Actually, they are good at improving things but it does take them a long time to get there. MS might have a slow development cycle, it takes them a bit to get going, but once they get going they do well. I think it depends on your mindset. You can either ship the best possible product or ship a workable product to get it in the wild and improve it in later releases. As far as I can tell MS usually opts for the second strategy. For a developer or user, this might not seem like the best way to do things but from a buisness end I can see why you might want to do it.
I think the decision depends on where you are at in the market. If you have a big comfortable lead in market share you can take time to add more features and do more testing. If you are playing catch up you have a lot less time because it is hard to get people to switch software once they are confortable using it(#1).
Slee
#1. I have no data to back this up, but as far as I can tell getting people to switch from one software package to another that does the same thing is very hard. Especially if there is a large amount of user effort and learning required.
As stated, that is correct, but seems to imply that the Mac had apples first GUI, and that is wrong. The Lisa predated the Macintosh, and used a GUI that was virtually identical to the origional Mac. Macintosh was essentially an economy version of the $20,000 (1983 dollars) Lisa.
I’ve seen several interviews of Apple executives where the convienintly forget to mention both the failed overpriced Lisa, and the underfeatured 2c which was intended to compete in the same non-market as the PC-Jr.
A couple corrections… actually, there’s a terribly large number of erroneous points being made. Just off the top of my head…
Microsoft did /not/ invent the scroll wheel. The Intellimouse was a year after the first scroll wheels appeared. As far as I can tell, they can be credited with the tilt wheel, but I’m wary of even giving them this much.
Age of Empires is more like Warcraft or Command and Conquer than anything else, both games that appeared long before AoE. Of course, all of these are younguns compared to the grandaddy of RTS games, Dune 2.
IDEs, languages, .Net… it’s all just repackaged stuff. I’d be willing to listen to an argument that DirectX was somewhat innovative, not in what it did but in the common API. But you’d be surprised what X-Windows came up with that never got used, and thus wasn’t put in the final release.
One thing that I do admit MS has done that I have yet to find absolute proof was done before is the tabbed window interface. Too bad they were incredibly slow in adding that idea to their web browser.
Innovation just isn’t MS’s strong point. It takes them several releases to get anything right. If they were a startup with a record like that, they wouldn’t have survived.
That said, MS Research has come up with some interesting stuff. It’s usually(but not always) botched when MS tries to implement it, but the ideas are sound.
I don’t have a reliable list of dates that I can fish out offhand, but I do recall hearing about scroll wheels before. This page presents a biased view against MS being the first, but does list two companies as having products beforehand. Also, didn’t MS purchase the Intellimouse from another company anyway? Can’t recall, there.
Another quick look at the Microsoft Hall of Innovation, which is another admittedly biased page, lists a few others.
Of course, I could be wrong, but I’ve never considered the scroll wheel to be an MS invention. The link above is particularly relevant to this discussion, it just took me a moment to recall it. Looks like the tabbed Window view is under debate put possible.
Note that some of the ones they reject, I think they’re being a little nitpicky on, so some of the items on that list may be considered innovations by someone with a little more flexibility and not so much anti-MS sland.
Wouldn’t Atari be the scroll wheel innovator with the ball used in Centipede? That thing scrolls on the x and y axis when the scroll wheel actually is a de-evolution back to 1 axis.
Regardless of who came out with the first scroll wheel, would you really consider that innovation? Or tabbed windows? If that is innovation then myself and just about every developer I’ve ever met has “innovated” thousands of times.
To me, innovation is a substantial change, like the GUI, object oriented programming, relational database and the math theory behind it, etc.
No, that’s a trackball. It’s basically a mechanical mouse flipped upside down. The scroll wheel is an addition to a mouse that gives you a third axis of movement in discrete steps.
I consider the scroll wheel a great innovation. It’s had a big effect on how I interact with computers, and I can hardly stand to use a mouse without one anymore. It has caught on with users, developers, and even competitors (see the Mighty Mouse’s scroll ball).
Then I suppose that to you, innovation is something that mainly comes out of academic research, and none of Microsoft’s competitors have innovated either.
And if we want to get really nitpicky, Atari’s first use of a track-ball was probably the black-and-white Football arcade game (complete with X’s and O’s), which had a ginormous track-ball players would roll to move their characters.
Yes, I know it’s called a trackball. My point was that it was a rotating control device as opposed to a key or joystick, and from that perspective, no the scroll wheel is not innovative.
However, they added it to the mouse instead of somewhere else, which makes it convenient (yes I do like it too), so I will give them credit for that and call it innovative, but for me it stretches the term a little.
If you water down that statement a little then yes I generally agree with it. As I posted previously, I don’t think there is too much innovation by any software company as most of it seems to be incremental improvement. This is not to say there is none, or that it only comes out of academic research, just that what I would consider “innovative” is reserved for those things that seem to be substantially new/different/better.
Well, if you’re taking that route, why stop at the trackball? How about this: the scroll wheel isn’t innovative because it’s a wheel, and wheels have been around for thousands of years.
What makes the scroll wheel innovative is not the fact that it’s a rotating control device (knobs and dials have been around for a long time too). Its innovation is that it allows you to adjust the thing you’re pointing at up and down, instead of simply activating or selecting it by clicking.
I submit that this definition is too restrictive for any meaningful discussion.
Given my previous post and explanation, do you really think this generalization is a fair characterization of my position?
Sure, if the software is written to interpret the signal that way. I guess I look at it a little more generically:
The scroll wheel is a rotating control device that will send signals indicating direction of rotation. The application can then use those signals to do whatever it wants, zoom in or out, make something louder or quieter, etc. etc. Given that there have been previous examples, it didn’t seem too innovative.
However, if you look at the Nintendo Wii’s new controller, that seems to occupy a new niche as far as control devices go. Would I call that innovative? Sure, maybe, kind of, but not nearly as much as the first GUI.
Sounds like we have a different “line in the sand” when we think of the word “innovative.”
Honestly, yes. If you’re going to dismiss the scroll wheel because rotating control devices already existed, I don’t really think dismissing it because rotating wheels already existed is any different.
As I said, knobs and dials are rotating control devices, and they’ve been around far longer than the trackball. (The first mouse didn’t even have a ball, it had two dials on the bottom which were directly turned by friction against the table.) I believe if you dismiss the scroll wheel because of its similarity to the trackball, you must also dismiss the mouse because of its similarity to the dial - all you’re really doing when you move a mechanical mouse is turning two rollers at the same time.
But of course, the point of the mouse and what makes it innovative isn’t the rollers, or dials, or camera, or laser, or whatever means it uses to track motion, and that’s what I think you’re overlooking. The mechanism by which it works is separate from the type of interaction that it enables. Similarly, the point of the scroll wheel isn’t the fact that it rotates; some mice have touchpads or joystick nubs on top for scrolling, but those still serve the same purpose as a wheel.
You can find previous examples of anything if you’re willing to lower the similarity bar enough. But I think combining a knob with a mouse, producing a knob that can easily be used to adjust something you’re pointing at, is a significant step forward. Innovation rarely means inventing something entirely new and unimagined; innovations usually build on what’s already out there.
I’d say it is innovative. The individual parts–a wireless controller, an accelerometer, a CCD–aren’t new, but the combination is new and allows for new types of input.
Well, the idea of a stick like device that can sense 6 Degrees of Freedom has popped up in numerous places in applications to do with VR and innovative user interfaces. Credit certainly goes to Nintendo for making the first one with acceptable accuracy that is under $100 but if we’re being so harsh on Microsoft for innovation, then the Wii controller is definately not innovative.