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!