Is Microsoft Actually Innovating?

http://blog.villainousmind.com/2009/06/is-microsoft-actually-innovating.html

by Deadly_B • 17 years ago

15 26 17 years ago

blog.villainousmind.com

icey• 17 years ago

I do feel like Microsoft has been listening to what its consumers are asking for more than it used to. I think they got humbled by Vista more than they'd like to admit.

aswanson3• 17 years ago

Microsoft needs to stop this genuine validation shit before they get a class action against them on it. I paid for a PC two years ago that worked up until last night when I got greeted with this:

http://social.microsoft.com/forums/en-US/genuinevista/thread...

Never mind the recovery process now that they don't even ship some computers with the OS disk.

aswanson3• 17 years ago

Update: The bastards are magnanimous enough to allow a special mode where a browser can be used to go to pay for a genuine liscense, but no way to restore what you already paid for. So not only do they accuse customers of theft, they hold your pc hostage to extort more from legitimate users. I despise them. Do not trust MS with any data you have.

sp332• 17 years ago

Microsoft Research has some very cool stuff. But that technology gets into consumer products very slowly, if ever.

http://research.microsoft.com/apps/dp/pr/projects.aspx

anigbrowl• 17 years ago

Ray Ozzie certainly seems to be changing their corporate culture for the better. On the provided examples, Natal looks like an unambigious winner if it delivers; Sideshow looks more in the pattern of MS delivering an awkward implementation of a basically good idea.

Let me rephrase that. Sideshow looks stupid and the name invites mockery. Make it a tablet touchscreen and say it's the future of the mouse, and then please send me one if this turns out to be profitable.

tybris2• 17 years ago

There are many innovative companies like Philips, Amazon.com, Yahoo!, Sun, formerly AT&T, but Apple and Microsoft are not among them. Their core competencies are quality and marketing. There's way more money in that.

Apple did not invent the phone, mp3 player, video player, application store, etc. They just perfected and skillfully crafted hypes around them. Microsoft did not invent the Office suite, IDE's or the hardware acceleration layer, but they did perfect and deploy them through aggressive business strategies.

jameskpolk• 17 years ago

>Apple did not invent the phone, mp3 player, video player, application store, etc. They just perfected and skillfully crafted hypes around them. Microsoft did not invent the Office suite, IDE's or the hardware acceleration layer, but they did perfect and deploy them through aggressive business strategies.

Is your claim that a company must invent something from whole cloth to be "innovative"?

tybris2• 17 years ago

No, but that's not how they run their business. You shouldn't expect Microsoft or Apple to be innovative, you should expect them to make a better product than everyone else and/or market it better than everyone else.

Amazon.com did invent Cloud Computing, Philips did invent the CD, Sun did invent Java, Toyota did invent the hybrid, AT&T did invent the cell phone, Xerox did invent the GUI. Those are the companies that run on innovation.

philwelch2• 17 years ago

"Apple did not invent the phone, mp3 player, video player, application store, etc."

That doesn't mean they aren't innovative. It's easy to invent the MP3 player. It's hard to invent the MP3 player that people actually want to use. That doesn't suck.

mattmaroon2• 17 years ago

"For example, no one wants an iPod. They never have."

Obviously this guy has never watched a television. Apple spends hundreds of millions each year making sure people do want an iPod.

incomethax• 17 years ago

Apple doesn't spend its money making sure people want iPods, they spend their money making sure people want to listen to "the right song wherever they are," and making sure that the iPod is the device that lets them listen to "the right song wherever they are."

paulgb• 17 years ago

Even if this (dubious) claim is true, it doesn't negate Matt's point.

mattmaroon2• 17 years ago

No offense, but that's stupid. Apple doesn't need to spend a dime "making sure people want to listen to 'the right song wherever they are'". People have probably wanted that since wars were fought with sticks and have expected it since the Walkman in the '80s. That's like saying Coke's ad budget is an attempt to convince people to drink something when they're thirsty.

They spend their money on branding ads, to make sure that when people think about "listening to 'the right song wherever they are'" they associate that with an iPod. That's the only explanation, since everybody has known what an iPod is for years and yet they still spend literal hundreds of millions per year on ads for them.

calambrac• 17 years ago

For example, no one wants an iPod. They never have. What people want is to hear the right song at any given moment in time anywhere they are at without any device whatsoever.

That's an adorable bit of engineer-brain reductionism, but I don't think it's right. Having some kind of device in the loop is useful as a symbol. It tells other people that you're listening to music, that you spent a certain amount of money to do so, or that you do or don't pay attention to what's popular. If you bought a certain color, you probably did so to convey (or to avoid conveying) something about yourself, etc. People like to carry around and display tokens of their interests.

netsp3• 17 years ago

People like things.

rudyfink• 17 years ago

This certainly seems to be true of some people. I have lost count of the number of times I have heard the phrase "retail therapy" used.

phatboyslim• 17 years ago

For those unfamiliar with Johnny Lee, I highly recommend is YouTube videos on Wii Hacks ... he is a well recognized genius int the field and was recently employed by Microsoft after graduating Carnegie Mellon university. His involvement in this project ensures that it will have a better chance at survival.

joel_feather• 17 years ago

It's easy to sing to the choir. It's also boring and badly written.

Microsoft has made a LOT of innovations. A massive amount of modern computing is based of how accessible microsoft made computing - if we still had to recompile our kernel to enable sound, I don't think we would be near as far as we are.

sundeep• 17 years ago

> Microsoft has made a LOT of innovations. A massive amount of modern computing is based of how accessible microsoft made computing - if we still had to recompile our kernel to enable sound, I don't think we would be near as far as we are.

Sure , they've enabled innovation. How much have they actually done ...

Tichy• 17 years ago

I think it is just dumb to claim that Microsoft doesn't innovate. Comparing them to Apple is also a bit like comparing Apples and Oranges (pun intended).

Is Microsoft Actually Innovating?

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