Microsoft, the follower
Microsoft earlier this week celebrated its 10,000th patent. Implicit in that announcement is the supposition that "patents = innovation." However, a quick look at Microsoft's last five years demonstrate a company that is struggling to copycat the best the industry has to offer, rather than innovate.
Take, for example, Microsoft's decision to open retail stores. Never mind the fact that most technology companies have failed to successfully launch retail outlets, as CNET's Charles Cooper reminds us, and never mind that Microsoft's primary products like Windows 7 are likely to come pre-bundled with new computers, not bought separately at retail, as ZDNet's Sam Diaz writes.
No, the real problem with the retail stores is that they demonstrate a continued lack of creativity and innovation at Microsoft. Don't believe me? Well, how about these products that broke new ground in innovation?
- XBox (Sony Playstation)
- Live Search (Google, Yahoo)
- Zune (Apple iPod)
- Vista/Windows 7 (Apple's Mac OS X)
- I'm a PC advertising campaign (Apple's Mac vs. PC campaign)
- SharePoint (Documentum - though to be fair, SharePoint is significantly better than Documentum and the old-school ECM products)
- Tabbed browsing and other features in IE (Firefox)
And so on. Even Microsoft's Surface, which is very cool, functions much like an iPhone (though at significant scale).
Maybe this isn't all that new. After all, Microsoft's Office product originally started off as a rip-off of WordPerfect, and has hardly changed since the day Microsoft killed off WordPerfect. This is why Mitchell Baker's counsel to the European Commission to not allow Microsoft to dominate the browser market is timely and important: Microsoft is not an innovator, and becomes even less of one when it dominates a market.
Microsoft does a great job of executing against others' innovations. It is not an innovator, however, as David Wheeler called out back in 2001.
In this way it's much like the criticism it has of open source: Microsoft claims that open source steals others' intellectual property and doesn't innovate. Pot calling kettle black?
Follow me on Twitter at mjasay.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
Why, 80 versions of Windows 7! And Zunes! And customers will be able to look at pictures of the 8 billion different hardware configurations that run crappy Microsoft software. What a fun customer experience!
Microsoft is not only not an innovator, but they have no clue what consumers want.
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The Company is New and on The cutting Edge of Technology when it comes to search engine seo..
*Sony Playstation(Nintendo)
*Google, Yahoo ( AltaVista, WebCrawler etc etc)
*Apple iPod (Sony Walkman)
*Apple's Mac OS X ( Straight Source Copy from Linux/GNU)
*Apple's Mac vs. PC campaign ( Has apple invented advertising...Cant any organization put on its marking campaing on television)
*Documentum ( Thanks for mentioning this i didnt knew if such a product exists... got my point? )
*Tabbed browsing and other features in IE (Firefox) -> Remember Opera
To add more
* Speed Dial in chrome and firefox ( copy from opera)
* Apple iPhone ( LG parda)
* Multi Touch ( more copy of surface... MS has been doing research since 2000... Just try using google)
and lot lot more....
I think you are selectivly distoring facts to prove your point. Microsoft has been doing innovation but taking some one eleses idea and improving up on it doesnt mean balaintly copying it. When apple does this they are hailed as innovaters. But when microsoft does this they are called copiers.
PC revolution is attributes to both microsoft and IBM and if it werent for these companies we all would have been waiting with our punch cards next to a mainframe waiting for out turn.
That is the *biggest* part of Microsoft's problem... not only are they a follower, they do a crappy job of implementing the stuff they copy *and* they use their monopoly position to jam it down everybody's throat.
Death to Ming!
Last I saw this happen CGTalk had got hacked and the hackers had boned their cron backups for three days before they found out.
I also want to know what bbneo2 has against the LibDems.
The thing that bothers me about Microsoft is that they are a predator. They like selling me platform and applications, but they will absolutely not hesitate to club me to death once they realize that my margins are good and they learn how to do what I do.
I'm not here to argue that Microsoft is the *most* innovative company out there. And they surely aren't as innovative as they should be for their size and R&D budget.
But to say that Microsoft doesn't innovate is either deliberately ignorant or buying into a tired old narrative just because you think it's cool.
Who was the first company to put an online mapping service on the web using satellite imagery? (Answer: Microsoft, about two years before Google existed as a company.)
Why can we log in here and post our feedback on this website without having a page-refresh? (Answer: Because of AJAX, which relies heavily on a magical feature called XmlHttpRequest. Invented by Microsoft in 1995, and first released in -- gasp -- Internet Explorer. Then, adopted by the standards bodies.)
Who delivered the first web-based multiplayer gaming service embedded in a web browser? (Answer: Microsoft, in 1995. I actually led the team that did that work.)
Who released the first high-speed online multiplayer gaming network for consoles? (Answer: Microsoft.)
Who created a way for all databases to connect at the middleware layer sort of like printer-drivers? (Answer: Microsoft, with Open Database Connectivity.)
Who released the first touch-based multi-tasking OS for mobile phones? (Answer: Microsoft, with Windows Mobile.)
Who released the first Language-integrated querying capability, with full ORM (object-relational modeling) support in the language? (Answer: LINQ. Have you tried it? It's astonishingly cool and useful from a rapid development standpoint.)
I *love* Apple, and Google and other great innovators. I'm an ex-MSFT employee, but I also write iPhone apps and I own an iPhone because I think it's simply a better product.
Google is also my start page, because it's better. But Google's amazing Maps product relies upon XmlHttpRequest, invented by Microsoft, and it followed a good 4 years after Microsoft had a free satellite-based mapping service on the web. And the iPhone is a killer product, but Jeff Han demonstrated multi-touch at TED a full two years before the iPhone was released. The iPod is a terrific music player, but far from the first digital music player; just a far better one. Even the Mac, as innovative as it was, took many great ideas from PARC and commercialized them. (Read "Dealers of Lightning" if you disagree. The graphical user interface, the Mac, ethernet and more emanated from that terrific R&D lab.)
My point is that we all stand on the shoulders of giants. To say that Microsoft always follows is a canard, and it's lazy journalism.
Microsoft does a lousy job at implementing and marketing their own innovations.
What's more interesting is that, Sony is just about closing their Sony Style Stores
http://www.wealthalchemist.com/Blog/2009/02/microsoft-retail-stores-collision-apple/
- by S!egfried February 23, 2009 9:19 PM PST
- Your examples are horrid. The Playstation wasn't the first console, Google wasn't the first search engine, the iPod wasn't even close to being the first digital music player, Mac OS wasn't even written by Apple... In short all the examples of leaders you gave are actually followers....
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