Is Microsoft An Innovator? - The Winer-Scoble Debate

Carl Bialik from WSJ writes "Bloggers Robert Scoble (a former Microsoft 'technical evangelist') and Dave Winer (longtime Microsoft critic) debate whether Microsoft is driving innovation or playing catch-up, in an email conversation published on WSJ.com. Winer writes, 'Microsoft isn't an innovator, and never was. They are always playing catch-up, by design. That's their M.O. They describe their development approach as "chasing tail lights." They aren't interested in markets until they're worth billions, so they let others develop the markets, and have been content to catch-up.' Scoble responds that Microsoft's innovation can be found in the little things: 'I remember when they improved the error messages you get in Internet Explorer, or when they improved fonts in Windows with ClearType technology. That improved our lives in a very tiny way. Not one that you usually read about, or probably even notice. Is Microsoft done innovating in those small ways? Absolutely not. Office 2007 lets me do some things (like cool looking charts) in seconds that used to take many minutes, maybe even hours for some people to do.'"

Innovation, huh?

[scdeimos]

Scoble responds that Microsoft's innovation can be found in the little things: 'I remember when they improved the error messages you get in Internet Explorer, or when they improved fonts in Windows with ClearType technology.

How quickly they forget that ClearType, the method as Microsoft describes it, is a direct rip-off of the font smoothing technology Apple came up with for using Apple II's on (comparatively) lo-res colour television displays in the mid-1980's.

Re:Out of proportion

[Anonymous Coward]

Not only that, but Cleartype is mearly a marketing name for sub-pixel antialiasing, which is something Microsoft did not invent. So where is the innovation? "Friendly" error messages in Internet Explorer are also hardly an innovation, unless you're going to set the bar extremely low. Most developers and sysadmins hate the things anyway.

Just for clarification:

[geekoid]

innovation /nven/ Pronunciation Key - Show Spelled Pronunciation[in-uh-vey-shuhn] Pronunciation Key - Show IPA Pronunciation
-noun
1. something new or different introduced: numerous innovations in the high-school curriculum.
2. the act of innovating; introduction of new things or methods.

From dictionary.com

So, I guess technically MS does innovate, but they don't create new markets.

Re:Your wrong

[neonstz]

ClearType is not just anti-aliasing.

Re:ATM released in 1991; ClearType shipped in 2002

[gEvil (beta)]

FYI, font anti-aliasing is not the same as sub-pixel rendering. However, they both give you smoother edges for screen fonts.

Re:Innovation, huh?

[Ed Avis]

According to this article [cnn.com], Microsoft's ClearType does seem to be a new thing and not a copy of the anti-aliasing used on the Apple II. The tone of the article makes it sound as though ClearType is nothing new, but if you read the details you see that Apple's anti-aliasing uses neighbouring grey pixels to smooth the boundary between black and white (something used in many font systems since), but Microsoft's thing goes a step further and uses the separate R,G,B pixel layout of an LCD to fill in one-third or two-thirds of a pixel horizontally. This wouldn't work with colour televisions or CRT monitors, even if they have a Trinitron-like horizontal layout, because you can't reliably control individual phosphors.

I'm all in favour of 'nothing new has been invented since 1970' but unless Apple was using _coloured_ pixels (not shades of grey) to smooth the border between black and white, by taking advantage of the different placement of red, green and blue elements on the display, then I don't think Microsoft copied this particular idea from the Apple II.

Re:Out of proportion

[SEMW]

What the hell are you on about? The page you linked to is about 6 new fonts that will ship with Vista & Office 2007. They obviously are designed to work well will work with Cleartype, but they're not what Cleartype is. Cleartype is a method of subpixel font antialiasing, which works with any (truetype/opentype) font.

Oh, and if you think all new fonts are "rehashes of the same generic fonts available to all", you're just ignorant. There's a hell of a lot to good font designing.

Re:Your wrong

[de Selby]

ClearType is not just anti-aliasing.

Right. It's subpixel rendering (which was done on the Apple II) and used to anti-alias (which was done by IBM in '88).

Um... also did scoble outright lie?

[Mateo_LeFou]

"Microsoft's Live.com has my blogs listed in the correct order, while Google does not (Live.com lists scobleizer.com, which is my currently-kept-up-blog first, while Google lists scoble.weblogs.com as first, despite the fact that I haven't updated that blog for more than a year)." -Scoble in TFA

I searched "scoble blog" at live.com and google

http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=scoble+blog& mkt=en-us&FORM=LVSP&go.x=0&go.y=0&go=Search [live.com]
http://www.google.com/search?q=scoble+blog&ie=utf- 8&oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=f irefox-a [google.com]

both have the weblogs link first.

Re:Out of proportion

[KozmoStevnNaut]

Oddly enough, my sub-pixel anti-aliased fonts (Bitstream Vera Sans, for example) look quite a bit better on KDE (with "hinting" set to "slight") than Cleartype fonts do on XP, on the very same LCD. The X.org implementation is simply superior to Cleartype, which I find makes the text way too fuzzy. If I wanted fuzzy text, I would have gotten a CRT instead.

Even if I use the unsupported Cleartype tuning applet, it simply cannot look as good as the fonts on my KDE desktop.

Re:Give me a break

[xoyoyo]

>>Didn't a Microsoft employee come up with xml from sgml?

You're thinking of Jean Paoli. Not quite. Paoli was made third editor of the XML spec after Tim Bray started working for Netscape (this being the days when these things mattered). Microsoft has always had an active role in W3C working groups (look at the list of names on the CSS spec, for example) but that's not the same as coming up with the ideas in the first place.

>>Microsoft did bring GUIs to PC users

Depends on a> your definition of PC and b> your definition of GUI. GEM was first on Intel machines. Mac OS first on, well Macs (people used to call any computer you could own yourself a PC, not just IBM compatibles (which we used to call...IBM Compatibles)), and both ideas were pinched from Xerox PARC.

>>Then again I wanted a Mac once I got to the store. Instead I got a Packard Bell!

Then you were doubly cursed.

Re:Out of proportion

[Vitriol+Angst]

e.g. Apple ripped it off in OS X 10.2, most Linux desktops now use a very poor imitation of it, Adobe has their own ripoff, etc.

>> NO, I think Apple was "ripping off" Display Postscript, which was from Adobe. The NeXT boxes used display postscript to render everything -- but even THAT I think, came from a NeXT innovation in conjunction with Adobe's postscript printing language that they were trying to bring to the screen, but Adobe had the patents on Postscript so tight, they had to collaborate. DP was very resource intensive, and required NeXT to shell out real bucks for every computer that used it to Adobe -- hence, it didn't have much appeal to them when Apple bought NeXT (and was then taken over by NeXT). So it took some time to reproduce all of that in Quartz on MacOSX but this prompted an even bigger innovation by Apple to move these processes to the graphics card (though, AMIGA did all this right years before anyone by breaking down all sorts of CPU-bound functions into specialized components -- but I digress).

Anyway, anti-aliasing to the screen has been around a lot longer than you suggest. The "ripp-off" of clearer font display on OS X, was just the growing pains of Apple trying to re-invent what they had done years before in their previous OS, and also with NeXT computers.

The "Clear-type" technology, cannot compare at all to the quality of Display postscript. It basically rasterized all the vector data to the screen as though "printing" to it. Clear-type just used an efficient anti-aliasing technique that works better "in some situations." And people are confused by the issue because OS X did it wrong for a few years -- whereas NeXT had it PERFECT years before that.

And then there might be some SGI fans who will chime in that NeXT might not have been the first to market with Display Postscript.

"I guess I am the only person that thinks Microsoft's perpetuation of "Proud Ignorance" is troubling.

I find it rather ironic that this was posted by someone who appears to be proud of his own ignorance."

That is really, really Ironic. I'm guessing the previous poster meant; "Proud Ignorance" to mean that; "people think Microsoft Innovates all the time, because they don't know the real history."

They didn't invent DOS -- it was a knock-off of CP/M.

They totally ripped off VisiCalc from a man who didn't understand the need for lawyers to create Excel.

Word from MacWrite.

Etc.

>> Anyway, this is an old, old debate. MS doesn't have the "Pioneer" business model -- and that I can understand and I don't fault them for that. I think this discussion should really be; "Does Microsoft hurt real innovation" and I would have to say; Yes, more than any other company in the computer field.

But hey, I'm much more worried about politics in the US over the past few years to even have worries about Microsoft on my radar anymore.

Re:um

[SWPadnos]

yes indeed, don't you see that was my point? There were already operating systems, tens of the buggers. The problem was they lacked focus, chasing after each other and trying to trap customers. Go read about the Unix wars, you're history knowledge needs improving.

Well, that's not entirely true. There was CP/M, which ran on computers from several vendors (including several different processor families), and provided a common set of OS tools to the programmer. I'm not sure how great that was for end users, but it couldn't have been all that bad.

Vendor lock in was what the Unix wars were all about. Microsoft didn't invent that, they just said 'hey, we have new stuff that's cheaper, and it runs on any pc' They never claimed that other software makers could do better, that didn't make sense back then, co-operation was for losers..

That was true for "large computers", but not for "small computers". Of course it's true that there was a very small market for home computers at the time: Commodore PET, Tandy TRS-80, Atari, Apple, and several smaller players like Exidy and more I can't remember). Also, the phrase "runs on any PC" is kind of misleading, considering where we are today. The IBM PC was the only x86 computer in existence when they released it, and it was not compatible with anything else (though the instruction set is more or less an extension of the Z80->8080->8085). There were no clones of the PC until at least 2-3 years after it was released, IIRC.

Before microsoft you would buy your computing solution, the software would be custom written for that hardware only, and you were locked completelly to one vendor for both hardware and software, they could and did charge what they liked, and if the software was crap? tough. Microsofts greatest hit was not being tied to a specific hardware set, they could sell their stuff to any computer manufacturer they pleased.

Well, actually I think MS-DOS only ran on one computer at the time - the new IBM PC. The competitor CP/M was the one that could run on multiple machine types. I don't reember Microsoft ever coming out with a version of MS-DOS for the TRS-80 (probably the most popular business computer at the time).

Yes microsoft has software vendor lock in. They emerged in an era where this was an improvement. Besides, all businesses cared about was that it worked, and would be compatible with what other companies were using. This was another problem in the unix wars.

I don't think so. See previous comments about there being only one computer that MS-DOS worked on.

You're making the mistake of taking current events and extrapolating back 20 years, that doesn't work. Yes microsoft aren't so nice now, but have you had a look at what IBM used to get up to? They make microsoft look soft, I'm telling you.

Either company wasn't too nice back in the day. That doesn't make it a good thing.