Slashdot Log In
Microsoft is the Industry's Most Innovative Company?
Posted by
Zonk
on Thu Dec 20, 2007 03:21 PM
from the even-if-it-doesn't-work-vista-is-awful-pretty dept.
from the even-if-it-doesn't-work-vista-is-awful-pretty dept.
mjasay writes "According to a recent analysis by IEEE, Microsoft's patent portfolio tops the industry in terms of overall quality of its patents. And while Microsoft came in second to IBM in The Patent Board's 2006 survey, its upcoming 2007 report has Microsoft besting IBM (and even its 2006 report had Microsoft #1 in terms of the "scientific strength" of its patent portfolio). All of which begs the question: Just where is all this innovation going? To Clippy? Consumers and business users don't buy patents. They buy products that make their lives easier or more productive, yet Microsoft doesn't seem to be able to turn its patent portfolio into much more than life support for its existing Office and Windows monopolies. In sum, if Microsoft is so innovative, why can't we get something better than the Zune?"
Related Stories
[+]
Entertainment: Second Time 'Round - the Zune Flash In-Depth 180 comments
J Mallard writes "Ars Technica has an in-depth review of the new Zune Flash. The overall verdict? An improvement over the original, with some caveats. 'I suspect there's a special shotgun in Redmond passed around ceremonially to the different divisions so each can shoot itself in the foot. When the shotgun arrived at the Zune team HQ, it appears to have been directed squarely at one of the most promising new features the device has to offer: autosyncing of recorded TV content ... [Specifically,] DVR-MS support for unprotected standard definition TV recordings from Windows Media Center. HDTV and protected recordings are not supported.' Let me make sure I understand this: at this point, a consumer has purchased a PC, Vista, a tuner card, and a Zune, but still can't be trusted with high-def content? Nice.'"
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Full
Abbreviated
Hidden
Loading... please wait.
Prediction for this thread: (Score:3, Insightful)
Just call it a hunch...
IT RAISES THE QUESTION (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, but does that hunch beg the question, or raise the question? Inquiring minds want to know.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Prediction for this thread: (Score:5, Funny)
Just call it a hunch...
Parent
Did they include... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Did they include... (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:Did they include... (Score:5, Insightful)
There, fixed that for you.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Just goes to show... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Just goes to show... (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly. Invention != Innovation.
The iPod is a good counter-example. There was nothing particularly inventive about it, but it was quite innovative.
Parent
Re:Just goes to show... (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft's problem isn't R&D, it isn't that they don't have smart, cool or interesting people (although I imagine it's getting harder and harder to find new smart/cool/innovative ones)... their problem is the business management.
The management of Microsoft (based purely on my outsider observations) desperately wants to extend their monopoly as long as possible, by any means necessary. Their basic playbook, and it's getting kinda worn by now, is to make (or buy) neat tech and then force you to use their existing tech to use the neat tech. The problem with this approach is that the existing tech (Win & Office) is basically a frankenstein monster at this point and by crippling their new tech to force use of the old tech they ruin the good ideas. All this takes place well after the innovative thinking takes place.
MS shareholders need to do something about the state of that company, otherwise they're just going to continue to piss money away and eventually find themselves just like IBM in the early 90's.
l4h
Parent
the innovation is going to vista techs that no one (Score:3, Interesting)
Innovation (Score:5, Funny)
Innovation != Good (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Similarly there may well be plenty of good ideas which arn't patentable.
Call me skeptical (Score:5, Insightful)
Frankly, I think the patent system hasn't been a good gauge of innovation in many, many years. Patents are issued for everything from BS "perpetual motion machines" to the grilled cheese sandwich [patentstorm.us] are granted routinely.
Microsoft Research is awesome (Score:5, Interesting)
it's only a department (Score:3, Insightful)
If I pay a few millions and buy or even build an innovative R&D lab and let the PhDs there crank out super ideas every day and I never use them, I am not an innovative company. One department does not represent the whole company.
Are we done yet? (Score:3, Insightful)
Clippy has been gone for so many years now that when ever I see someone bring him/it up, it automatically diminishes my respect for the author. The only thing more lame than dragging out Clippy would be dragging out Bob, or the hoax/cliche phrase "640k is enough for anyone" crap.
Re:Are we done yet? (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I wish you'd tell Tom that. I hate walking into his office. He has all those annoying sound effects turned on, too.
They have some amazing new technology... (Score:5, Interesting)
Things that I have either heard of or seen coming from Redmond:
Any of which could have had multiple patents. A lot of what they do is impractical as a product now (the wall for instance), but is an investment in the future. Like in the early 90's when they purchased tons of digital rights. And some, like the Network LOD, are designed for developers to tie them into MS products.
But Microsoft, like AT&T when it had too much money, take a bunch of academics, give them money, and tell them to do cool things. After all, the whole deparment will pay for itself with a couple of nifty inventions.
Quality, not quantity (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft is *not* that innovative a company - it's bread and butter (80% of profits or so, I believe) come from corporations (not people), and corporations generally like "more of the same, please". There's nothing wrong with serving that demand, and [insert deity] knows they have clever people working there - the conclusion is that they don't *want* to be an innovative company - they're happy with the status quo, because it brings in gazillions of dollars for them. Sure, they'll have the occasional exciting new thing (how could they not, given their staff ?), but that's not the *company* focus.
In comparison, Steve is fond of saying he likes to run Apple as a small company, with the resources of a large company. That the cash-in-the-bank at Apple is because they *do* take risks, they *do* push the envelope that little bit farther, and that having a large wad of cash to fall back on is very useful, you know, just in case... Apple is ~1/5th the size of Microsoft (I think) in terms of staff, that's a lot of people, but they're spread pretty thin ("small company", "siege mentality", "more productive"), considering they produce computers, consumer devices, a major OS, several consumer apps, several pro-apps, as well as design their own hardware, operate a chain of retail shops (where most of the staff are), etc. etc.
Bottom line: Bill Gates said that Microsoft were one innovation away from being made irrelevant, and they work to protect their monopoly because of that. Apple's focus is more on the 'next big thing'. They take risks, and to do that you have to execute on new ideas. Apple is innovative, and its customers are people. Microsoft is protective, and its customers are corporations.
Simon.
Well, duh (Score:5, Interesting)
That's because innovation isn't measurable by the number of patents you produce. Let me tell you my patent story.
I used to work at a company that made a widget. Details left out because of possible NDA/lawsuit goodness.
There were 3 or 4 other players in this widget space. There are about 3 or 4 useful functions any of these widgets can do.
One of the other players decides to patent "feature A from this widget, combined with feature B from this other widget". A multi function widget, merely taking two functions from two widgets and combining them. In other words, peanut butter is ok, and jelly is ok, but putting peanut butter with jelly is *hugely innovative* and deserves a patent.
We held meetings and began to file patents too. They were all equally insane.
There was NO INNOVATION going on in these meetings. Just carving up the widget patent space - that has existed for years - with each of these little companies nit-picking each other to death with patent suits and royalty fees.
Patents do not equal innovation.
Compare for yourself (Score:3, Interesting)
http://research.microsoft.com/research/default.aspx [microsoft.com]
There's no real contest though. If they were course listings, one reads like MIT and the other like a community college.
Word Count (Score:5, Funny)
Words bashing Microsoft: 74
CD in a shoebox (Score:3, Interesting)
They practically invented the EULA for the masses.
They entered new markets by simply buying companies and their portfolios.
They probably weren't the first in any of these, but they perfected integrating these into a government-proof business strategy.
So yeah, they're pretty innovative.
Patently Absurd. (Score:5, Informative)
Secondly, a patent doesn't guarantee the given innovation ever reaches the market. To the contrary, patents are often used to protect an existing inferior product from going to market by having a monopoly over a potentially superceding product. As a result it's possible to argue that patents discourage actual innovation rather than encourage it.
Not that bad. (Score:5, Insightful)
The Flight Simulator line that they bought from SubLogic is actually very good. I love it and it is one of the reasons I keep Windows on my system.
I remember Word way back when No one used Windows and WordStar and WordPerfect ruled. It required a mouse and no one used it because it was SO different. Excel was another really innovative product. It was so much better than Lotus123 that it made your head hurt. I wounder how many Mac where bought just to use Excel before It was ported to Windows.
Visual Basic for all of it's proprietary nature did let a lot more people write code for Windows. Of course it let a lot of people that should have never been allowed to code to write code but that is another story.
Visual Studio is a very good IDE.
The calendaring features of Outlook/Exchange are very good.
The XBox 360 seems to be the right balance of HD graphics and cost.
XBox Live from what I hear is very good.
So yea give the devil his due.
The real truth is that everything is going to look like small beans compared to Windows and Office.
Re:Not that bad. (Score:5, Interesting)
What is true is that Microsoft do not - indeed have never - innovated. They've taken existing ideas, either bought them or copied them then marketed the hell out of the result.
Examples:
Flight Simulator - bought from SubLogic. (You said this yourself!)
FoxPro - Originally produced by Fox Software, which was bought out by Microsoft in 1992.
Outlook/Exchange - Lotus Notes was a groupware product well before then.
Access - Originally plagiarised from Borland Paradox.
Excel - Plagiarised from Lotus 1-2-3. The two were basically playing leapfrog in feature sets before 1-2-3 bit the dust.
Word - Plagiarised features from WordPerfect. Won the battle primarily by being sold to the boss rather than the secretary who was actually typing the letters.
Windows - Most graphical operating systems of the 1980's-1990's were shamelessly taking ideas from each other. The bar across the bottom of the screen, for instance, was seen in RISC OS and CDE long before Windows '95 hit the shelves.
XBox Live - the PS2 offered online play, but Sony never really exploited this. Frankly, it was a little early because it predated ubiquitous broadband.
In fact, Microsoft can't even innovate at the very simplest level.
Microsoft Paint (yes, that crappy little paint tool which has come free with Windows since the Windows 3.x days) - Take a look at this [wikipedia.org]. It's PC Paintbrush for DOS - developed by a company called ZSoft.
Parent
Too many patents gurantees poor innovation! (Score:3, Insightful)
All have some success stories from their respective research divisions, yet nothing remotely comparable to the number of patents they filed for.
Truthfully, a lot goes in to taking a "innovative idea" and taking it all the way through to become a marketable product in mass production. I think some of these big firms just like to pay a "think tank" to work on "anything you like", throwing all manner of things at the wall to see what sticks. This ends up being profitable for them because of all the lawsuits they can file over the trivial patents other people end up infringing on by accident - and means they're likely to eventually come up with something really innovative, at SOME point in time. (EG. Post-it notes!)
Smaller, more efficient businesses will do the R&D only on things focused squarely on a specific goal they've defined. They won't have huge numbers of patents, but will have ones relevant to their task at hand. These folks get more products to market per patent than the "big guys" do.
Begs the question? (Score:4, Insightful)
Does anyone else get the feeling that the editors actually do know what "begs the question" means, and are just screwing with us to get a higher post count?
I don't think it means what you think it means (Score:5, Informative)
Microsoft has many innovations in their products. (Score:4, Informative)
First, Office *does* have lots of innovations, particularly Office 97 and Office 2007.
Clippy *was* innovative. Yeah, it failed, but a lot of research went into it.
LINQ *does* rock.
Which reminds me that Microsoft just recently released a CTP of the
VC-1 *is* the most efficient hidef video codec.
XNA *is* an innovative product.
See the 2006 DEMMX Awards [demmx.com] and see that Microsoft won Best of Show - Innovator of the Year (beating out the likes of Apple, who won a lesser award for video iPod) and Game Innovation of the Year, both for XNA.
Microsoft *has* been commissioned by the JPEG working group to develop JPEG XR (aka HD Photo aka Windows Media Photo) as the next-gen photo image standard (where JPEG2000 failed).
Industry Standardization for HD Photo [msdn.com]
Check out this article on SIGGRAPH 2007 and learn that Microsoft is leading the way regarding graphics technology.
Siggraph: Microsoft the new research powerhouse in graphics? [computerworld.com]
F# *is* being "productized" and is already used in Xbox Live.
Vista *does* have excellent speech recognition (despite a failed demo of a beta), even admitted to by Mac fanboy David Pogue.
Telling Your Computer What to Do [nytimes.com]
Windows 2 Apples [podbean.com]
TabletPC'S *do* have the best handwriting recognition in the biz.
It goes on and on.
Microsoft Research [microsoft.com] is this era's "Bell Labs" and "Xerox PARC", but much of Microsoft Research's stuff does wind up in products. Microsoft Live Labs [live.com] is also doing interesting stuff like Volta (which is being productized), Photosynth, etc.
Just because slashdotters don't are totally ignorant of Microsoft tech doesn't mean that such tech doesn't exist.
Actually, the original Clippy was very innovative (Score:4, Informative)
The marketing folks decided it wasn't coming up enough (who want's a revolutionary feature hidden away most of the time?), and so made the development people dumb Clippy down, so it would think you were in trouble at the first sign of anything slights wrong, and pop up.
I suspect that this happens a lot with Microsoft products. The research version of Clippy was probably one of the best online help aids ever--way ahead of, and far more useful than, anything you'll find on Linux or Mac. Then marketing turns it into a joke.
Re:My only guess is that it is the handheld OS!! (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
USE AdventureWorks;
GO
WITH OrderedOrders AS
(
SELECT SalesOrderID, OrderDate,
ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY OrderDate) AS 'RowNumber'
FROM Sales.SalesOrderHeader
)
SELECT *
FROM OrderedOrders
WHERE RowNumber BETWEEN 50 AND 60;
Re:My only guess is that it is the handheld OS!! (Score:4, Interesting)
I wasn't good enough to notice when I was using SQL Server 6.5, but I've never noticed such a thing in 7, 2000 or 2005.
On the one project I used MySQL for, I was relieved to discover that it finally supported subqueries, but they ended up being unusably slow because the optimizer couldn't seem to do any optimization between the inner and outer queries. I ended up using Java code for what I would've just done with a subquery in SQL Server. Of course, now I'm mainly working in Oracle, and I have an almost opposite complaint; subqueries (and frequently several of them) seem to be the only way to accomplish a lot of things that wouldn't have taken much thought in SQL Server.
T-SQL always had the edge by allowing you bypass its annoyances by using stored procedures and views but this has now changed since MySQL 5.
I've only done stored procedures in SQL Server, Oracle, and barely in Informix. Informix procedures just suck unreservedly. Oracle PL/SQL is a decent procedural language, but the interface to regular SQL can be a bit awkward, and there's entirely too much iterative code needed for my taste. T-SQL is rather limited as a procedural language, but seems to do a lot better at letting you stay within set-based logic.
What are MySQL procedure like?
Parent
Re:My only guess is that it is the handheld OS!! (Score:5, Informative)
MYSQL:
SELECT * FROM records LIMIT 5, 5
T-SQL
SELECT TOP(5) * FROM records WHERE id NOT IN (SELECT TOP(5) * FROM records)
They both select records 5-10, but one is more redundant. (and possibly more memory intensive, slower, etc)
Parent
Parallel Programming Research at MS (Score:3, Interesting)
Yeah, and not only that, Microsoft seems to have understood that the first company to crack the parallel programming nut will be at the forefront of computing in this century. Lately, they have hired a few world-renowned experts in parallel programming and supercomjputing. Dan Reed (formerly of the Rennaissance Computing Institute [renci.org])
Re:Research! (Score:5, Interesting)
When IBM comes up with some great new technology, like the damascene process (copper on ICs), SOI, etc., we see it in chips pretty soon after. It was only about 10 years ago that the copper process was invented by IBM, and now every CPU has it to my knowledge, as has for quite some time. Intel invented a "strained silicon" process, and their CPUs have it now.
So where are MS Research's efforts paying off? Research isn't any good if it isn't actually applied somewhere. Basic research with no obvious course to application has its place, such as with fundamental science like quantum physics, exploration of Mars, etc., but software isn't one of them. If you can't find a place to use your findings, you've wasted your time. Back in the 60s-70s, researchers invented new programming languages and operating systems, and pretty soon industry and academia were all using C on UNIX machines. But we haven't seen anything come out of MS Research that's made a significant difference in anyone's lives.
Parent
Umm... examples? (Score:5, Informative)
VC1
XBox Live and XNA
C#
Ribbon
Sharepoint
or those nice mice/keyboard that Microsoft makes, they get a lot of patents for those, or if SQL Server does something better in the next release, well they get patents for the new algorithm/method that helped them achieve better performance.
Of course, if you open your eyes, there's a lot more, and they are affecting millions of people.
Parent
Re:MSFT invented IPv6!? (Score:5, Informative)
As for the other things you list, some of them did originate at Microsoft, or Microsoft was among the first. Spam filtering, for example (no Paul Graham was not first with statistical spam filtering--he was the first to popularize it). And they have indeed invented quite a bit of photography analysis tools.
Microsoft Research is basically an academic research lab. The place their results usually go are peer-reviewed journals and conference proceedings (which is why most people here never hear of them). But they also work with the product development side of the company so that the products can include this stuff, whether it was something invented at Microsoft, or something that was invented somewhere else and MS Research simply contributed advancements to the original investment.
Parent
Re:MS does have some valuable patents (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.grc.com/ctwho.htm [grc.com]
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
ClearType cannot be read by anyone (Score:5, Informative)
I have extreme difficulty to read ClearType text. I think this is related to the way the eyes of some people work and that other people also have similar problems.
I always thought that everyone was seeing the same things as me (fuzzy text hidden in an abyss of colours) and I thought well, maybe the whole world turned crazy or what, until I told what I were seeing to some other people and I asked them what they were seeing and they said "soft black letters", and then I read about the issue a bit and confirmed that yes, I am one of these people who can't read this stuff.
One would assume that the purpose of text is to be read rather than to look pretty. In this regard, ClearType creates difficulties for some people whose eyes can discern colour in more "resolution" than other people (ie it penalises people who have better eyes).
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Microsoft actually does real research ... (Score:5, Informative)
It does not seem that you are qualified to comment on the shortcomings of others, you need to work on yourself first. Those interested in what MS actually does in house might want to look at Micorsoft Research's project page: http://research.microsoft.com/research/projects/default.aspx [microsoft.com].
Also, out of house research is not necessarily patented. A friend did research on distributed shared computing in grad school. The project was supported by Microsoft, they had access to Windows source code, they were not restricted from publishing their research.
Parent
Re:They said innovation, not WHINE (Score:4, Insightful)
So if the GP stopped complaining then MS would make something better than the Zune? I think you have that backwards, son. The squeaky wheel gets the grease, the open mouth gets fed. If I complain about a crappy product (not saying zune is crappy, never used one) the company may or may not take my complaints seriously and change the next iteration.
If no one bitches then they'll pat themselves on the back. I'm not a good judge of my own product, you are.
Please, enlighten me as to how much more would get done if people who do ACTUAL WORK had OpenOffice to use on a daily basis?
AFAICS having office suites that interoperate with different companies' suites would smooth business quite a bit. MS Office isn't so widespread because of its quality, it's widespread because only another Office user can interoperate seamlessly with it, and because nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft.
I am not a Microsoft apologist
I couldn't tell that from your post but I'll take your word for it.
Parent