Hell if MSFT would have given XP X64 the support they should have most folks would have probably been happy to stay on XP
IE6 would still be alive and massively deployed. Good riddance! Not to kick it while it's down, but see XP & the rise of botnets. I'm glad it wasn't adopted. Not to mention the improved display driver model first in Vista and also in Windows 7.
and now that they are gonna try to ram a stupid appstore down everyone's throat having an OS that'll run DirectX that valve can control would be a smart move.
I'm glad you mentioned this. I'd like to counter this point by saying that this appears to be what the masses want judged by the success of the Android market place (now Google Play) and the App Store. Joe Sixpack accesses the store from his phone/device, selects the desired app, and installs it. A simple process. Most phones have auto update notifications to boot (Wouldn't it be nice if Windows had this without requiring each application to run its own updater, or knowing someone has once-overed the code to the store compliance guidelines? As an example: I have updaters I'm able to name off the top of my head: Adobe Application Updater, Flash (web developer), apps with update checking: Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Steam, Malware Bytes, Nvidia, Skype). One of the biggest problems out there is people who don't patch vulnerabilities, many cases the hot fixes and patches were available before the storm hit, creating a problem for even more people.
There have been many vocal posts about how dodgy software plagues the less technical users and how the fault lies either with the OS vendor or application developer. The App Store takes this a step further by vetting code as well as requiring a developers license to submit software. It is massively popular with the masses and very successful at generating revenue for Apple and others who use the marketplace. Not to mention look at how extremely well Apple is doing. I am aware they make most of their money on the phones not just digital purchases. You may be surprised to know Apple isn't the king of devices activated though. The Android daily device activation is number staggering (~12 a second, 1 million a day) which is roughly half of all smartphones.
I've been berated on/. for "not getting it" when talking about computer use (I'm a technical user, to frame it briefly: why wouldn't you want to master a tool which is used in your life daily?). The barrier to entry is lower now than it has ever been, enabling more people to be online than ever before. Now these users are voting with their wallets. Seems like mainframes (cloud) and proprietary systems/walled gardens are all the rage in the industry's mind and the users are not at all concerned with who owns or accesses data and how. As long as they eventually get what they want.
I'd be ALL for it, but it looks like OpenGL is gonna be for the CAD guys
I'm sure games are another legitimate consideration, so is GUI compositing. Shiny sells. That giant screen is used for more than just a phone button interface. You're not thinking about the oodles of handsets that are out there; literally millions more are created daily. Millions of potential customers daily and developers cater to their customers.
OpenGL just isn't as good as DirectX, its too hacky with all the extensions and its just not been given the love like it had in the late 90s when it looked like it had a shot at the title.
Indeed. However, an (arguable) benefit of OpenGL and variants is the graphics are now largely cross platform. DirectX also succeeds because, as a developer wouldn't you be interested in (relative) ease? I'm referring specifically to complexity.
We all use open source software with huge code bases (e.g. Apache httpd, MySQL, JBoss,...) and it is virtually impossible for smaller companies to even touch their source code.
These are not small projects with fickle developer support. The great thing about opensource is that projects may be forked, and if there is some massive shortcoming there are other options which become available since the source is available. As an example take a look at what happened with OpenOffice.org. Your point as I understand it is we all depend upon software which we don't have the expertise to fix, and my response to that is there are commercial offerings which provide similar functionality if the free ones disappeared overnight. If you're running a business, you must invest in infrastructure at some point.
Thanks for your opinions about support contract. I guess it should be considered whenever available.
No problem, I've been involved in many meetings where management won't touch things without support contracts.
I am starting to worry whether we can rely on less popular open source software? In recent few years many of the open source libraries and software I use were discontinued.
Ultimately it's unwise to base your business upon something that your organization is unable or unwilling to maintain.
This question comes to my mind: Which open source projects we may trust (to rely on them)?... perhaps those which have a better business and sustaining plan ?
I'm sure you've heard of the phrase 'there are no guarantees in life' which also applies to software. If you (or your company) are dependent upon something that is developed by a 3rd party, it's wise to get a support contract. As an example: Redhat offers support as well as other organizations which develop OSS. Consider licensing the code, or hiring the developer(s) outright, failing that fork it and learn to maintain it in house. A lesson from my professional life: software constantly changes.
Most of that stuff is tweaks, or borrowed, or inane (the "Taskbar" is really a window list, and Apple's dock is much truer to the concept and more useful to boot).
Most things are tweaks. Ever noticed how keyboards are basically the same for over the last 100 years, ergonomic keyboards are the same keyboard split in the middle. Funny how that didn't really catch on until recently, little things make a big difference. Sorta like the little switch on a lighter that prevents children from using it. Yes it's just a little switch added to someone's design, but it's innovative. The grandparent said that Microsoft NEVER innovated, I provided some examples where they have. Now you're balking at how big they are, Bob was an innovation as well. Is it an innovation if it doesn't succeed? (rhetorical)
"Lots of small innovations in.NET"... are mainly features borrowed from Delphi and elsewhere.
Perhaps you're not aware they hired the man who designed Delphi to design something for them? Wouldn't you want the best? Java and Delphi (and all others) borrowed things from other languages as well and improved upon them in other ways, just like.NET does. We all stand upon the shoulders of giants, especially so in the computing world.
Shadow Copy... I very much doubt this one, as copy-on-write capability goes back to other systems in the 1970s.
My point is desktop operating systems didn't feature that before. DOS, Windows, Mac OS, OSX didn't feature that, so when you're introducing it to people over 30 years after it was invented where it hasn't been applied before, it's considered an innovation. I liken that to saying since a steam engine was invented back in ancient times, that modern day engines aren't innovative.
To me, their biggest contributions seem to be in fonts and in pushing GUI programming environments (of which I consider MS Office to be a member).
Their biggest contribution in my opinion was getting a PC into everyone's home, making it affordable and ubiquitous outside of the office. They're responsible for creating many markets which many people benefit from today, such as IT, Developers, Hardware, XBox Live. Windows for Workgroups (as much of a pile as that was) was responsible for many LANs.
XNA received two awards specifically for innovation.
They also created iframes and the technology behind AJAX. OLE. Bringing scroll wheel's on mice to the masses as well as ergo keyboards (by making them affordable, just like PCs).
First commercially successful optical mouse. ClearType (Woz may have come up with something similar, but if it wasn't used for near 20 years, Microsoft gets credit for bringing it out) ClearType uses color fringing to fool your eye into seeing more information than actually is there. Microsoft owns the patent for that, which, according to American law at least, means that Microsoft owns the invention.
Intellisense.
Fast user switching Plug n Play
I noticed you left out Windows 95, Apple was on the defensive and playing catch up all through the 90s. Microsoft had a modern OS long before Apple did *prepares for flames* (read about mac os memory model here). Apple tried for years to come up with one, but failed (Copeland), and basically shipped Next Step as their OS (first modernizing the primitive Classic Mac API into Carbon and adding that to NextStep as an additional api besides Cocoa, which NextStep already had).
Office was not innovative
I'm half joking here but have you tried automating any other suite as easily, especially for the average office power worker?
MS skunkworks is truly amazing! Surface (both the original table and the new tablet), Photosynth,... Some of that stuff is revolutionary!
Engineers doing R&D can be awesome at nearly every company. Looking back upon Microsoft's innovations a more pressing question (in my mind) is what are they doing now? They're certainly not leading like they were in the 90s, when companies feared getting into the same market as Microsoft. I wish we had Bell Labs still...
I think this article shows us why - the individual divisions are very innovative. But they compete with each other, distracting them from actually doing anything in the market.
Agreed, pretty lame for the company as a whole.
Perfect example of why companies shouldn't be allowed to grow into obesity! It's interesting to note that breaking up MS would probably have been a good thing for the market.
I understand what you're saying and it's an interesting thought experiment. Although, there are plenty of massive companies out there who do it right (arguably the success maybe due to different culture) such as BP, IBM, Boeing etc.
Did you even read the page you linked to? I quote: "TrueType is an outline font standard originally developed by Apple Computer in the late 1980s as a competitor to Adobe's Type 1 fonts used in PostScript."
Indeed I did, did you read the part where Apple gave them a license for free to help make it popular as well as develop several fonts for it to ensure its success? It's called collaboration and I used the word helped, which is what they did like when they bought a bunch of stock to save Apple's ass (although not out of the goodness of their hearts).
Most high profile games that are multi-platform use C/C++ code rather than XNA.
And what you're missing is before XNA there wasn't an easy way to develop for consoles. You needed a very expensive developer unit (which weren't given to mere mortals). XNA changed that. I don't own an XBOX360 FYI, but I'm not ignorant to the fact that nobody else did what they did before them. That's what my point is.
The.NET framework borrowed ideas from Cocoa and Java.
Which borrowed ideas from languages before them, and improved upon them in other ways.
Regardless if these are massive steps forward, even small ones, they're innovations none the less and everybody stands upon the shoulders of giants. Apple didn't invent the mp3 player either but there is a reason people ask if you have an iPod when referring to portable media players instead of an MP3 player.
Nope.
I noticed you didn't spend any time providing any links, you must be lazy.
Scroll wheel on a mouse? Logitech trackball in a mouse 1983
A ball is not a wheel. Also, if they were the first to have a scroll wheel (which isn't the case) why didn't they bring theirs to market before their competition did?
Seriously, you're scraping the barrel to find anything you can interpret as invention, and its very similar to the comments scraping the barrel to make Ballmer sound like a good CEO.
If you'll look at my post I didn't mention anything about the management there. The GP said Microsoft never innovated anything and I provided examples. Apple is full of failures too, how's Ping working out for them? See that's the thing about actually trying things, sometimes you fail. It's part of the learning process.
Microsoft has never been an innovative company. Never.
They came up with AJAX and prior to that Iframes, maybe you've heard of those?
Microsoft had the first console to feature an internal HD eliminating the need for memory cards for save games among other things.
Intellisense is amazing (it's an example of auto completion done well). The scroll wheel on a mouse.
The first optical mouse.
The first mouse featuring backwards and forwards buttons. First mainstream ergonomic mouse.
While not the first, they're responsible for ergonomic keyboards (due making them affordable, just like PCs) Teraserver (1998 a precursor to Google Earth)
Involved in the creation of the browser useragent
Video codec innovations which led to VC-1 being the premier codec for HD-DVD and BR discs.
Helped establish TrueType ClearType
The Taskbar
Ability to alter compiled code while debugging it
Dynamic HTML desktops
Lots of small innovations in.NET that when combined equal large cumulative innovation.
XNA
Alt tab to switch between applications Photosynth Microsoft OneNote
First OS to have a 3D Sound api for games Shadow Copy
Certainly that should qualify as an innovation.
They won the PC-DOS contract in 1981, overlaid it with Windows GUI 4 years later...Apple that were doing the innovating.....
By giving Xerox a bunch of stock in their company for access to their GUI technology, essentially buying technology just like Microsoft?
Seems to me that if you're a business who is dependent upon 3rd parties for your core services you're at their mercy. Why even involve a 3rd party? Doing things in house takes expertise, time and money and many businesses seem to find it cheaper in the short run to lease expertise and equipment and outsource operations. This situation underlines some of drawbacks of not doing things yourself (as a company).
Yes, these are relatively trivial services, but that doesn't mean that cloud providers can'tor won't drop more important services.
And why are they dropping the service?/. seems to think Google is unable to monetize iGoogle. Google is providing useful yet free service, not a paid service. Paid services typically involve a contract which cover items like availability, which as a business you're able to make plans around.
You maynot expect an online service to last more than 5 years, but most businesses do.
I don't know many successful businesses which base their day to day operations off of free 3rd party services with no service agreements. They've got bigger issues if their entire business model revolves around iGoogle wouldn't you say?
Try editing a photo with the command line. Sure, you can do it, but why would you?
Seriously? I'd love to leave it a "Because you can." You're not thinking creatively enough or you must not do much programming. You see the results of it around you every day online! How do you think thumbnails are generated on many websites!? Packages such as Image Magick or GD are powerful command line programs. You may not be aware that photo editing software features command line options for situations where batch jobs make sense.
A scenario would be removing EXIF data from photos (like the latitude and longitude embedded by many devices by default, not so hot if you're a clown distributing pictures of their super secret grow op...). Irfanview is a great example of a GUI application exposed with command line functionality. Say you've got a bunch of photos of a client's (frequently rotating) products featured both in print advertisements and their online store.
Another real life example this last week I wrote a script to automate creating various graphic assets for our user created apps on the various platforms we support (iOS, Android variants) with files users uploaded directly to our web server.
If you notice most professional software packages support scripting functionality because it's extremely useful (Maya, Cinema 4D, CAD, Photoshop (macros) etc.).
Please don't interpret this as subtle advocacy supporting command line elitism. Simply put I enjoy being productive, I get more done and my clients/employers as well as I benefit immensely from this. Daily there are times where GUIs are the way to go. For example I find editing documents using a mouse much faster for most situations, multiple copy and paste jobs are night and day faster for instance.
Greetings and thanks for pointing that out. I didn't claim otherwise, I merely stated that it remains popular there; while in the states and most of western Europe its use declined over the last decade replaced by other services. Why would AOL buy something which wasn't popular? ICQ arguably sparked instant messaging, with the only mainstream contender at the time being AOL IM which wasn't stand alone. Oddly enough one of my friends whom I learned about ICQ from (97ish?) had a UIN in the low 300s. Today most of the low digit and desirable UINs are heavily hacked and trafficed. One of my big complaints with the service was that the contact lists were stored locally so if you didn't back them up you learned quickly;)
And now Facebook more and more is how most people IM and email... *sigh*
Well Apple's Mountain Lion is $19 for starts. Even if you had to buy Lion at $29 at's still less than the traditional Windows upgrade.
Sure, those are nice upgrade prices but how much did the user pay for the hardware? And it's not like they can just throw Lion discs into any old machine and have them run. It must be supported Apple hardware.
Windows is supported for much longer compared to OSX releases as far as software support and backwards compatibility are concerned. The general rule for Apple support seems to be the current and last release and you're on your own. As a developer it's nice to have users running current versions of things, however, being on a quickened upgrade treadmill isn't always cheap. An example of OSX backwards compatibility is Adobe Creative Suite.
I think there will be FEW upgrades this round because Microsoft wants Windows 8 tied to the proper hardware. I think they are making the consumer push first to grab some hardware sales, companies aren't going to upgrade for 6-12 months anyway.
I think most people prefer fresh installations when upgrading anyway. It's not like you're unable to take your files with you as most people are familiar with backups and having multiple copies of their files. The Windows 7 release was pretty smooth since most of the driver issues which plagued Vista's launch had been settled by the vendors.
While I like some of the under the hood features of Windows 8 I'm not too keen on the UI among other things. As far as Windows is concerned I'll be sticking with 7 for the foreseeable future.
I was shocked as well when one of my friends mentioned using AOL in Germany in the 90s. There's a brief mention of it in their history too. Pretty wild, now that I think about it I almost miss the mailers which made great give away CD holders. One of their properties (ICQ) is pretty big in Europe (mostly eastern and Russia) to this day.
Pretty much any software with activation. Adobe Creative Suite, Maxon Cinema 4D are two that I can think of off the top of my head. Typically it's when they're first run, and when checking for updates. It's not some spontaneous dialing that happens randomly (that would require a service).
Now the customer wants the product tested on IE8, forcing me to upgrade
Hello, this might save your ass like it saved mine. I'm not affiliated with them in any way. It allows you to run the rendering engines for multiple Internet Explorer browsers without having them installed. The stand alone IEs were a pain in the ass to get working on Windows 7 64bit, while the performance isn't great it sure beats having to load a Windows VM to test your site/application with.
You can't do that with Windows or Apple. You get only one and if it sucks, too bad. Buy the next version and hope.
Depending how deep you want to go there are options for the shell and interface. The Windows API is pretty powerful and well documented enabling developers to make a variety of applications. Here is a list of alternative shells for Windows many of which have been around for over a decade. WindowsBlinds is another product that makes installing custom themes and interactive elements a breeze.
In addition to increasing prices there is also inflation which helps prop up the numbers. In fact between 1990 and 2012 American currency has nearly halved in purchasing power due to inflation. $16 in 1990 is $30 in 2012 dollars.
Couple of points which might help make your argument more factual.
They were coasting on Windows XP for over a decade.
Windows XP was released in 2001 and Windows Vista 2006. Microsoft didn't coast, the users sure did though (with many home users and businesses still holding on to Windows XP) and no matter how you cut it five years is not a decade.
It wasn't until Apple starting to pose a threat with Mac OS X
OSX isn't (nor was it) a threat, it has less than 10% of the desktop market sharehere too, which until recently was less than Vista alone. If you want to compare particular versions of OSX it would be 10.5. Your threat argument might be better if it were referring to iOS on mobile devices. There also seems to be a lot of backlash over Lion.
Similar story with the Zune, Windows phones, and now tablets.
They've had success with the Xbox 360 and hardware. Microsoft had some dud launches and dysmal releases for certain but they're not alone in this. Apple has had its share of defects most recently with their iPhone4 antennas and blaming users for holding the phone wrong. Here is a nice list of some Apple failures.
That's not really a fact though, that "cheap PC hardware price = poor performance and poor MTBF", that's your opinion.
Not all hardware is created equal, especially storage (SSD). Factors like sequential read/write, random read/write performance vary considerably from series to series and brand to brand. Slashdot has an article about SSD failure rates ~10 months ago which you may find interesting. Cheap hardware is cheap for a reason. Most of the time it's not to corner the market with quality hardware sold at artificially low prices.
Perhaps if the Indians had done the same to the Europeans right from the beginning (instead of handing them land), they would still control America.
The Natives did (here) (humorously here). As history has shown all this accomplished was delaying things. Also the Natives were in number compared to when the Europeans started colonizing the New World.
Notice how the europeans had zero success taking-over China despite repeated attempts..... because the Chinese rejected the invaders.
The greatest killer of all was disease, failure of their own immune systems. Disease wiped many of these people out, this is documented with Cortez, too. There is some evidence of the affect these epidemics had relating to the carbon dioxide levels around the time of Columbus' arrival.
Slashdot Mirror
Hell if MSFT would have given XP X64 the support they should have most folks would have probably been happy to stay on XP
IE6 would still be alive and massively deployed. Good riddance! Not to kick it while it's down, but see XP & the rise of botnets. I'm glad it wasn't adopted. Not to mention the improved display driver model first in Vista and also in Windows 7.
and now that they are gonna try to ram a stupid appstore down everyone's throat having an OS that'll run DirectX that valve can control would be a smart move.
I'm glad you mentioned this. I'd like to counter this point by saying that this appears to be what the masses want judged by the success of the Android market place (now Google Play) and the App Store. Joe Sixpack accesses the store from his phone/device, selects the desired app, and installs it. A simple process. Most phones have auto update notifications to boot (Wouldn't it be nice if Windows had this without requiring each application to run its own updater, or knowing someone has once-overed the code to the store compliance guidelines? As an example: I have updaters I'm able to name off the top of my head: Adobe Application Updater, Flash (web developer), apps with update checking: Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Steam, Malware Bytes, Nvidia, Skype). One of the biggest problems out there is people who don't patch vulnerabilities, many cases the hot fixes and patches were available before the storm hit, creating a problem for even more people.
/. for "not getting it" when talking about computer use (I'm a technical user, to frame it briefly: why wouldn't you want to master a tool which is used in your life daily?). The barrier to entry is lower now than it has ever been, enabling more people to be online than ever before. Now these users are voting with their wallets. Seems like mainframes (cloud) and proprietary systems/walled gardens are all the rage in the industry's mind and the users are not at all concerned with who owns or accesses data and how. As long as they eventually get what they want.
There have been many vocal posts about how dodgy software plagues the less technical users and how the fault lies either with the OS vendor or application developer. The App Store takes this a step further by vetting code as well as requiring a developers license to submit software. It is massively popular with the masses and very successful at generating revenue for Apple and others who use the marketplace. Not to mention look at how extremely well Apple is doing. I am aware they make most of their money on the phones not just digital purchases. You may be surprised to know Apple isn't the king of devices activated though. The Android daily device activation is number staggering (~12 a second, 1 million a day) which is roughly half of all smartphones.
I've been berated on
I'd be ALL for it, but it looks like OpenGL is gonna be for the CAD guys
I'm sure games are another legitimate consideration, so is GUI compositing. Shiny sells. That giant screen is used for more than just a phone button interface. You're not thinking about the oodles of handsets that are out there; literally millions more are created daily. Millions of potential customers daily and developers cater to their customers.
OpenGL just isn't as good as DirectX, its too hacky with all the extensions and its just not been given the love like it had in the late 90s when it looked like it had a shot at the title.
Indeed. However, an (arguable) benefit of OpenGL and variants is the graphics are now largely cross platform. DirectX also succeeds because, as a developer wouldn't you be interested in (relative) ease? I'm referring specifically to complexity.
We all use open source software with huge code bases (e.g. Apache httpd, MySQL, JBoss, ...) and it is virtually impossible for smaller companies to even touch their source code.
These are not small projects with fickle developer support. The great thing about opensource is that projects may be forked, and if there is some massive shortcoming there are other options which become available since the source is available. As an example take a look at what happened with OpenOffice.org. Your point as I understand it is we all depend upon software which we don't have the expertise to fix, and my response to that is there are commercial offerings which provide similar functionality if the free ones disappeared overnight. If you're running a business, you must invest in infrastructure at some point.
Thanks for your opinions about support contract. I guess it should be considered whenever available.
No problem, I've been involved in many meetings where management won't touch things without support contracts.
I am starting to worry whether we can rely on less popular open source software? In recent few years many of the open source libraries and software I use were discontinued.
Ultimately it's unwise to base your business upon something that your organization is unable or unwilling to maintain.
This question comes to my mind: Which open source projects we may trust (to rely on them)? ... perhaps those which have a better business and sustaining plan ?
I'm sure you've heard of the phrase 'there are no guarantees in life' which also applies to software. If you (or your company) are dependent upon something that is developed by a 3rd party, it's wise to get a support contract. As an example: Redhat offers support as well as other organizations which develop OSS. Consider licensing the code, or hiring the developer(s) outright, failing that fork it and learn to maintain it in house. A lesson from my professional life: software constantly changes.
Most of that stuff is tweaks, or borrowed, or inane (the "Taskbar" is really a window list, and Apple's dock is much truer to the concept and more useful to boot).
Most things are tweaks. Ever noticed how keyboards are basically the same for over the last 100 years, ergonomic keyboards are the same keyboard split in the middle. Funny how that didn't really catch on until recently, little things make a big difference. Sorta like the little switch on a lighter that prevents children from using it. Yes it's just a little switch added to someone's design, but it's innovative. The grandparent said that Microsoft NEVER innovated, I provided some examples where they have. Now you're balking at how big they are, Bob was an innovation as well. Is it an innovation if it doesn't succeed? (rhetorical)
"Lots of small innovations in .NET"... are mainly features borrowed from Delphi and elsewhere.
Perhaps you're not aware they hired the man who designed Delphi to design something for them? Wouldn't you want the best? Java and Delphi (and all others) borrowed things from other languages as well and improved upon them in other ways, just like .NET does. We all stand upon the shoulders of giants, especially so in the computing world.
Shadow Copy... I very much doubt this one, as copy-on-write capability goes back to other systems in the 1970s.
My point is desktop operating systems didn't feature that before. DOS, Windows, Mac OS, OSX didn't feature that, so when you're introducing it to people over 30 years after it was invented where it hasn't been applied before, it's considered an innovation. I liken that to saying since a steam engine was invented back in ancient times, that modern day engines aren't innovative.
To me, their biggest contributions seem to be in fonts and in pushing GUI programming environments (of which I consider MS Office to be a member).
Their biggest contribution in my opinion was getting a PC into everyone's home, making it affordable and ubiquitous outside of the office. They're responsible for creating many markets which many people benefit from today, such as IT, Developers, Hardware, XBox Live. Windows for Workgroups (as much of a pile as that was) was responsible for many LANs.
They also created iframes and the technology behind AJAX.
OLE.
Bringing scroll wheel's on mice to the masses as well as ergo keyboards (by making them affordable, just like PCs).
First commercially successful optical mouse.
ClearType (Woz may have come up with something similar, but if it wasn't used for near 20 years, Microsoft gets credit for bringing it out) ClearType uses color fringing to fool your eye into seeing more information than actually is there. Microsoft owns the patent for that, which, according to American law at least, means that Microsoft owns the invention.
Intellisense.
Fast user switching
Plug n Play
I noticed you left out Windows 95, Apple was on the defensive and playing catch up all through the 90s. Microsoft had a modern OS long before Apple did *prepares for flames* (read about mac os memory model here). Apple tried for years to come up with one, but failed (Copeland), and basically shipped Next Step as their OS (first modernizing the primitive Classic Mac API into Carbon and adding that to NextStep as an additional api besides Cocoa, which NextStep already had).
Office was not innovative
I'm half joking here but have you tried automating any other suite as easily, especially for the average office power worker?
MS skunkworks is truly amazing! Surface (both the original table and the new tablet), Photosynth,... Some of that stuff is revolutionary!
Engineers doing R&D can be awesome at nearly every company. Looking back upon Microsoft's innovations a more pressing question (in my mind) is what are they doing now? They're certainly not leading like they were in the 90s, when companies feared getting into the same market as Microsoft. I wish we had Bell Labs still...
I think this article shows us why - the individual divisions are very innovative. But they compete with each other, distracting them from actually doing anything in the market.
Agreed, pretty lame for the company as a whole.
Perfect example of why companies shouldn't be allowed to grow into obesity! It's interesting to note that breaking up MS would probably have been a good thing for the market.
I understand what you're saying and it's an interesting thought experiment. Although, there are plenty of massive companies out there who do it right (arguably the success maybe due to different culture) such as BP, IBM, Boeing etc.
Did you even read the page you linked to? I quote: "TrueType is an outline font standard originally developed by Apple Computer in the late 1980s as a competitor to Adobe's Type 1 fonts used in PostScript."
Indeed I did, did you read the part where Apple gave them a license for free to help make it popular as well as develop several fonts for it to ensure its success? It's called collaboration and I used the word helped, which is what they did like when they bought a bunch of stock to save Apple's ass (although not out of the goodness of their hearts).
Most high profile games that are multi-platform use C/C++ code rather than XNA.
And what you're missing is before XNA there wasn't an easy way to develop for consoles. You needed a very expensive developer unit (which weren't given to mere mortals). XNA changed that. I don't own an XBOX360 FYI, but I'm not ignorant to the fact that nobody else did what they did before them. That's what my point is.
The .NET framework borrowed ideas from Cocoa and Java.
Which borrowed ideas from languages before them, and improved upon them in other ways.
Regardless if these are massive steps forward, even small ones, they're innovations none the less and everybody stands upon the shoulders of giants. Apple didn't invent the mp3 player either but there is a reason people ask if you have an iPod when referring to portable media players instead of an MP3 player.
Nope.
I noticed you didn't spend any time providing any links, you must be lazy.
Scroll wheel on a mouse? Logitech trackball in a mouse 1983
A ball is not a wheel. Also, if they were the first to have a scroll wheel (which isn't the case) why didn't they bring theirs to market before their competition did?
Seriously, you're scraping the barrel to find anything you can interpret as invention, and its very similar to the comments scraping the barrel to make Ballmer sound like a good CEO.
If you'll look at my post I didn't mention anything about the management there. The GP said Microsoft never innovated anything and I provided examples. Apple is full of failures too, how's Ping working out for them? See that's the thing about actually trying things, sometimes you fail. It's part of the learning process.
Microsoft has never been an innovative company. Never.
They came up with AJAX and prior to that Iframes, maybe you've heard of those? .NET that when combined equal large cumulative innovation.
Microsoft had the first console to feature an internal HD eliminating the need for memory cards for save games among other things.
Intellisense is amazing (it's an example of auto completion done well).
The scroll wheel on a mouse. The first optical mouse.
The first mouse featuring backwards and forwards buttons.
First mainstream ergonomic mouse.
While not the first, they're responsible for ergonomic keyboards (due making them affordable, just like PCs)
Teraserver (1998 a precursor to Google Earth)
Involved in the creation of the browser useragent
Video codec innovations which led to VC-1 being the premier codec for HD-DVD and BR discs.
Helped establish TrueType
ClearType
The Taskbar
Ability to alter compiled code while debugging it
Dynamic HTML desktops
Lots of small innovations in
XNA
Alt tab to switch between applications
Photosynth
Microsoft OneNote
First OS to have a 3D Sound api for games
Shadow Copy
Certainly that should qualify as an innovation.
They won the PC-DOS contract in 1981, overlaid it with Windows GUI 4 years later...Apple that were doing the innovating.....
By giving Xerox a bunch of stock in their company for access to their GUI technology, essentially buying technology just like Microsoft?
You miss the point.
Seems to me that if you're a business who is dependent upon 3rd parties for your core services you're at their mercy. Why even involve a 3rd party? Doing things in house takes expertise, time and money and many businesses seem to find it cheaper in the short run to lease expertise and equipment and outsource operations. This situation underlines some of drawbacks of not doing things yourself (as a company).
Yes, these are relatively trivial services, but that doesn't mean that cloud providers can'tor won't drop more important services.
And why are they dropping the service? /. seems to think Google is unable to monetize iGoogle. Google is providing useful yet free service, not a paid service. Paid services typically involve a contract which cover items like availability, which as a business you're able to make plans around.
You maynot expect an online service to last more than 5 years, but most businesses do.
I don't know many successful businesses which base their day to day operations off of free 3rd party services with no service agreements. They've got bigger issues if their entire business model revolves around iGoogle wouldn't you say?
Try editing a photo with the command line. Sure, you can do it, but why would you?
Seriously? I'd love to leave it a "Because you can." You're not thinking creatively enough or you must not do much programming. You see the results of it around you every day online! How do you think thumbnails are generated on many websites!? Packages such as Image Magick or GD are powerful command line programs. You may not be aware that photo editing software features command line options for situations where batch jobs make sense.
A scenario would be removing EXIF data from photos (like the latitude and longitude embedded by many devices by default, not so hot if you're a clown distributing pictures of their super secret grow op...). Irfanview is a great example of a GUI application exposed with command line functionality. Say you've got a bunch of photos of a client's (frequently rotating) products featured both in print advertisements and their online store.
Another real life example this last week I wrote a script to automate creating various graphic assets for our user created apps on the various platforms we support (iOS, Android variants) with files users uploaded directly to our web server. If you notice most professional software packages support scripting functionality because it's extremely useful (Maya, Cinema 4D, CAD, Photoshop (macros) etc.).
Please don't interpret this as subtle advocacy supporting command line elitism. Simply put I enjoy being productive, I get more done and my clients/employers as well as I benefit immensely from this. Daily there are times where GUIs are the way to go. For example I find editing documents using a mouse much faster for most situations, multiple copy and paste jobs are night and day faster for instance.
Greetings and thanks for pointing that out. I didn't claim otherwise, I merely stated that it remains popular there; while in the states and most of western Europe its use declined over the last decade replaced by other services. Why would AOL buy something which wasn't popular? ICQ arguably sparked instant messaging, with the only mainstream contender at the time being AOL IM which wasn't stand alone. Oddly enough one of my friends whom I learned about ICQ from (97ish?) had a UIN in the low 300s. Today most of the low digit and desirable UINs are heavily hacked and trafficed. One of my big complaints with the service was that the contact lists were stored locally so if you didn't back them up you learned quickly ;)
And now Facebook more and more is how most people IM and email... *sigh*
Well Apple's Mountain Lion is $19 for starts. Even if you had to buy Lion at $29 at's still less than the traditional Windows upgrade.
Sure, those are nice upgrade prices but how much did the user pay for the hardware? And it's not like they can just throw Lion discs into any old machine and have them run. It must be supported Apple hardware.
Windows is supported for much longer compared to OSX releases as far as software support and backwards compatibility are concerned. The general rule for Apple support seems to be the current and last release and you're on your own. As a developer it's nice to have users running current versions of things, however, being on a quickened upgrade treadmill isn't always cheap. An example of OSX backwards compatibility is Adobe Creative Suite.
I think there will be FEW upgrades this round because Microsoft wants Windows 8 tied to the proper hardware. I think they are making the consumer push first to grab some hardware sales, companies aren't going to upgrade for 6-12 months anyway.
I think most people prefer fresh installations when upgrading anyway. It's not like you're unable to take your files with you as most people are familiar with backups and having multiple copies of their files. The Windows 7 release was pretty smooth since most of the driver issues which plagued Vista's launch had been settled by the vendors.
While I like some of the under the hood features of Windows 8 I'm not too keen on the UI among other things. As far as Windows is concerned I'll be sticking with 7 for the foreseeable future.
I was shocked as well when one of my friends mentioned using AOL in Germany in the 90s. There's a brief mention of it in their history too. Pretty wild, now that I think about it I almost miss the mailers which made great give away CD holders. One of their properties (ICQ) is pretty big in Europe (mostly eastern and Russia) to this day.
Pretty much any software with activation. Adobe Creative Suite, Maxon Cinema 4D are two that I can think of off the top of my head. Typically it's when they're first run, and when checking for updates. It's not some spontaneous dialing that happens randomly (that would require a service).
Now the customer wants the product tested on IE8, forcing me to upgrade
Hello, this might save your ass like it saved mine. I'm not affiliated with them in any way. It allows you to run the rendering engines for multiple Internet Explorer browsers without having them installed. The stand alone IEs were a pain in the ass to get working on Windows 7 64bit, while the performance isn't great it sure beats having to load a Windows VM to test your site/application with.
You can't do that with Windows or Apple. You get only one and if it sucks, too bad. Buy the next version and hope.
Depending how deep you want to go there are options for the shell and interface. The Windows API is pretty powerful and well documented enabling developers to make a variety of applications. Here is a list of alternative shells for Windows many of which have been around for over a decade. WindowsBlinds is another product that makes installing custom themes and interactive elements a breeze.
This is stupidly false. Authorization doesn't come from a (misconfigured) server, it comes from people.
The same people who put the information on the webserver?
In addition to increasing prices there is also inflation which helps prop up the numbers. In fact between 1990 and 2012 American currency has nearly halved in purchasing power due to inflation. $16 in 1990 is $30 in 2012 dollars.
They were coasting on Windows XP for over a decade.
Windows XP was released in 2001 and Windows Vista 2006. Microsoft didn't coast, the users sure did though (with many home users and businesses still holding on to Windows XP) and no matter how you cut it five years is not a decade.
It wasn't until Apple starting to pose a threat with Mac OS X
OSX isn't (nor was it) a threat, it has less than 10% of the desktop market share here too, which until recently was less than Vista alone. If you want to compare particular versions of OSX it would be 10.5. Your threat argument might be better if it were referring to iOS on mobile devices. There also seems to be a lot of backlash over Lion.
Similar story with the Zune, Windows phones, and now tablets.
They've had success with the Xbox 360 and hardware. Microsoft had some dud launches and dysmal releases for certain but they're not alone in this. Apple has had its share of defects most recently with their iPhone4 antennas and blaming users for holding the phone wrong. Here is a nice list of some Apple failures.
ATI video drivers suck for both windows and Linux although windows drivers are very slightly better for windows.
Windows drivers are slightly better for Windows! Profound!
quality.
Quite right, they're driving scooters which most certainly don't burn wood to get around.
That's not really a fact though, that "cheap PC hardware price = poor performance and poor MTBF", that's your opinion.
Not all hardware is created equal, especially storage (SSD). Factors like sequential read/write, random read/write performance vary considerably from series to series and brand to brand. Slashdot has an article about SSD failure rates ~10 months ago which you may find interesting. Cheap hardware is cheap for a reason. Most of the time it's not to corner the market with quality hardware sold at artificially low prices.
Perhaps if the Indians had done the same to the Europeans right from the beginning (instead of handing them land), they would still control America.
The Natives did (here) (humorously here). As history has shown all this accomplished was delaying things. Also the Natives were in number compared to when the Europeans started colonizing the New World.
Notice how the europeans had zero success taking-over China despite repeated attempts..... because the Chinese rejected the invaders.
The greatest killer of all was disease, failure of their own immune systems. Disease wiped many of these people out, this is documented with Cortez, too. There is some evidence of the affect these epidemics had relating to the carbon dioxide levels around the time of Columbus' arrival.
Also related, you may find Lies My Teach Told Me an interesting read.