I like:Pirates of Silicone Valley (1999, 95 minutes, produced by USA Films). Says plenty.
Thats bizarre, I have been beleiving that Bill wrote DOS (originally called QDOS) during a five-hour plane journey. Source? TV series “revenge of the geeks [nerds?]”. Is that some kind of joke?
Ah - posted on Sunday - I deliberately stay far away from computers on the weekend. 
How can it be Apple’s secret if Xerox thought it up?
I’m no fan of Microsoft, but at least they can’t do any worse than Connectix at technical support. Connectix had the absolute worst technical support of any company I’ve ever dealt with. A few years ago, I had a problem with Virtual PC where one of my disk images somehow got corrupted and it would crash my Mac on startup. I called technical support and explained the problem. The clueless so-called support person actually told me that it couldn’t be a bug in VPC because if it was, other people would have reported it! I sent email after email to their support address and got absolutely no reply, not even an automated one. I think I even tried emailing to other contact addresses from their website, and still got nothing. I got to the point where I figured the only explanation was that Connectix had quietly gone out of business. Imagine my surprise when, some six months later, I finally got a reply from technical support. Far too late to be of any help, of course.
Sorry for the hijack.
Microsoft has never innovated. Whether they stole, bought, borrowed, copied, or just jumped on the passing bandwagon can be argued, but is there even one example of Microsoft being the first with anything? Have they ever even tried to go into uncharted territory?
It’s very clear that innovation is not Microsoft’s business strategy. They let others do the innovation and take the risks. They watch carefully to see what works, where the market is going, what consumers want, etc. Then they put their might to work doing the same thing, either by buying, copying, or stealing.
Yes, we all know that Xerox pioneered the GUI. But what happened next? While Microsoft was content to sell DOS, Apple took the real risk of trying to actually sell a GUI. It wasn’t until Apple succeeded with the Mac and proved that people would buy such a thing that Microsoft did Windows.
Maybe it’s true, as another poster said, that Microsoft started writing Internet Explorer before Netscape started writing Netscape. But the important point is that Mosaic had already proven the web concept. No innovation, no risk-taking by Microsoft.
Palm pioneered an entirely new class of computing device, the handheld; took the risk, made it work and proved there was a market. Microsoft jumped into that arena with a series of vastly inferior OS’s. They still don’t have it right; the only reason that anyone buys a WinCE or PocketPC device is because of the Microsoft name on it.
Now, as a business strategy, this is obviously great. Like them or hate them, you can’t argue with Microsoft’s success. But for consumers, for the computer industry as a whole, it’s terrible. If Microsoft had dominated a bit earlier, we’d all still by using command-line OS’s (in other words, if Apple hadn’t taken the risk to prove that GUIs worked, Microsoft never would have developed one on its own, regardless of what or who it got from Xerox). It’s a matter of personal opinion whether Windows or the MacOS is “better”, but it’s a fact that MacOSX is innovative and Windows XP is derivative.
This is why Microsoft’s huge dominance is a bad thing; if there’s no one around able to innovate, we’ll just stagnate with minor changes to Windows. There would be no handhelds. There’ll be no . . . whatever the next big innovation is.
Unless you or they are misremembering, the source of that is probably this - Paul Allen (co-founder of Microsoft) wrote a tape reader for the Altair on a plane ride to New Mexico. He was going there to demonstrate the BASIC version (that Bill Gates largely wrote) for the Altair, and they hadn’t tested it yet (I think). This was in early 1975, technically before Microsoft existed. (web cite)
[gratuitous slam] DOS (MS-DOS) was originally called QDOS, for ‘Quick & Dirty Operating System’. Microsoft, had to go and remove the ‘Q’, leaving just a ‘D’ operating system[/slam].
After the Internet explosion with Netscape, IE suddenly becomes an integral part of the MS operating system. Thereby making the Internet = IE = Microsoft. Thank God the industry, and congress, finally put their foot down when this happened. So what happens next? .NET Is .NET an innovation? Nope, it’s almost an exact duplicate of Java J2EE. Here we go again.
There was a movie called Revenge of the Nerds, which I haven’t seen for ages, and which might have forwarded that idea. But I’m afraid it’s not correct.
QDOS was the operating system developed by Tim Paterson, which Microsoft later bought all rights to and made into MS-DOS. I’m sure QDOS was a relatively simple work at that time (1980), but still not something even an expert could write in one just plane trip. Especially since the original code would have been Intel 8088 assembly language. Thousands of lines of it. And there were no laptops then to work on either.
The real historical event that the movie might have mangled is when Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft, had to write a “loader” for their Altair BASIC while flying to Albuquerque to give a demo. This is something he and Gates had accidentally forgotten to do (or run out of time for?) back in Massachusettes.
Because the technology disclosed was covered by a non-disclosure agreement with Apple. This would seem to make the information “secret” as far as Microsoft was concerned, regardless of the ultimate source.
I’m not an intellectual property lawyer, so that’s just my layman’s take on it. (Seems clear enough though.)
I should probably add some other stuff Microsoft is guilty of while you’re on the subject:
Monopolistic evils:[ul][li]MS has a habit of making their products compatible with their products and their products only. Way back in the early days of PCs, there was a competitor to DOS called Dr. Dos. MS made their new graphical Windows 3.1 spit out a fake error if it detected it was running on Dr Dos, making users think they needed MSDOS instead.[/li][li]More recently, in an apparent attempt to make browser competitor Opera look bad, the MSN site started detecting if the browser request came from an Opera browser, then sent a style-sheet page which caused the page contents to shift over, overwriting a column of stuff that was in the way. (Cite)[/li][/ul]Microsoft actually pioneered (or at least popularized) other evil techniques, Astro-turfing, “embrace and extend”, and the dreaded FUD.[ul][li]Astro-turfing is where you work up “grass-roots” which actually consists of members of your own company (for example, a letter-writing campaign to newspapers purporting to be from “concerned citizens”).[/li][li]To embrace and extend, you must find something popular that uses a particular protocol. Release something that claims to work using said protocol. Then, add on proprietary “extra” stuff to the protocol, and make your product use these heavily. You now control this previously generic protocol![/li][li]FUD (for Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt), is when you can’t really push your own product for being good ('cause it’s probably not), so you bash the competition. (more or less a smear campaign). The most common FUD target for MS is Linux.[/ul]I’m not even boycotting them - I run 3 machines with some 'doze version, and some of their software is the best there is. But as companies go, they’re running some bad juju.[/li]
Oh wait, my pet peeve; when they got smacked down for being a monopoly, they paid part of their fees by donating software to schools. Geez. Apparently they get tax-write offs that way too. I’ve gotta get in on that: (100 schools x 100$ licence) - (100 schools x 0.10$ CD) = big tax break for me. 
Yeah, wasn’t that just amazing. They use monopoly practices, so as punishment they are allowed to give free software to schools, thereby forcing others out of the market, enforcing a monopoly. Quite apart from the whole ‘catch them while their young’ marketing advantages. :smack: :smack: :smack: Now that’s a fine that really must have hurt them!!
Claiming that MS does not innovate is such an old chestnut I’m amazed it’s still around. Take a look at the MS Research site. Check out the US patent database and compare patents held by MS to patents held by Apple, Lotus, Netscape et al (and I’m being generous in letting Apple have their patents for ornamental staircases in this race).
The “embrace and extend” technique is hardly unique to Microsoft. Netscape, that obvious paragon of virtue, tried it on with various non-standard HTML tags, DOM modifications etc, all the while overlooking the fact that Navigator sucked.
It’s not necessarily a bad thing either. Software companies take standards and run with them. Good stuff that comes out of the race makes it into the next version of the standard in a few years time. The XSL language is going through this kind of revision at the moment and if it wasn’t for the work of people like Mike Kay on the Saxon parser the specification for XSL/XPath 2.0 wouldn’t be nearly as mature and far reaching as it is. Nobody’s accused him of attempting to corner the market in XSL parsers though, despite his software supporting quite a few “proprietary” commands that others don’t.
Look at database servers for another example and point to one that is 100% compliant with ANSI SQL and not one iota more. Why’re Oracle’s additions to the standard a good thing and Microsoft’s are an underhanded attempt to screw the consumer?
Sure Microsoft are evil, but they’re not stupid and they’re not, for the most part, producing bad software.
While it is true you cannot build your own new Mac with pieces that you get at the flea market or computer show, it is UNTRUE that you can’t upgrade your Mac. I personally have done these upgrades: ram, processor, video card, ethernet, modem, firewire/usb, hard drive, cd/zip drive (internal). Maybe I’m missing something. What was it that you thought couldn’t be upgraded?
This is not always by choice. Example: A few years ago I was assigned the task of making a converter that would read the latest version of Aldus Persuasion files in PPT. In order to do so, I needed someone at persuasion to give me enough of the newer source so I could create the converter. In previous versions, they were receptive to the idea, but some new executive took over and refused to give me the source. Since I had neither the time nor the resources to reverse engineer the converter from scratch using PPT and an older converter, we had to scrap the idea.
So it’s not always our choice to not create a converter.
panamajack:
That sounds about right, pity its shattered my belief about the might of Gates.
Armilla I don’t claim MS doesn’t “innovate” at all… but perhaps that’s aimed at others here.
Dooku - has MS ever done that itself? Released source to someone making a converter or trying to make something compatible? To my knowledge, all the products out there (especially open source ones) that support MSWord or PPT or SMB or even just DHCP were made by reverse engineering, with no MS support whatsoever. (In fact IIRC, MS changed the SMB protocol just enough to break Samba w/o breaking their older Win9x machines a few times.)
Bytegeist has hit the heart of it - Microsoft has based their PR on the idea of wild-eyed geek innovators when in fact the company is now and always has been a very traditional, white male, hierarchal gray-flannel suit enterprise depending on gamesmanship and aggressive-to-illegal tactics.
Give me a specific example of an innovative software product that Microsoft developed on its own (i.e. didn’t buy or copy).
Patents have little to do with innovation. If you take an existing product or process and tweak it slightly, you can patent the result.
And Microsoft’s own research site? Please, hardly an unbiased source, wouldn’t you agree? But even there, the Fortune article: Windows Media Audio: what’s the innovation? e-commerce? Not even Microsoft is brazen enough to claim invention of that. Tablet PC? Anyone remember Grid, circe 1989?
Ok, the research site’s list of projects. Sure are a lot of 'em in there. But innovative? My random sampling showed a lot of “extending this” (e.g. Raven), and work to build better tools for existing tasks (e.g. the TLA Tools), and just integrating existing technologies (e.g. Smart Personal Objects).
Once again: Give me an example of a truly innovative product from Microsoft.
No, they didn’t develop MS-DOS. They merely bought QDOS, developed by Tim Paterson of Seattle Engineering, and Bill Gates himself went to Florida to pitch it to the Project Chess team.
However, Accidental Empires asserts that QDOS contained a lot of lifted CP/M code, and BG knew about it.
Eh, Longhorn, which integrates SQL Server? :dubious:
::ROTFLMAO::