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.'"

Re:Give me a break

[Slithe]

Stuff like Dtrace , TCP/IP, xml, .. THAT is innovation.

Don't get me wrong; DTrace does sound like a very useful application, but real-time debugging was available on Genera [wikipedia.org]. Clinical debugging (as opposed to mortician-style debugging) has been around for quite some time.

I agree that TCP/IP was innovative.

XML is just a simplified subset of SGML; while XML is useful, it is hardly innovative. If you want to see innovative, you should look at Project Xanadu [wikipedia.org]. .l

Worst "debate" ever

[illuminatedwax]

FTFA:

It was a fun debate.

No. It was a bloody awful debate, full of contradictory statements and non sequiturs.:
Guy 1: Microsoft doesn't innovate.
Guy 2: Yes they do! They innovate by improving their own software! So clearly they are more innovative than themselves!
Guy 1: Apple doesn't innovate either.
Guy 2: Ah, but what about Halo??
Guy 1: Um, Microsoft bought the company that made Halo.
Guy 2: That's just how they innovate: buying people who do! Um, I guess that's not innovation, so.... remember how much more Apple innovated in 1989, but then Microsoft made more money than them? That proves that Microsoft can innovate in this new horrible way that I just made up!
Guy 1: No, that doesn't make sense and you know it. I think Google is the top software company now because I use their products.
Guy 2: Well, Google shut down one of the things they do, and I like how Microsoft ranks my blog better than how Google does it! That's the kind of thing that makes Microsoft innovative: providing a better search result for a single query. Vista has an RSS aggregator. Is that innovative? Oh...no but it's cool. Also the XBox is popular.
Guy 1: Big corporations are all assholes and none of them innovate.
Guy 2: A friend of mine that works at Microsoft says he's happy that Google is innovating, because that means he gets to work on his projects to play catch-up...I mean innovate. Here's a bunch of random stuff Microsoft did that has nothing to do with innovation.

This uninformed waste of time brought to you by the Wall Street Journal.

ATM released in 1991; ClearType shipped in 2002

[Beltway Prophet]

Adobe Type Manager, with font smoothing, was out on Macs in 1991, long before ClearType, which was touted as one of XP's new features when it shipped in 2002. ATM was even available as an add-on to Windows by 1993, nine years ahead of ClearType. Furthermore, Mac OS 8.5 shipped with Apple's own built-in font smoothing in 1998. Whether or not M$ has done much innovating, that example doesn't exactly help his case.

Re:Innovator, maybe not

[vertinox]

Still, they have a habit of taking crap and actually making it pretty decent. At least to my experience.

Are you talking about Microsoft's crap or other people's crap?
I mean if we are talking about the transition from Win95 to Win2000, I would say that is true but let us take a look at some examples when we compare other companies vs Microsoft:

1. Apache vs IIS

Apache crap? I don't think so. Ever had to admin IIS 4 or 5? Gah! I don't know about newer versions though, but I have a hunch there are still issues going on.

2. Oracle SQL/MySQL vs MS SQL

MS SQL isn't all that bad if you got the hardware to keep it in line, but I wouldn't call Oracle or MySQL crap.

3. iPod vs Zune

I'm not going to even answer this one. *coughs*

4. Playstation 2/Game Cube vs Xbox

Yeah... Technically Xbox has better hardware and graphics, but you can't say the other two systems were crap.

5. Groupwise vs Outlook

I mean Groupwise isn't as say functional with VBA and add-ins... Well maybe that isn't a bad thing, but Groupwise wasn't crap. Now if your an Exchange Admin of Outlook I'm sure you might have some nasty words about Outlook. Its getting better though

6. Lotus Notes vs Outlook/Access

Um... Ok. You got me. Lotus Notes was and is crap. I can't defend that product. So we've got 1 out of 6. I could go on about Wordperfect, Quatro Pro, and Lotus Suite which weren't crap products. Microsoft didn't really improve on those when they came out with their competing office suite. If you are going to talk about improvements we are going to have to look at Office 97, 2000, 2002, 2003 and now Office Vista which is an improvement of their own products.

Re:Different kinds of innovation

[gad_zuki!]

Youre going to get a lot of replies, mostly saying "NO! It was done by this company." and that person will reply "No, it was done by this company first!" then another person will reply "No, this university came up with the idea." "NO! it was this eastern european researcher who wrote the paper!" "NO! It was this science fiction writer no one has read!" And so forth.

I think theres some kudos to bringing an idea or implementation to market and making it affordable for most people. I'm not sure innovation is the word here, but its real work and deserves real credit. I don't think its just marketing, as some cynics have already suggested.

Re:Innovator, maybe not

[jimstapleton]

> Java
No, to my experience, this has always sucked and been unreliable, with very few exceptions

> Java script
> HTML
OK, I'll grant you they screwed these two over

> C++
OK, their C++ implementation in VS kinda sucks in a few aspects, but to my knowledge, they didn't massively kludge it any more than any other implementation, including GCC, Borland and Codewarrior did.

Improved the Error Messages in IE??? WTF???

[eno2001]

Is he fucking high?! Oddly enough I was complaining about Microsoft's poor decision to change over to those "user friendly" (in reality EVERYONE HOSTILE) messages just yesterday. Mainly because I had a branch computer tech call and tell me that the branch's WiFi was "down". Since I don't deal directly with helpdesk issues anymore I made the cardinal mistake of taking her word for it. I spent about 20 minutes looking at the Cisco APs via their web admin interfaces and they showed the right number of clients connected and the proper VLANs. After all that it finally occurred to me that I should ask her EXACTLY what is or isn't happening. Her answer? "The internet is down because the WiFi is down". Seriously, that was her answer. Digging back to my heldesk days I knew this meant something more specific was going on. I asked her, "did they log into Windows OK"? She said, "Yeah. Windows if fine. It's the internet that's not working anymore. So that means the WiFi must not be working. I rebooted the network but they still don't work". So I asked her, "How do you know the internet is down"? She said, "Because the program said it is". I asked her, "What program"? She said, "Umm... Microsoft word. No. Um.. The blue E program. You know! The internet"! At this point I kept from flipping out and said, "What does it tell you that indicates the internet is down"? She said, "It shows that screen that says to contact the administrator. It said something about the home page not being there I think". I then asked her if she had tried to go to any sites other than the default "home page". She said, "Um... no. Should I go try that". Me: "Yes". She took off and then came back to the phone and said, "Oh. It looks like out home page isn't working. I guess I'll need to call the people who host it"? I said, "Sounds like it".

The problem illustrated above is that Microsoft's thinking that providing a "friendly" error is useful is untrue. They SHOULD have added a button to click on called "Technical Detail" or some such that would reveal the real error as presented by the web server itself. This has been one of my gripes about IE ever since they went that route. Fortunately my desktop isn't polluted with MS crap. It's a Linux box and I use Firefox. So when there is a problem (like there was yesterday) with a web site, I CAN see the REAL error message as presented by the server. I know you can configure the IE browser to NOT use the friendly messages, but to be honest it should be a default that the friendly message displays WITH the option to see the real message.

Innovation my ass. As a second example of their failings in terms of being up on technology that is important, it took them until Windows XP to have proper MIDI support. And I'm not talking the crap MIDI that's on your soundblaster card. Having been a professional composer in a past life (1990s) I was faced with the decision of getting a Mac (which had proper MIDI support since 1987) or getting a PC. I couldn't afford the Mac, so I was stuck with getting a DOS/Win3.1 PC. To say the MIDI support was lacking is an understatement. There wasn't much hardware for professional outboard gear on the Windows side, and what little there was was REALLY backwards. But this was mainly due to MS not really giving a crap about a very important piece of musical technology at that time. The reason? Windows was a business OS at the time. It wasn't an OS for creative people. And Microsoft didn't really truly start paying attention to the creative people until Windows XP. Windows XP finally had a real 32-bit MIDI driver and supported 256 MIDI ports vs. 16 in the previous 16-bit driver that lived on through Windows 98. This was one of the main reasons I abandoned Windows as soon as I could. And here's the thing that REALLY burns me up. Back in the late 80s I was doing TONS of MIDI and audio work on an Atari ST that was pro level stuff. People were using Macs in the same way. MS didn't give a shit. Back then we were called musicians and it w

MS and Walmart

[raymcgill]

Everyone loves to hate the big guys. MS and Walmart are some of our best companies and we continually whine and beat the crap out of them. MS is far from perfect, but its the best desktop available in the world (Yes, I run Ubuntu at home, but not my important machine). Linux is almost there but is chasing the taillights of MS. Linux has a superior architecture, but just isn't usable enough to put in a business without a full time linux geek. The whole PC industry is what it is becuase of MS. No they didn't invent it, but THEY MADE IT HAPPEN. Give them some credit and stop piling on with the sheep.

Re:Impressive Rebuttal

[greginnj]

Agreed. When I first saw these sample 'innovations', I had to double-check to make sure I wasn't reading one of those look-and-feel satires on The Onion or someplace. These are the strongest arguments he can fill his column-inches with? This is what an annual 7 Billion Dollars of R&D money gets you? Sheesh.

Re:Impressive Rebuttal

[Coryoth]

This is what an annual 7 Billion Dollars of R&D money gets you? Sheesh.

$7 Billion in R&D money buys you things like Spec# [microsoft.com] and its verifier, C-omega [microsoft.com] for easy concurrent programming done right, and Singularity [microsoft.com] for a secure OS core, and... well a whole host of other things that are going to remain interesting research lab projects that MS will never get around to properly productizing and marketing.