Thing is I cannot remember when Microshaft actually made any real innovations at all. For instance:
[ul]
[li]DOS: a port of CP/M bought from outside[/li][li]Windows: Bill did not invent GUIs or add anything significant[/li][li]Word: Bill did not invent word processors either[/li][li]Excel: or spread sheets[/li][li]Internet Explorer: BG’s late epiphany regarding the internet is well documented.[/li][li]SQL Server: yawn[/li][/ul]
So just what is this innovation which is now threatened?
You know, I spent way more time than I probably should thinking about this. I’m certainly no microsoft apologist, but i figured they had to have one original idea in 25 years.
So heres what I could come up with, productwise (other people may be able to talk buisness strategy better, I understand that their early company organization was kind of innovative).
The Mouse Wheel
Bob
Works (did anyone earlier have an integrated office package?)
Minesweeper
They also have a pretty active research department, but I’m not sure how much of that work has filtered down to the products.
Does something have to be completely new and original in order to be an innovation? Hell no.
Microsoft’s “innovation” was creating an operating system that was relatively easy to use AND capable of working with a diverse amount of software. Essentially, Microsoft created the first Swiss-Army-OS designed for the average Joe. Up until Windows first hit the market, the only big-time computer users were ones with a degree in computer programming (okay, slight exaggeration).
I’m afraid you’ve forgotten about the Macintosh OS. It’s even easier to use and, like any OS, will run any application written for it. The Mac OS was first, but Windows caught on a lot faster. Windows was cheaper because users didn’t have to change their hardware. It has taken a few years, but people are now starting to realize that you get what you pay for.
I was thinking about making this point myself, until I remembered that Macs had all the functionality Windows did, long before Windows 95 came out (Win 3.0 certainly doesn’t qualify as a swiss-army-knife OS). Hell, Office was originally developed for the Mac, because Bill Gates couldn’t believe that Steve Jobs would be stupid enough not to do what was necessary to turn Macs into the dominant computing platform.
If you completely close your eyes to the existance of MacOS than you might be right. Lets not mention that the MacOS is argubly the superior OS. Don’t want to get the MS apologists confused.
What MS has done has alot to do with the art of making money than making computers. Like
The Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish philosphy.
Way to get away (for a while) with illegaly crushing competition.
Getting rid of the useful and informative paper manual to save costs.
Charging $30-$50 for the printed manual that used to be free.
The way to keep the business OS market is to make OS’s backwards compatible at the price of stability.
Forcing OEMs to not provide backup windows CDs for their next version of windows.
Tech innovations:
The talking paperclip.
Bob
The scroll wheel, which is really cool.
Not to mention bring back the bowl haircut.
You are both forgetting that the whole OS was actually invented by Xerox. Xerox was stupid enough to GIVE it to Apple, who promptly let Microstoft steal it from them (they had a development deal with Microsoft)
This article in Wired magazine is an excerpt from a book that puts a different spin on Windows: Apple’s schizophrenic attitude towards clones led them into a deal with MS that they then backed out of. One of the reasons Apple lost the case against MS stealing the desktop was that they had originally signed them to a deal to port it to non-Mac hardware. They pull out, MS develops Windows.
I have a different spin on the OP that might also help discover that elusive beast, the Microsoft innovation: what has MS done (first) that others have copied? I can think of one thing: MS’s COM architecture is now being copied on Linux in GNome’s Bonobo architecture, and in Mozilla’s XPCom system. However, is MS the original developer of component architectures (it counts if they’re the first to actually implement a component architecture).
While Bob is generally accepted, the Intellimouse is a bit questionable;
from Boycott Microsoft’s Hall of Innovation:
BTW, that site accepts submissions regarding MS’s innovation.
Despite it’s name, the Boycott Microsoft site is a pretty decent source of information on what MS has done. They tend to post articles from a variety of sources, which are usually well-reasoned. They don’t have a lot of hoopla or tirades against MS; they simply present information.
On a personal note, I don’t think borrowing good ideas is necessarily wrong. That’s not the problem; the problem is that Microsoft’s basic business strategy is consistent coercion, cheating, and stealing.
And Avalongod, I wouldn’t say that Xerox was stupid necessarily for showing Apple a working GUI. The PARC isn’t set up to make money, it’s a Research Center, so showing off what work they’ve done is a natural thing for them.
The MacOS: Designed for a small number of computers on the market, namely, Macs, Macs, and only Macs.
Windows: Designed for everything else.
The average Joe didn’t have a Mac. They had an IBM compatible PC. Windows made a very resilient product for a wide range of people that may or may not be based on the MacOS (though I wouldn’t be surprised). Seeing as how they were the first to successfully create a widely populat GUI designed for the majority of consumers… how can that not be considered an innovation?
Spoofe, you don’t know your computer history. Read the article to which I linked above. Then ask someone in graphic design why they use Macs. You’re misinformed about the relationship between Macs and Windows, about the virtues of Macs, and the reasons that Windows has 95% of the market today.
Hansel, the “average Joe” isn’t in graphics design.
I KNOW the correlation 'tween Macs and PCs. I KNOW that fewer people have a Mac than a PC. I KNOW it’s been that way for a long time. I KNOW that Microsoft took advantage of a large market, while Apple took advantage of a small market. It doesn’t matter if the MacOS is a better product… most people weren’t able to USE it, since they didn’t have a Mac!
I bow to your superior KNOWledge, then. It doesn’t change the fact that Macs did (and does) everything Windows does, and did it before Windows.
A large market share isn’t an innovation. It’s being cheaper, having better marketing, and making better deals in the larger and more lucrative business sector. Good business strategy, yes. Innovation, no.
MacOS has NEVER run on machines made over the course of 15 years by over 1000 companies and well over 1,000,000 hobbyists, using parts from untold numbers of vendors who may or may not have provided drivers for their software and even some harware manufactured by the hobbyist themselves. It does not run on CPUs made by more than 10 different companies at the same time.
I am not saying that, given a machine running MacOS and a machine running Windows, you couldn’t do the same things. I’m saying that Windows innovated by running on such diverse hardware, while Macs, quite simply, did not.
Anybody who is complaining that Microsoft didn’t do anything great must just not remember what computing was like, pre-Windows. And yes, pre-Mac, as well. I’m not going to get into the Mac side of things because I agree with SPOOFE and Flymaster - regardless of how great the Mac OS is, the fact that you have to have a Mac to run it is simply too limiting.
Remember good ol’ WordPerfect? How 'bout Lotus 1-2-3? Remember the 15 floppies that WordPerfect came with? Remember that 10 or 12 of those floppies were Printer Drivers, because in the pre-Windows world each application had to provide support for EVERY printer out there. You got another 10 or 12 disks with Lotus. And another with your database program. Boy, wasn’t that great? Damn Microsoft for improving on that design!
How 'bout graphics drivers? It was the same story if you wanted to display something other than text. You wrote a driver for each and every video card out there.
Hmmmm… what if you wanted to say, put a block of your spreadsheet into your word processor document. You just try getting Lotus and WordPerfect to do that. Yes, later versions would allow that, but not until Microsoft provided the technology (remember DLE?) to do that.
No, Microsoft isn’t perfect. No, they weren’t the first inventors of a lot of technology. But they did make it easy, cheap, and accessible to the masses. They made computers exponentially easier to use, and put 'em everywhere.
IBM released PCs with a proprietary bios on non-proprietary hardware. PC clone makers reverse engineered the bios so they could make cheaper copies - thus, the clone wars, where IBM, HP, Wang, Samsung, Epson, and a host of others competed on 8088 platforms running DOS 4 or 5. There were two computing areas carved out: Mac, and PCs, which were built to a hardware standard. Drivers aside, there was no difference between DOS running on a Wang and DOS running on an IBM. This isn’t innovation, it’s good business sense - OS/2, under development at the same time, ran on all the same hardware. Unix has been running on many different hardwares for most of its life, and highly different architectures, at that.
If you’re tempted to credit MS with the widespread expansion of computing, remember that what made it happen was cheap hardware caused by the clone wars, and that expansion was well under way before 1995, when MS first released an OS that could be termed “easy to use”. MS rode the wave of expansion; they didn’t create it. They weren’t the ones who made it cheap, and they weren’t the first ones to make it easy or accessible.