they can possibly be." I said, "Yeah. Well tell you what, if you want a copy of the ones I picked up in Malaysia..." He said, "Fuck that, man. You know how I feel about that piracy shit."
Hey, I'm with you, man. But at some point the United States government decided that when a certain number of customers start to think of a bank a certain way, then that bank needed to fulfill a certain set of obligations. Hence regulation.
Hell, I have a fellow customer at the same branch of a US bank that wanted to send me money. It's impossible, according to Wells Fargo, to transfer more than $1000 from one account holder to another. The person may have been misinformed, but the person trying to get me money tried more than once with different people and couldn't do it.
It's a security measure. I used to have his problem with Bank of America until they instituted a new security system. Now they will SMS my phone with a code that I have to enter in order to verify a transfer greater than $1,000. Optionally you can pay to have them send you a little electronic one-time pad card.
Paypal is a till not a bank. It is foolish to treat them otherwise. Maybe they should be kicked out of money markets and bank-like things like that, but the real problem here is Paypal customers using them in the wrong way and trusting them too much.
OK, but to your average consumer who just wants to buy Hummel figurines on eBay: walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, etc.
How far out of its way does PayPal go to inform new subscribers that it is not a bank, deposits you make into your PayPal account are not FDIC insured, which means the government will not help you, etc? Just flipping through the introductory pages, I don't see anything like that. Compare to E*Trade, for example, which slaps disclaimers at the bottom of every page (and E*Trade actually does operate a bank that is an FDIC member).
Bank of America and Wells Fargo Bank ATMs (and maybe some others) have implemented a change that may make you reconsider.
These days, you don't use an envelope. That's right, you just take the stack of checks and shove them into the slot, up to 10 at a time. The ATM reads each check with OCR software and tells you, right on the screen, the amounts of the checks. It actually also stores pictures of each check, so they can't say they never got them.
Mind you, the money still isn't transferred until the transaction is processed, the check clears, etc.
You can do the same with cash, but I've always been sorta leery of depositing cash into an ATM. It's especially a bad idea if the ATM isn't connected to a bank branch. My card was eaten by one of those machines once, and the bank told me there wasn't any way to get it back and they'd have to issue me a new one. Glad it wasn't a wad of hundreds.
I'm sorry, dude, but you said yourself that you have to drive "for a while" just to find an ATM, and that you don't live in a city. My guess is that you live out in a cabin like that because you're totally paranoid and afraid of people.
I do live in a city, where we have real gang violence and real crime, including robbery, armed and otherwise. And like most everybody else who has responded, I never worry about "standing near an ATM," I hardly ever worry about pulling money out of an ATM, and as the other poster observed, ATMs are so popular here that they're available in every liquor store, every grocery store, any bank branch, and lots of bars and restaurants, and with few exceptions the outdoor ones all operate 24 hours a day. In fact, I have a hard time fathoming being in a location in the city where I'd be more than 10 minutes' walk from an ATM. Try not standing near one under those circumstances!
If you see an actual Cisco device at a retail shop, and buy it for anything other than learning/private lab purposes... you're a moron. Cisco doesn't retail Cisco gear, they retail Linksys gear.
Look again. Linksys equipment all carries the Cisco logo these days, in addition to the Linksys branding. Sure, none of it looks like Cisco routers, but counterfeits of anything could still damage Cisco's brand.
Why? They released the unedited versions to DVD. Granted that weren't cleaned up or anamorphic, but certainly will be better quality than your VHS transfers.
Even before that, very high-quality DVD bootlegs were available that were mastered from laserdisc versions of the films. I still watch these when I want to revisit the trilogy, rather than pay Lucas for copies of the worthless "special editions" just to get "official" versions of the unmolested films that look little better than the bootlegs.
And in addition, the report itself doesn't even explain the result. It's a bullet point at the beginning of the report, but there's no explanation or analysis.
Maybe Amazon doesn't have a monopoly per se, but it's still using its size to put pressure on companies to set prices how Amazon wants them. Amazon is doing the same thing Wal-Mart does. Wal-Mart doesn't have a monopoly on selling shirts, or binder paper, or whatever else. But it's such a huge retail channel that makers of products pretty much cannot afford not to do business with Wal-Mart. Amazon is definitely in a similar position to Wal-Mart, especially in the book market.
If you deal with 150+ page technical specs with embedded bits from the rest of the office suite, you find out how stable it really is - either crashing or consistently screwing up the output so that it looks nothing like what is on the screen.
I can believe it. For a guy who writes for a living, my document demands are remarkably simple. Actually, if someone asked me to produce a document that big, I'd probably think, "Oh, so you'll want me to use LaTeX, right?" (Or at the very least, Framemaker.) The whole concept of a WYSIWYG word processor seems to have grown out of the need for a program for authoring memos, letters, reports, and other short documents. I think any word processor will start to break down once you get outside of that.
Apparently the Eee PC Surf 4G uses far better equipment than the Eee PC 901, because my experience is pretty much exactly the same as Pieterh's (above). The secondary SSD that ships with the 901 is about as fast as a USB keychain drive. I have to put my Firefox profile on the boot drive or it's basically unusable (due to slow writes, to the cache etc.). As far as I can tell, in general Eee PC models with SSDs are actually slower than the ones with traditional hard drives. (But speed is not the only reason why you might want an SSD.)
Well, that "even with an SSD" is a little misleading, since the SSDs that ship in Eee PCs are really slow. On my Eee PC 901, the secondary drive is so slow that its write speed is actually a bottleneck when downloading over a fast Internet connection. The boot drive is faster, but not impressively so.
Also, I believe all new Eee PC models come with access to Asus WebStorage, a file/sync storage system, so one of the advantages of Google Docs is negated. You can use your local drive to store OpenOffice and keep your documents in (ahem) "the cloud." I guess the Asus WebStorage driver is not free software, but it is available on Ubuntu 9.10.
OpenOffice doesn't implement the.doc format for people to actually use, since it's a terrible, underdocumented and messy standard, but it is provided so people can get in and out of OO into the hegemon MS Word.
OK, but as a guy who uses a word processor professionally pretty much every day, I can tell you that I don't stick with Word because of lock-in. I use it because OpenOffice is totally unacceptable to me, while Word is a really slick, full-featured word processor. If OpenOffice were as innovative as Word, I would use it, file formats be damned. Most of what I write could be saved in plain text, or at the very least HTML, without losing much. It's the tool itself that I prefer.
Being the only glazier in town doesn't mean you can go around breaking windows and calling it "innovation."
I don't understand the meaning of your statement in this context. Microsoft isn't breaking OpenOffice's windows. The closer analogy would be that Microsoft sells windows made of glass, and OpenOffice sells windows made of plastic. OpenOffice can demonstrate that its windows are technically superior -- they don't break, they don't rattle as much in the wind, they provide better insulation, and they're infused with a chemical that blocks UV radiation so the color doesn't fade on your framed antique Parisian theatre posters. And yet for some reason people still seem to want glass windows. In fact, almost everybody prefers to go with glass -- even though, on face value, plastic windows are the more modern, innovative product. So OpenOffice grudgingly agrees to sell glass windows, too. But selling glass windows is a real pain in the ass for OpenOffice, because the equipment used to make plastic windows is no good at all for working with glass, and Microsoft won't give OpenOffice a tour of its glassworks. And the whole thing is a real shame, because if they could both agree to just sell the same kind of windows it would be great... except for the small point that Microsoft is in the business of (no pun intended) selling windows, and it doesn't make sense for it to show its competitors all its tricks. So OpenOffice gets all mad and says, "But this is terrible for the people! In fifty years' time, at least half the windows people are buying now will be broken, because they're made of glass, and if they only bought plastic windows we could save countless billions on windows over the course of 50 years, and we wouldn't have to worry about how our windows will be preserved, and the world would be a much better place!" And Microsoft says, "People prefer glass windows." So, OK. Solve that problem for me.
And, back to the original point... why on Earth would people prefer this technology that's hundreds, if not thousands of years old? If Microsoft has just been sitting on its fat ass this whole time, doling out the same, old, boring glass windows, why are people such suckers? Economists will tell you that innovation is one of the main forces driving any market. And yet if, as people seem to be claiming, there has been no innovation in Microsoft's markets whatsoever, or Microsoft has been intentionally stifling innovation, how does the market keep growing?
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.
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.
Slashdot Mirror
While anyone losing their job is a bummer, the tone of the submission is a little histrionic. What actually happened here is that Oracle laid off two people who were working on accessibility. Again, that's a shame... but as the OSTATIC article points out, if Gnome accessibility work was really just two layoffs away from ending for all time, there were problems with the project before Oracle ever got here.
Also, Oracle already sponsored an OpenSolaris accessibility group, and now they're in charge of the OpenOffice accessibility work as well, to say nothing of making sure their business applications are up to government standards... is it really fair to expect it to shoulder the burden of accessibility for Gnome, too?
Maybe Novell wants to hire these guys? Or Red Hat?
May I ask why? When I'm talking about cheap Web hosting, I usually think in terms of their network connectivity, not their geographic location. Hostgator, I believe, is in Texas.
If you misuse technology, it fails. A netbook is not a PC, except when it is. I'd have thought you'd know the difference.
Oh give it a rest, dude. You're not impressing anybody.
Besides, google-analytics.com is way too easy for people to remember to block. Now change it to 1e100.net and they probably get a lot more data.
Honestly, the people who block domains don't "remember" to block anything. They add it to a list and forget about it.
Have you disabled disk caching?
Nope. Why should I? You started out by talking about how something was slow "even with an SSD," and now you're asking me how many things I've disabled to make a Eee PC run like normal computer? Whatever, man.
Slashdot editing is so inconsistent. Is that set free as in "turned loose"? Or set free as in "nobody owns one"?
You could have been responsible for mine, or maybe not. I have a friend who is a scrupulous anti-pirate. I actually brought him a copy of the latest Nine Inch Nails album (one of his favorite bands) before release, and he refused to listen to it until he could get the CD in his hands. That said, he got himself bootleg copies of the original Star Wars movies, just like I did. I said, "Isn't it great to see them the way they were meant to be seen?" He said, "Yeah, way better than watching the stupid special editions. Except for the part where the screen goes blue when they change the laserdisc sides. That's pretty lame." I said, "What? Mine don't do that." He said, "Yeah, but mine were made by guys who worked at Lucasfilm, so they're the best they can possibly be." I said, "Yeah. Well tell you what, if you want a copy of the ones I picked up in Malaysia..." He said, "Fuck that, man. You know how I feel about that piracy shit."
Hey, I'm with you, man. But at some point the United States government decided that when a certain number of customers start to think of a bank a certain way, then that bank needed to fulfill a certain set of obligations. Hence regulation.
Hell, I have a fellow customer at the same branch of a US bank that wanted to send me money. It's impossible, according to Wells Fargo, to transfer more than $1000 from one account holder to another. The person may have been misinformed, but the person trying to get me money tried more than once with different people and couldn't do it.
It's a security measure. I used to have his problem with Bank of America until they instituted a new security system. Now they will SMS my phone with a code that I have to enter in order to verify a transfer greater than $1,000. Optionally you can pay to have them send you a little electronic one-time pad card.
Paypal is a till not a bank. It is foolish to treat them otherwise. Maybe they should be kicked out of money markets and bank-like things like that, but the real problem here is Paypal customers using them in the wrong way and trusting them too much.
OK, but to your average consumer who just wants to buy Hummel figurines on eBay: walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, etc.
How far out of its way does PayPal go to inform new subscribers that it is not a bank, deposits you make into your PayPal account are not FDIC insured, which means the government will not help you, etc? Just flipping through the introductory pages, I don't see anything like that. Compare to E*Trade, for example, which slaps disclaimers at the bottom of every page (and E*Trade actually does operate a bank that is an FDIC member).
Bank of America and Wells Fargo Bank ATMs (and maybe some others) have implemented a change that may make you reconsider.
These days, you don't use an envelope. That's right, you just take the stack of checks and shove them into the slot, up to 10 at a time. The ATM reads each check with OCR software and tells you, right on the screen, the amounts of the checks. It actually also stores pictures of each check, so they can't say they never got them.
Mind you, the money still isn't transferred until the transaction is processed, the check clears, etc.
You can do the same with cash, but I've always been sorta leery of depositing cash into an ATM. It's especially a bad idea if the ATM isn't connected to a bank branch. My card was eaten by one of those machines once, and the bank told me there wasn't any way to get it back and they'd have to issue me a new one. Glad it wasn't a wad of hundreds.
I'm sorry, dude, but you said yourself that you have to drive "for a while" just to find an ATM, and that you don't live in a city. My guess is that you live out in a cabin like that because you're totally paranoid and afraid of people.
I do live in a city, where we have real gang violence and real crime, including robbery, armed and otherwise. And like most everybody else who has responded, I never worry about "standing near an ATM," I hardly ever worry about pulling money out of an ATM, and as the other poster observed, ATMs are so popular here that they're available in every liquor store, every grocery store, any bank branch, and lots of bars and restaurants, and with few exceptions the outdoor ones all operate 24 hours a day. In fact, I have a hard time fathoming being in a location in the city where I'd be more than 10 minutes' walk from an ATM. Try not standing near one under those circumstances!
If you see an actual Cisco device at a retail shop, and buy it for anything other than learning/private lab purposes... you're a moron. Cisco doesn't retail Cisco gear, they retail Linksys gear.
Look again. Linksys equipment all carries the Cisco logo these days, in addition to the Linksys branding. Sure, none of it looks like Cisco routers, but counterfeits of anything could still damage Cisco's brand.
Hostgator offers Rails on all their plans, too, which start at $4.95/month. I think someone's not looking hard enough.
Why? They released the unedited versions to DVD. Granted that weren't cleaned up or anamorphic, but certainly will be better quality than your VHS transfers.
Even before that, very high-quality DVD bootlegs were available that were mastered from laserdisc versions of the films. I still watch these when I want to revisit the trilogy, rather than pay Lucas for copies of the worthless "special editions" just to get "official" versions of the unmolested films that look little better than the bootlegs.
And in addition, the report itself doesn't even explain the result. It's a bullet point at the beginning of the report, but there's no explanation or analysis.
Maybe Amazon doesn't have a monopoly per se, but it's still using its size to put pressure on companies to set prices how Amazon wants them. Amazon is doing the same thing Wal-Mart does. Wal-Mart doesn't have a monopoly on selling shirts, or binder paper, or whatever else. But it's such a huge retail channel that makers of products pretty much cannot afford not to do business with Wal-Mart. Amazon is definitely in a similar position to Wal-Mart, especially in the book market.
If you deal with 150+ page technical specs with embedded bits from the rest of the office suite, you find out how stable it really is - either crashing or consistently screwing up the output so that it looks nothing like what is on the screen.
I can believe it. For a guy who writes for a living, my document demands are remarkably simple. Actually, if someone asked me to produce a document that big, I'd probably think, "Oh, so you'll want me to use LaTeX, right?" (Or at the very least, Framemaker.) The whole concept of a WYSIWYG word processor seems to have grown out of the need for a program for authoring memos, letters, reports, and other short documents. I think any word processor will start to break down once you get outside of that.
Apparently the Eee PC Surf 4G uses far better equipment than the Eee PC 901, because my experience is pretty much exactly the same as Pieterh's (above). The secondary SSD that ships with the 901 is about as fast as a USB keychain drive. I have to put my Firefox profile on the boot drive or it's basically unusable (due to slow writes, to the cache etc.). As far as I can tell, in general Eee PC models with SSDs are actually slower than the ones with traditional hard drives. (But speed is not the only reason why you might want an SSD.)
Even with an SSD the lauch time is unacceptable.
Well, that "even with an SSD" is a little misleading, since the SSDs that ship in Eee PCs are really slow. On my Eee PC 901, the secondary drive is so slow that its write speed is actually a bottleneck when downloading over a fast Internet connection. The boot drive is faster, but not impressively so.
... in browsers that have [the Microsoft] Silverlight [plugin]. c'mon now...
Here's a comparison of who has what. Yes, it seems Silverlight 3 is the most popular version... (cough).
Note: I have no idea how valid this sampling might really be, but it pretty much jibes with my experience.
Also, I believe all new Eee PC models come with access to Asus WebStorage, a file/sync storage system, so one of the advantages of Google Docs is negated. You can use your local drive to store OpenOffice and keep your documents in (ahem) "the cloud." I guess the Asus WebStorage driver is not free software, but it is available on Ubuntu 9.10.
OpenOffice doesn't implement the .doc format for people to actually use, since it's a terrible, underdocumented and messy standard, but it is provided so people can get in and out of OO into the hegemon MS Word.
OK, but as a guy who uses a word processor professionally pretty much every day, I can tell you that I don't stick with Word because of lock-in. I use it because OpenOffice is totally unacceptable to me, while Word is a really slick, full-featured word processor. If OpenOffice were as innovative as Word, I would use it, file formats be damned. Most of what I write could be saved in plain text, or at the very least HTML, without losing much. It's the tool itself that I prefer.
Being the only glazier in town doesn't mean you can go around breaking windows and calling it "innovation."
I don't understand the meaning of your statement in this context. Microsoft isn't breaking OpenOffice's windows. The closer analogy would be that Microsoft sells windows made of glass, and OpenOffice sells windows made of plastic. OpenOffice can demonstrate that its windows are technically superior -- they don't break, they don't rattle as much in the wind, they provide better insulation, and they're infused with a chemical that blocks UV radiation so the color doesn't fade on your framed antique Parisian theatre posters. And yet for some reason people still seem to want glass windows. In fact, almost everybody prefers to go with glass -- even though, on face value, plastic windows are the more modern, innovative product. So OpenOffice grudgingly agrees to sell glass windows, too. But selling glass windows is a real pain in the ass for OpenOffice, because the equipment used to make plastic windows is no good at all for working with glass, and Microsoft won't give OpenOffice a tour of its glassworks. And the whole thing is a real shame, because if they could both agree to just sell the same kind of windows it would be great... except for the small point that Microsoft is in the business of (no pun intended) selling windows, and it doesn't make sense for it to show its competitors all its tricks. So OpenOffice gets all mad and says, "But this is terrible for the people! In fifty years' time, at least half the windows people are buying now will be broken, because they're made of glass, and if they only bought plastic windows we could save countless billions on windows over the course of 50 years, and we wouldn't have to worry about how our windows will be preserved, and the world would be a much better place!" And Microsoft says, "People prefer glass windows." So, OK. Solve that problem for me.
And, back to the original point ... why on Earth would people prefer this technology that's hundreds, if not thousands of years old? If Microsoft has just been sitting on its fat ass this whole time, doling out the same, old, boring glass windows, why are people such suckers? Economists will tell you that innovation is one of the main forces driving any market. And yet if, as people seem to be claiming, there has been no innovation in Microsoft's markets whatsoever, or Microsoft has been intentionally stifling innovation, how does the market keep growing?
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.
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.