Microsoft an Innovator, Yea Right

Posted on by

Slashdot | Is Microsoft An Innovator? – The Winer-Scoble Debate

Winer writes, ‘Microsoft isn’t an innovator, and never was. They are always playing catch-up, by design. That’s their M.O. They describe their development approach as “chasing tail lights.” They aren’t interested in markets until they’re worth billions, so they let others develop the markets, and have been content to catch-up.’

They are playing catchup to Google and Apple. Scoble lists 3 things that are not really innovative, like ClearType that was copied from Apple, Error messages in IE (Invent a better browser… wtf!) and Office 2007 (Open Office is free! I could care less about using the $600 Office).

If they are seriously to be considered as a truly innovative company they would have invented NEW things like Firefox or YouTube or Del.icio.us or Google Reader or Google Calendar. Either open source everything and charge companies for support or stick to video games!

  • Nate

    Firefox is basically new Netscape, youtube hosts videos, del.icio.us is a WEBSITE and reader and calender are.. god I shouldn’t have to explain why those aren’t new things. And though I don’t disagree with your points, the uninformed and bitchy way you presented it almost makes me want to argue the other side. And for god sake, you dont so much skip over the other side of the argument as you do completely ignore it! Have you forgotten why windows is called windows!? God damn man!

  • Katrina “the Lamia” Payne

    Okay–going over this… uh Office 2007 IS more innovative than Open Office.Org. OO.o has only ever been able to impliment 10% of the features MS Office has had. Further: Microsoft has been releasing software for long enough that it use to have to compete with IBM Lotus packages.

    Firefox is NOT a new thing. It is a rewrite of Netscape. Which only existed after the developers of Seamonkey found that the code they got from Netscape was too completely unworkable to remove stuff like browser bloat and memory leaks. Gee–good thing they got rid of THAT in Firefox (rather than just add them again–but now with arrogant fanboy support).

    Youtube is essentially a refined version of Albino Black Sheep or Newgrounds really. It does nothing new or note worthy so to speak. It just has gotten insanely popular.

    Del.icio.us is pretty much what link directories were in the late 1990s. Doing nothing new, or in anyway noteworthy.

    Google Reader is a Web based PDF reader. PDF readers existed long before Google Reader–as has the idea of doing stuff in a web based format.

    Google Calender is a calender.. I admit to sucking the Google dick, but even I do not claim that Google invented–or even really reinvented, calenders or the practice of scheduling crap.

    It is rather annoying that you list Google and Apple as “not chasing the tail lights”–when both of those are just as bad as Microsoft at it. For quite a few years, a lot of viable get rich quicks schemes revolved around creating a web service, and having Google buy it from you, once it got successful. In fact the majority of Google’s services were purchased acquisitions (like say… Youtube). Apple is even worse. While given praise for the GUI–they kind of stole that originally themselves as well. They really have not done much of anything (iTunes is lifted from the Pay-to-use version of Napster, iPod is predated by other MP3 Players, iPhone is predated by BlackBerries, iTouch is predated by Palm Pilots). Well–except for basing OSX’ Darwin Kernel off of BSD4.3 making programs easier to move onto and from other UNIX and UNIX Workalike systems.

    And the fine folks at Microsoft have done a few innovations. Not many mind you–but I can think of one off the top of my head: .Net. This is probably one of the most advanced and well running Virtual Machines out there. It is predated by the JVM–but there are enough differences in how it runs that Microsoft has been granted patents. I generally noticed it tends to work better than both Parrot and the JVM.

    Microsoft is also a key player in the Video Game Console world. As they were the first, to allow players to make games under an “Indie Developer” user status. Something that has, to this day, been the sole reason nobody is even interested in breaking into the set up of an XBox 360 to put Homebrew on it. Neither Nintendo or Sony can even compare themselves to the lack of working on getting stuff to run on a 360 that probably should not be on there.

    Also noteworthy, Microsoft is the company that moved the video game test market from Japan to Europe. A rather monumental move, as it had been in Japan for most of the 1990s, some of the 1980s and some of the new millenium. The market being in Japan, rather than North America was credited as a reason the great crash did not occur a second time.

    Myself, as a Linux user, would prefer that my own side not use such horrid arguments in describing why we like stuff. Call this a friendly fire bitch slap for being retarded.