Does Microsoft innovate?

Great Debates
41

[QUOTE=scotandrsn]
Really bad example. Age of Empires is based strongly on Sid Meier’s Civilization series, which came out first, and were in turn based on a 1980s board game.
[/QUOTE]
Age of Empires is only based on Civilization to the extent that the setting is in advancing a civilization from the stone age to some future point. The games are very dissimilar. Age of Empires is much more closely based on RTSs like Warcraft.

It is to some extent, but OpenGL (and its predecessors) was there earlier. Of course, those were on specialized graphics machines, not consumer boxes.

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[QUOTE=iamthewalrus(:3=]
…Age of Empires is only based on Civilization to the extent that the setting is in advancing a civilization from the stone age to some future point. The games are very dissimilar. Age of Empires is much more closely based on RTSs like Warcraft…

[/QUOTE]

…which was first published three years earlier than the original Age of Empires, as it turns out.

43

[QUOTE=iamthewalrus(:3=]

[ DirectX ] is to some extent, but OpenGL (and its predecessors) was there earlier. Of course, those were on specialized graphics machines, not consumer boxes.

[/QUOTE]

On the other hand, although OpenGL is certainly older, it only does graphics. DirectX is a big collection of APIs covering graphics, sound, networking, input devices, and other game-related services.

Nifty as that is, I’m hesitant to call DirectX a real innovation, since it’s just a gathering together of APIs they would (or should) have done anyway. They just choose to bundle it all under one brand name.

44

[QUOTE=Bytegeist]
I believe Borland’s Turbo Pascal beats them here, at least, but I’m not sure.

If you’ll accept Emacs as an interactive editor and compiler (which it is, among other things), then that certainly predates the Visual development environments.
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I wouldn’t argue against that; but Turbo Pascal was not nearly the first of its particular kind of IDE - I’m pretty sure I had an IDE compiler for my ZX Spectrum. But that’s not what I really mean by *visual *IDE; I’m talking about visual, graphical object-oriented form design with drag/drop/click property and event handler management. I can’t think of an example of this that predates VB, but maybe I’m missing something

45

[QUOTE=scotandrsn]
In other words, the computer is providing UI responsiveness at the same time as overseeing the completion of the print job, thereby engaging itself in multiple tasks at the same time? :dubious:

How is that not multitasking?
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I agree that multitasking was a motivator. Just not timesharing.

46

[QUOTE=sweeteviljesus]
Does Microsoft innovate?
[/QUOTE]

Bob.

47

I think B:)B was pretty innovative. And have you forgotten Clippy?

48

I was wondering what he’d been up to since he retired from baseball.

49

[QUOTE=AHunter3]

Is Microsoft unusually bad about mostly buying out successful companies or copying what they did without innovating much? Well, yeah, in my opinion, they do indeed have such a track record. What’s more annoying is that they often buy out a good small company with a kick-ass product and then don’t do squat with it and it withers and dies. Run any FoxPro databases lately?
[/QUOTE]
I was going to mention that, but my view is they bought out Fox Software to upgrade it just a trifle, make it a cash cow, then bury it, since their in-house Access database manager didn’t have royalties attached to each sale. I think this is a typical product development cycle for MS.

Of course, MS is not the only party guilty of such action. To use the Fox story as an example, since I happen to know a good deal about it…first there was Wayne Ratliff who took a mainframe (mini?) program called Vulcan and ported it to CP/M. Pretty neat for its time. Smartly marketed by George Tate as dBase II, it became quite successful, then was bought out by Borland, who proceeded to bloat it with copius baggage until it became unwieldy and was no longer cutting edge (the multi-user interface was abominable). Enter a couple of smart guys who reportedly rewrote the code base over a few weeks, optimized the heck out of it, and sold it as FoxBase; leaner, meaner, and a far better program with an amazing lack of bugs.

Then, just when FoxBase was getting market share, Microsoft bought it out, bloated and bugged it again, ported it to Windows without the savvy of a couple of smart guys, and it languished and dissapeared. Deja vu all over again.

50

[QUOTE=Musicat]
I was going to mention that, but my view is they bought out Fox Software to upgrade it just a trifle, make it a cash cow, then bury it, since their in-house Access database manager didn’t have royalties attached to each sale. I think this is a typical product development cycle for MS.
[/QUOTE]
‘Embrace Enhance Extend, Extinguish’, it has been called. They’re trying this approach on the PDF format right now.

51

[QUOTE=AHunter3]

Is Microsoft unusually bad about mostly buying out successful companies or copying what they did without innovating much? Well, yeah, in my opinion, they do indeed have such a track record. What’s more annoying is that they often buy out a good small company with a kick-ass product and then don’t do squat with it and it withers and dies. Run any FoxPro databases lately?

[QUOTE]

Slight hijack.

I do support for a software company that is one of the bigger companies in the particular market we inhabit, and we are also known for having the best product. It is not the biggest market out there but it ain’t bad.

I trudge through FoxPro databases every day. Most of our products are written in Fox Pro though that is changing. I believe, but do not know, that our latest version is the last one to be built using Fox Pro. We are also moving to SQL. They haven’t provided a time line yet, but we have SQL products that clients are using presently.

End hijack.
Microsoft really isn’t about innovation. What Microsoft does, and it does it well, is take ideas and improve them and get them out to customers. Granted, the first two versions usually suck, it takes MS about three tries to get things right, but they do usually get it right after a while.

Slee

52

[QUOTE=Voyager]
I agree that multitasking was a motivator. Just not timesharing.
[/QUOTE]

What I was saying is that timesharing was a prime motivator (notice I said “a” and not “the”) for multitasking. Whatever, have it your way. It’s far too minor a point to take up this much thread already.

53

[QUOTE=sleestak]

Microsoft really isn’t about innovation. What Microsoft does, and it does it well, is take ideas and improve them and get them out to customers. Granted, the first two versions usually suck, it takes MS about three tries to get things right, but they do usually get it right after a while.

Slee
[/QUOTE]

I would argue that if it takes them at least three releases to actually improve something whose essentials have already been developed, then they aren’t that good at improving things.

54

[QUOTE=Mangetout]
How about Visual IDEs for programming languages such as Basic and C? Or did someone else do that first?
[/QUOTE]

How about NeXT with the NeXTStep Interface Builder?

Rob

55

[QUOTE=ultrafilter]
PnP hardware–if they didn’t invent it, they at least did a lot to popularize it.
[/QUOTE]

PnP was available on the Amiga in 1985 and worked very well. It wasn’t available from Microsoft until Win95, and even then, it was pretty primitive. I suspect it was available at Apple before 1995, also.

Bob

56

I’ll do a little defending of Microsoft here.

First of all, .NET is innovative. Sure, the concepts weren’t new to Microsoft, but the way Microsoft packaged it all together and pretty much bet the company on it becoming a core technology was pretty cool. And I’ve got to say, .Net 3.0 kicks some major ass.

.Net 3.0 is built on top of .Net 2.0, and adds some great new stuff - Windows Presentation Foundation, Windows Communication Foundation, InfoCard…

If you haven’t played around with WPF yet, try it. It’s revolutionary. It integrates all aspects of user interface building - media, graphics, forms, etc. Everything is driven under the hood by DirectX, so you get graphic acceleration even in forms rendering and other stuff. You can use XAML to build WPF screens, and I can tell you that you can build high-quality user interfaces in about a tenth the time as it used to take using Win32 (and about a quarter the time of WinForms). There’s a ton of really innovative concepts under the hood of WPF that make it a joy to work with. And you could do things that were flatly impossible before. I’ve seen a demo of a running user interface warped over a 3-D cube and spun in realtime. The UI had a window with a video running in it, and when the cube spins you can see the video still running. This is done with about 20 lines of code, btw.

WPF is going to change the way we build user interfaces.

Have a look at this interview - about 1/3 of the way he shows some demos of some WPF stuff, particularly using the visual brush: Visual Brushes in WPF
Then there’s Microsoft Research. Microsoft Research’s budget for 2006 is 6-7 BILLION dollars. That’s more than the entire National Science Foundation’s budget.

57

[QUOTE=Sam Stone]
Then there’s Microsoft Research. Microsoft Research’s budget for 2006 is 6-7 BILLION dollars. That’s more than the entire National Science Foundation’s budget.
[/QUOTE]

Quantity, not quality, eh?

58

[QUOTE=rjung]
Quantity, not quality, eh?
[/QUOTE]

Just curious. What is the dollar limit to determine quality/quantity?

59

[QUOTE=AHunter3]
Microsoft didn’t come up with that. The bean-counters at Microsoft should offer daily thanks to the Gods for the rise of Compaq and the other early IBM-compatible clones.

In sequential order:

• IBM prototypes a personal computer, to be called the Personal Computer, or PC

• IBM has the most expensive brainfart in history and decides to farm out the OS development to any 3rd party who wants to supply them with one

• Microsoft beats out CP/M for the bid, handing in something they acquired, originally called QDOS (quick and dirty operating system), repackaged as MS-DOS

• The IBM-PC does quite well, marketshare-wise. Each IBM-PC runs MS-DOS and ships with MS-DOS on diskettes (or, upon the ubiquity of hard drives, preinstalled)

• Other hardware companies reverse-engineer the IBM-PC and produce IBM-compatibles. They run MS-DOS, too.

• MS, which didn’t do anything in particular to make that happen, sure doesn’t do anything to prevent it. IBM does, (tries to change architectures, micro-channel I think it was called? Also tries to supplant MS-DOS with OS/2), but to no avail. So no one needs an IBM-PC to run MS-DOS (and later, Windows).

• Fast forward a couple decades and Apple, whose computers were not reverse-engineered and whose OS is produced in-house to run only on their hardware, is still in business and doing decently well; Microsoft, whose OS runs on everyone’s hardware (including Apple’s nowadays), kicked everyone’s butt and is the biggest software company on earth; IBM, whose hardware got reverse-engineered and the OS of which is made by other people, bailed out of the personal computer business (they put their logo on machines made by another company).
[/QUOTE]
But Gates had the foresight to retain rights to the OS. IBM didn’t think that was abig deal because they didn’t foresee the clone wars. I think there may have been a legal reason as well. IBM had been forced to unbundle their SW from their HW for their mainframes, so this may have been an easy way to do that. And after all, the money is in the HW, right? :wink:

60

This is pretty cool: MyLifeBits. A system to archive your life. Pretty neat.

Then there’s Microphone Array, software which uses inputs from multiple microphones to identify where a speaker is, then to ‘beam form’ the sound by cancelling out everything but the speaker.

Here’s just a small sample of the Human-Computer Interaction research they are doing. All kinds of new input devices (including direct brain interfaces), new UI paradigms, etc.