Microsoft is the Industry's Most Innovative Company? 421
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?"
Did they include... (Score:5, Interesting)
the innovation is going to vista techs that no one (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Innovation != Good (Score:3, Interesting)
Similarly there may well be plenty of good ideas which arn't patentable.
Microsoft Research is awesome (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Did they include... (Score:0, Interesting)
Some 'facts' for yah:
I can get a patent for something I have never used, or heck, doesn't even exist yet. This is the nature of the system. I am protecting my concept or idea. The point that MS didn't actually use this when they got the patent has a high b!tch and moan factor but absolutely no pertinance factor.
Xnix did not patent this. Microsoft did. Now, here we go, explain to me how they are evil because they have some common sense and foresight and actually comprehend how the world beyond 0 and 1 works...
Zune? (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Re:Zune? (Score:1, Interesting)
Had Microsoft made it driverless, or using the generic MTP that MS had as a standard spec, it would be different.
At least you can find software to use ipods on Linux.
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.
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.
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]) comes to mind. However, I doubt that this is going to be enough to solve the parallel computing conundrum. Sadly, computer science is dominated by a bunch of aging computer geeks who still think like Charles Babbage when it comes to computer programming and CPU design. Solving the parallel computing problem will take a strong willingness to break away from the orthodox fold. In my opinion, it is time to declare the algorithm dead and embrace a non-algorithmic computing model. We must reinvent the computer, especially now that the industry is taking its first painful step away from sequential computing to massive parallelism. We made a mistake fifty years ago when we chose Babbage's model but, it wasn't so bad because most of our computers had single-core CPUs. Unless we choose the correct path now, we will pay a heavy price later. Eventually, we will be forced to change. Better now than later. Is there anybody at Microsoft who can see the writing on the wall? Who know?
Re:MS does have some valuable patents (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
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.
Re:Are we done yet? (Score:3, Interesting)
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?
Re:Did they include... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Just goes to show... (Score:3, Interesting)