FWIW, you’re probably thinking of the three-hour long PBS miniseries Triumph of the Nerds from 1996, a very interesting look at the history of the industry.
(Sorry for the late reply - I left early on Friday)
I can only speak with certainty for PPT, and in our case yes we have, when offered. I’ve been on the Mac team since 1996 and we have a very good and open relationship with the Apple Devs. They had what they needed when they were working on the “export to PPT” feature of Keynote, and in years past I’ve helped Gold Disk out with their Astound product. In those years Persuasion and HG never asked us for a PPT translator that I’m aware of.
I can only assume that you’re laughing so hard because you know that your example just proves my point: Longhorn is hardly innovative, it’s just another step in GUI development, partly (as usual) playing catchup to OSX, and going a bit further down the road of integrating existing technologies into the OS. It’s the perfect example of what I’ve been saying, they’re building on what already exists, and what’s already been proven by others. What about the task-based interface, you ask? Please, just another step down the road of hiding OS details.
Try again.
Patent law isn’t quite as simple as all that, Roadfood. It’s true there’s not necessarily a direct correlation between number of patents and innovations, but you would expect there to be some correlation. If they didn’t innovate at all there’d be nothing to patent.
I think you’re a little quick to dismiss the more than six hundred research groups listed at the MS research site. You note that the couple you looked at seemed to be working stuff that built on existing systems, and dismissed them for that. Are you saying that all reasearch that builds on previous work is invalid?
Windows NT (and later derivatives) are often accused of being based on VMS. Fair enough, they are to a certain extent. And Linux is based on Unix, which was in part based on the research for Multics, which drew on even earlier timesharing systems. What’s your point?
Look at the “innovation” of the world wide web. Its invention is often attributed to Tim Berners-Lee at, but how much did he really invent? HTML is a cut-down subset of SGML. HTTP is pretty similar to pre-existing protocols (SMTP, for example). Hypertext was already around in Apple’s Hypercard, and in NoteCards from the Xerox PARC, even as far back as ZOG. The image formats were also already around, as were techniques like UUEncoding. By your criteria of demanding absolute originality it’s pretty hard to put your finger on anyone who’s ever innovated at all.
As I’m sure you’re well aware asking for a “software product” that Microsoft has entirely invented is very much a poisoned chalice. Everything builds on everything else. MS didn’t invent the word processor, or the spreadsheet or the web browser. But, then again, WordPerfect, Lotus 123 and Netscape Navigator weren’t original either.
I could point to new MS products like OneNote, but inevitably you could find a hundred ways to dismiss it as not innovative (pre-existence of multimedia, pre-existence of handwriting systems, pre-existence of graphics, pre-existence of computers). Or maybe SmartDisplays…but I guess the idea of having computers display information on screens isn’t original either.
In short, your confident “Try again” is a strawman.
Try again.
Well, I’m inclined to give Microsoft kudos for Excel. While I’ll quickly and often say that I don’t care much for the rest of their offerings (hate Word with a passion, don’t care for Windows, detest Outlook, don’t like Internet Explorer, have no need or use for PowerPoint or MS Project), Excel has always pleased me, and while it certainly wasn’t original from the ground up, go dig up a copy of Lotus 123 Release 2 for MS-DOS and compare it to Excel 1.0 for DOS, not to mention Excel 1.0 for Macintosh. Even under DOS, with no mouse, Excel was so much easier to learn and utilize.
Excel isn’t by any means the perfect tool for every job, but for a quick and dirty scratch pad that gives you the figures you want and lets you sort and graph and analyze, it’s a wonderful cross between power and ease of use. I can do more with FileMaker but I can’t set it up as rapidly.
In all fairness, I did not work in VisiCalc or Borland Quattro Pro or Claris Resolve or Wingz (who made Wingz anyway?) and for all I know one of them was as good or better than Excel. What I do know is that I ran across Excel early on and had no trouble figuring it out without a software manual. And in a software lineup otherwise characterized by featuritis and bloat and a tendency to be able to do anything as long as you’ve got an entire weekend to figure out how, Excel is still pretty self-explanatory.
I’m obviously not a MS patriot. But I have visited several rural libraries that had PCs and Internet connections donated by the Mr. Bill foundation. I had to whisper one small thank-you for that charitable contribution.
[nitpick] The QWERTY keyboard is not a particularly poor standard, nor is Dvorak the vastly superior alternative it is reputed to be. As the Master has admitted.
[/nitpick]
Moving this to Great Debates before you yahoos start throwing cd-roms across the room at each other.
Excel is quite nice, and as far as I know, it’s an in-house product from version 1. Their DOS effort, Multiplan, left a lot to be desired, but so did most early DOS spreadsheets.
Visicalc was the first one for DOS, and the original versions of Lotus shared a LOT of similarities. To use an industry term, the “look and feel” were almost identical, except that Lotus expanded on the functionality. Quattro Pro basically did the same thing to Lotus, except their original selling point wasn’t enhanced functionality as much as it was price. While this pissed Lotus off, the industry pundits mostly laughed and said “Good for the goose…”. They did later do some innovating, and eventually it became quite different. Wingz was about as cool as a spreadsheet can get, but it was produced by Informix, which had little clue how to market a product to spreadsheet users, especially of the Mac variety. Their charting tools were awesome.
My take on the OP?
Their past agreements with hardware manufacturers in regards to exclusivity are the thing I find most appaling, and I’m glad that they were forced to stop.
They do often buy products, rebrand them, and oftentimes improved them. I much prefer using MS SQL Server over Sybase, even though they both come from the same original source. Access was also not their baby originally, but I’d be willing to be it has almost no code from the original anymore. I don’t find anything wrong with this practice, and they certainly aren’t the only company that practices it. It does bother me when they take a nice product and neglect it, such as Fox, but that’s also not unique to them. Computer Associates has turned that into an art form.
They do innovate. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Bob was certainly innovative, even if it was cartoonish and despite the fact that it didn’t take off. Neither did IBM’s Topview, which was an excellent product. The .Net framework they created, on the other hand, is wonderful. While it’s clearly obvious that someone studied Java intensely when putting the classes and C# together, the entire Visual Studio.Net package is a phenomenal achievement. Microsoft is also being pretty open with it, allowing others to write languages that can work with it.
If by innovate, you mean come up with a novel concept all by themselves, without any outside influence whatsoever, and open up a whole new market, then no, they do little of that. If you mean take existing ideas and products and come up with ways of making them better, then yes, they do it often.
Microsoft is not completely innocent, and in some cases have crossed the line when it comes to ethical business practices, but they do still manage to create or improve on nice software at times.
They also seem to “get” the fact that most users are more interested in new features than smaller code size, more stable code, etc. While I’d probably pay $500 if the next version of their OS was identical in functionality to XP Pro, but was completely secure, crash-proof, and had a memory footprint that was 100th of the size of the current OS, I’m not a typical user.
I need to take back one thing I said. Apparently, and I have no idea how I didn’t know this, as I was already deep into the tech industry at the time, Lotus bought the rights to Visicalc, so I can’t accuse them of copying the “look and feel”, since they owned the product they copied.
For some reason, I still remember pundits laughing when Borland did it to them, but now that just confuses me more. 
The authentification software in Windows 2000 is basically the open source product Kerberos with a changed protocol, which makes a connection with non Microsoft machines impossible.
So, they not just stole the product and integrated it, they used their monopoly to lock the competition out.
Unfortunately, at that time kerberos was not under the GPL, which prohibits the usage of the code without making the changes open source itself. This has been changed since, kerberos is not open source, but it’s too late. Microsoft took it.
It’s legal, but IMO not moral. You decide.
cite or google for “Kerberos Microsoft GPL”
Bill Gates’ major innovations weren’t software, but it was nonetheless a vitally important creation. MS has created important software packages, but the real core was in the sales of software.
Up until MS came along, every company in the Biz tried to make their own hardware/software package (and now, Apple is the only opne really left alive, and its skittering on its last legs). MS changed that. gates took a number of other peole’s creations, put them together, and then sold his stuff at a huge volume to anyone who wanted it and at a cheap price. Disks cost bupkass to print: with enough sales volume everyone could own cheap software.
And by god was it successful. In a way, he’s just like Jobs. Neither of them really came up with brilliant software or hardware. The Mac is nice for some things, but ever version of its hardware and OS has had significant flaws (not that the Macophiles will ever admit it). Both MS and Apple have had some pretyt good idea. But the real core was in the sales and marketing approach. Mac today isn’t selling superior computers, not even for carefully selected photoshop filters taking advantage of already-patched bugs on a deliberately crippled PC, but they are selling a lifestyle and a self-image and a pretty case.
That’s rather unfair. MS is very good about consuming a whole need/opportunity in software, so very people have ever had a chance to break into their turf. MS is too successful thus far to lose out.
The only problem with Excel is that it has known errors, especially in statistics, that Microsoft won’t (I’ve heard can’t from people) fix. Of course, the work around is writing your own code to do what you need.
The amazing thing, really, about Excel is that it can be used for so much more than just business spreadsheets. I use it all the time in physics and chemistry. I even have a book, called Excel For Chemists, which tells you how to really use it to do chemistry. You can open files that you wouldn’t think of being able to open right off the bat, use it for automated data collection, and do all sorts of other things.
I agree that Microsoft Office generally has a tendency to bloat (my favorite version is 95 Pro, which I can’t use on campus anymore because it’s not compatible with the school’s XP standard), but Excel, in my opinion, has the lowest new feature to bloat ratio. Simple things in Excel XP, like the colors for each selected cell in a formula, really do make it easier to check your formula, as do the colored paranthesis. Of course, it still has that lousy paperclip, but at least it’s easy to get rid of.
Out of curiosity, asterion, do you have a cite for the Excel statistical errors? (Not being snippy here - genuinely curious. I develop stuff very occasionally for Excel and if there’re problems in there I want to know about them.)
My personal favourite feature in Excel XP is the XML spreadsheet format. I’ve been using it in a reporting environment, retrieving XML directly from SQL Server 2000 using annotated schemas and XPath queries and then transforming the output on the fly using XSL so that it loads directly into Excel with formulas, formatting and multiple sheets in place.
I’m still at a loss to explain the paperclip though. Some things just ain’t right.
Unfortunately, I don’t. And I probably should have been more careful saying this. I got this tidbit secondhand from a professor of mine who knows someone who went to Redmond on sabbatical with the intention of fixing those problems in Excel, only to be told that a. Microsoft knows about it and b. there’s nothing they can do about it because of something about the source code. I do not know if there is other information out there corroborating this.
In any case, the stat functions are not set up for small-sample statistics. One of my homework assignments in a class was to make either a spreadsheet or an Excel VB macro that would allow you to enter the data and spit out your stats right away. I chose the spreadsheet, as that’s about the level of my programming skills and I had no chance of learning VB for one assignment in an Analytical Chemistry class.
My metaphor wasn’t the best it could have been. True, QWERTY turns out not to be the disaster that Dvorak enthusiasts claim, and Dvorak doesn’t especially shine as a compelling alternative. In fact it might have no measurable advantage at all. Point conceded.
So my “QWERTY Syndrome” needs a punchier name. Somebody somewhere has probably already thought of one. But in any case the phenomenon I was referring to was: the premature adoption of a technology standard that hinders the future evolution of that technology; also, the market pressure that often drives such adoption.
Perhaps a better example than the typewriter would be the NTSC television signal standard. Designed originally for black and white pictures only, NTSC had to be jury-rigged later on so that color signals could be displayed sensibly by B&W receivers, millions of which had already been sold.
NTSC Syndrome it is then.
No wait. MS-DOS Syndrome nails it even better. 
Microsoft Bob. I have several copies if you would like one.
Bob
Gosh, bytegeist, you didn’t have to be so darned civil about it.
A brief history of spreadsheets:
You contradict yourself in two adjacent sentences. If there is “not ncessarily a direct correlation” then to “expect there to be some correlation” is to expect something that is not necessarily true. I made no blanket statement about patents in general, I simply said that the number of patents held by Microsoft is not evidence of the company’s innovations. Since you agree that " there’s not necessarily a direct correlation between number of patents and innovations", you agree with me on this point.
No, I’m not saying that at all. Where did the word “invalid” come from? I certainly never used it.
That no version of Windows so far can be called innovative. Again, I’ve never said anything about Linux, so what does that have to do with my point?
Again, you put words in my mouth that I never said. When did I say anything about “absolute originality”? Obviously almost everything that has been “invented” has built on something else. And nothing is done in a vacuum. “Innovative” is a relative term, so you need to look at the result and compare that to what already exists. Sure, Berners-Lee didn’t come up with everything about the WWW out of thin air. But what he did do, what resulted, was like nothing else that existed. Innovation.
And since I never made claim to WordPerfect, 123, or Navigator being innovative, what’s YOUR point?
And speaking of points, thanks for once again supporting mine by pointing out that Microsoft simply copied ideas from Wordperfect, Lotus 123, and Netscape Navigator.
You think that having computers display information on screens IS original?