In a report inspired by the advice of a departing Microsoft manager, a Merrill Lynch technology analyst wrote that the software company must “notch up the innovation component” if it wants to succeed in an era of networked systems and increased pervasiveness of open-source applications. The report, released Wednesday by Merrill tech strategist Steven Milunovich, analyzes points raised in an essay recently published by retiring Microsoft program manager David Stutz.
Microsoft Urged to Innovate
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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While open-source software has yet to put a noticeable dent in Microsoft’s hefty profit margins, Wall Street appears to be waking up to the risks the movement may pose to the company’s future dominance.
Ha! I *love* seeing MS stockholders get nervous. Sell!! Sell!! [Teehehehe]
..is what MS is. Their glory days are over, and they know it. History is repeating itself: MS is now where “big blue” was 20 years ago, and Linux is now in the same position as Microsoft was: the cheap up’n’comer. And Linux can’t be bought (except in the form of bribing the opinion and sponsoring FUD of course, but thats’s something already part of the MS business model
) so they won’t be able to buy themselves out of the situation either…
Cry, Ballmer, cry…being fat won’t help you this time! >-)
The core Microsoft values are that stealing is good, cheating is good, lying is good and greed is goooooood.
It sounds like like Mr. Stutz has not come to terms with the fact that he supported the efforts of an thoroughly evil company for so long. He says it is “perception”. I burst out laughing when I read that. Dude, check into reality. Microsoft IS a wretched company, run by amoral greed fiends.
Microsoft innovate? Isn’t that goodspeak for “go out and find somebody who has a worthy idea and steal it” ?
What a joke.
–ms
What I get out of it is that basically they’re saying the PC is dead and that Microsoft should embrace new technologies to stay top dog in the latest tech craze. I recommend actually reading the article.
Best of luck. It would be a good thing. But not what they are used to.
Whenever Microsoft sets out to innovate, it turns into something like Bob.
I have a bad feeling about this… 😉
True Archie, true. What would Darwin say about this OS Race? It is a matter of generations, and the MSs one is over.
The PC is dying? That would be only because Microsoft is busy killing it.
Microsoft is absolutely stupid in putting all sorts of draconian anti-customer technology in Windows and then basically forcing Intel to add anti-customer capabilities to their chips so the anti-customer technology will work.
There’s no way anyone on Planet Earth can trust their computer if it is running any software from Microsoft. Depending on how the cards fall, the same may soon be said of Intel.
If open source kills Microsoft it will be because Microsoft deserved it.
–ms
“While open-source software has yet to put a noticeable dent in Microsoft’s hefty profit margins, Wall Street appears to be waking up to the risks the movement may pose to the company’s future dominance. ”
If investors only own MS stock they should worry. However Wall Street and all investors should be overjoyed by the use of open source.
Joe investor thinks: “Gee I invest in 100 different companies. One of them is Microsoft. Microsoft makes 80% profit on the OSes it sells. Microsoft makes 80% profit on the office suite it sells. Oh no! 99 of the companies I invest in are spending way too much on basic software purchases.”
If the other 99 switch to free Linux and free Open office, their costs are reduced, and (all other things remaining the same) their profits increase. Jo investor’s portfolio goes up.
Open source may cut into MicroSoft’s profits, but the open market created by the competition from open source products will lower the cost of doing business for all other companies.
I think it will be interesting to see what Microsoft comes up with over the next few years. I agree that the PC is dying. I recently bought a badass pc, and in a way, I kind of regret it. I think I may have been better of buying a nice laptop of some sort. I just don’t use nearly enough of my system’s super powers to make it worth it.
What will Microsoft do to stay ahead in this changing game? Well, so far they haven’t really had a great track record with innovation. The tablet pc (which they didn’t really innovate, but I digress) has had pretty sad sales. There is no question if the thing is cool. It is. But I guess it simply doesn’t prove useful to enough people. These new wrist-watch things… they seem like a joke to me, but who knows. Other innovations? I haven’t seen much else on the horizon from microsoft which interests me besides palladium, and palladium will do nothing to bring me closer to ms.
Overall, I would say that MS is done in the server arena. FreeBSD and Linux are taking over in leaps and bounds and there is no way for either Sun or MS to hold them off. As for the desktop realm… I don’t think this is the real battleground as the desktop pc I expect to start vanishing, or at least taper off in growth. The real battleground is embedded devices, laptops, and other mobile components, and the fight is just beginning.
I strongly urge Microsoft to give me ten thousand dollars.
Just cuz.
What someone needs to do is make me some XGA sunglasses with a wireless UWB connection to my next zaurus PDA. I already got all the CPUs I need and I would only buy a webpad if it were perfect, which it will never be because so many companies are so stoopid and uncreative. Oh, and maybe some VR gloves, too.
They dont need to innovate. All they have to do is stop charging insane prices for thier software and including annoying anti-pirate schemes. If MS dropped the price of Windows XP to a 3rd of what it is now,got rid of Licensing 6 and WPA,and allowed home users to install it on 2 or 3 computers,then there would be a very hard time for Linux.
Microsoft has never ceased to “innovate”. For a recent example just look at their annouced purchase of Connectix. By golly, there they go “innovating” again!
Good comment. As a bit of interest, does anyone know of a site that lists all the ORIGINAL innovations that have come from Microsoft. Good Luck.
Innovate? Microsoft? In the same sentance? That would be the day…
You keep on poking fun at Microsoft because they don’t “innovate” enough. Well, guess what? Your happy-fun-lovely Linux window managers are about 5% innovation and 95% copied from Microsoft.
KDE and Gnome look exactly the same to me, except Gnome2 appears to have better antialiasing (though Linux is such a nest I can’t really tell if it’s Gnome that’s doing it or Redhat or…). Oh, and it’s a lot slower too, especially when rendering icons on menus. Eww! At least XP can render the icons in my menus pretty quickly.
Oh, but it’s Microsoft. It HAS to be crap. Nothing good could ever come out of oh-so-evil Microsoft! Linux 4ever!!!!
Show some maturity. I’ve seen no innovation at ALL in Linux in the last few years I’ve been following it. I’m sure someone’s going to pipe in and say “oh, but Linux can do xyz and that’s totally new!”, though. It’s too bad xyz is some little feature buried in the kernel that’s been unknown to even the kernel developers themselves for the last 5 years. Oh, and you’ll have to download the xyz-lib RPM to get it to work, too. But your gcc version is a bit outdated, so you might want to download the latest gcc and compile it.
I’ve _NEVER_ had problems like this in Windows or BeOS. I’m just tired of all the Linvocates spreading FUD everywhere they go.
It seems to me a lot of people are misinterpreting Stutz. The way I see it–he isn’t flat out saying MS has never done anything innovative, nor is he saying the PC is flat out dead… He is saying that open source, the diversity of devices (most of which MS isn’t even close to being the leader in: PDAs, cellphones, high end servers and datacenters, mainframes, etc…), the diversity and design of modern programming tools means that MS should be doing innovative things to actually make them work together whether or not they are produced by MS.
Hasn’t anyone noticed how MS will come out with a new server product and say it supports mobility, but that support is only for PocketPCs or WinCE devices… Their response–well, these devices have feature x, y, z which we think is important to you. They don’t say: yes, we recognize that Palm devices, Symbian smartphones, and BlackBerries are very popular in the markets we try to succeed in so we are going to support these devices just as much as our crappy, small marketshare versions of the device…
Or that Office 11 has nothing new except two new apps: one which duplicates a lot of functionality of word (OneNote) but is intended to be an advertisement for tabletPCs (look you can scribble notes, wippy!!) and the other XDocs that is not only tied into SharePoint, SQL, and .Net but is a nonstarter in a market that MS has no experience or solid footing in (WorkFlow and Document Automation)…. That the only new features are just tied to SharePoint, but that SharePoint is the least successful of any Document Management Server?
This is the stuff that is entirely non-innovative… They may be new, but they only attempt to supplant more robust solutions already in place or further to concretize the dependence of PC apps on MS server products… When, if MS would just focus and admit that they aren’t the best at everything and would build truly innovative methods for third parties, devices, and other platforms to interact, they probably would create the next revolution in computing.
Instead they prefer the MS monoculture.. They don’t even know the skills, the work that other developers need to go through to produce products for multiple platforms or to be compatible with other systems. This seems to be the big accusation leveled by Stutz, and the investors and analysts are seeing in that Windows and Office are the only profit makers… The next generation (Office 11, SharePoint Server, Titanium) is only going to further alienate customers and make people realize that they aren’t getting new, innovative functionality from MS–they are getting sucked into a closed vacuum of a monoculture.
Jeez. I am appalled by the mindless anti microsoft feelings.
I have no great love for MS, but to be fair to them, they have
been great at exploring an idea, marketing it into a product
and improving it par excellence. MS Money, MS Project, Office,
Visual Studio, Encarta, etc. As for trying to make money, show me a company that doesn’t want to!. companies like IBM,RedHat
SuSe, Xandros, Lindows…all intend to make money at the end.
Blame Microsoft for using unfair trade pactices: not for running a buisness…they are VERY impressive in they way they manage their sofware…
Be fair.
-Xalan
Good comment. As a bit of interest, does anyone know of a site that lists all the ORIGINAL innovations that have come from Microsoft. Good Luck.
I don’t know of any site, wich only shows what Microsoft invented, but this site shows what they DID NOT invent:
http://www.taikahn.com/mssucks.html
cheers
Steve
they don’t innovate that much, but when they improve certain products developed by others, they make it really good.
Microsoft:
Excel – copied from 1-2-3 and other spreadsheets
Word – copied from Wordstar, Wordperfect, MacWrite, and other word processors
Powerpoint – copied from Lotus and others.
Access – copied from Paradox and others.
Visio – purchased from an innovator.
Frontpage – purchased from an innovator.
Encarta – copied from Grolier, Compton, other encyclopedias
Visual Studio – copied from Borland and others
Someone complained that Linux was copying Microsoft. Well, it’s only a copy of a copy. One might say that deep down, it is the Gods of the GPL at work. Microsoft needs to give back to the world everything that they stole from others. Microsoft hijacked the information age and now it is time to take it back.
>You keep on poking fun at Microsoft because they don’t “innovate”
>enough. Well, guess what? Your happy-fun-lovely Linux window
>managers are about 5% innovation and 95% copied from Microsoft.
yeah, all that copying has nothing to do with ms monopoly.
plus ms never copied anything from anyone else. never. forget that BSD
tcp/ip stack, mosaic browser, etc, etc
>KDE and Gnome look exactly the same to me, except Gnome2 appears to
>have better antialiasing (though Linux is such a nest I can’t really
>tell if it’s Gnome that’s doing it or Redhat or…). Oh, and it’s a
>lot slower too, especially when rendering icons on menus. Eww! At
>least XP can render the icons in my menus pretty quickly.
don’t like gnome & kde? switch to another window manager; plenty to
choose from…. just like ms… (explorer or explorer or explorer…)
>Oh, but it’s Microsoft. It HAS to be crap. Nothing good could ever
>come out of oh-so-evil Microsoft! Linux 4ever!!!!
i notice a distinct lack of mention of anything that you find
exceptional (or even a good rating) that you find from ms. stumped
like the rest of us i suppose. whenever it really comes down to
details, ms loses every time.
>Show some maturity. I’ve seen no innovation at ALL in Linux in the
>last few years I’ve been following it. I’m sure someone’s going to
>pipe in and say “oh, but Linux can do xyz and that’s totally new!”,
>though. It’s too bad xyz is some little feature buried in the kernel
>that’s been unknown to even the kernel developers themselves for the
>last 5 years. Oh, and you’ll have to download the xyz-lib RPM to get
>it to work, too. But your gcc version is a bit outdated, so you might
>want to download the latest gcc and compile it.
>I’ve _NEVER_ had problems like this in Windows or BeOS. I’m just
>tired of all the Linvocates spreading FUD everywhere they go.
1 – don’t lump beos with ms, it’s an insult to beos, and unearned and
undue praise to ms.
2 – i suppose you’ve never been to DLL hell….. msvcXXX.dll version
what? and i need to find a VB runtime version what? the list goes on.
every idiot vendor takes the attitude that they’re loading their DLL’s
no matter what. nice job of organizing the os, for a 3 year old. and
speaking of nice jobs: job of watching that idiot ms invention called
the registry whirl in the background eating up cpu cycles and then
crashing and taking your entire installation with it. oh, and nice job
on the paperclip in office. and nice job on the vapid, homogenous
looking icons on XP, i can almost tell them apart, there’s probably 3
or 4 pixels that are different.
3 – linux people can’t spread FUD, since FUD is a defensive strategy
used by those in power. linux people do spread their hatred and
contempt for ms though, but it’s not FUD.
4 – and you’ve seen no innovation from linux? right. try doing
something simple like reading freshmeat.net where there’s a parade of
innovation from filesystems to programming languages to you-name-it on
a daily basis.
5 – ms is real big on innovation, especially things like building
monopolies, bribing the president and wiping their arse with the law.
> KDE and Gnome look exactly the same to me, except Gnome2 appears to have better antialiasing
Funny, antialiasing is not done by KDE or Gnome themselves.
> KDE and Gnome look exactly the same to me, except Gnome2 appears to have better antialiasing
Yes, you’re unknowing. Thanks for demonstrating it.
Elliot,
KDE and Gnome aren’t window managers, they are environments, designed to give a suite of applications a common look and feel. If you don’t like the way they resembled Microsoft Windows, try enlightenment, a window manager.
Enlightenment is not, yet, a desktop environment. Instead, it’s a highly customizable window manager. Window managers are not desktop environments.
I know I’m being pedantic, but you used two of possibly more than fifty different Windowing systems and decided that because they look like windows, there is no innovation.
I have yet been able to find anything with the configurability of enlightenment.
>>You keep on poking fun at Microsoft because they don’t “innovate”
>>enough. Well, guess what? Your happy-fun-lovely Linux window
>>managers are about 5% innovation and 95% copied from Microsoft.
>yeah, all that copying has nothing to do with ms monopoly.
>plus ms never copied anything from anyone else. never. forget that >BSD
>tcp/ip stack, mosaic browser, etc, etc
The sole reason TCP/IP is so popular is because of BSD’s amazing implementation of it. Don’t you dare say Linux has never stolen anything. I believe (this may not be the case, I’d be happy to be proven wrong though) that after NetBSD figured out how to boot on the Dreamcast, the Linux people quickly got the source, “ported” it to Linux, and after a while discovered how to get thinks like the Jump Pack working. All licensed under GPL. NetBSD, the original founders, are now behind Linux, because they STOLE their work and stuck it onto the GPL. Yes, the NetBSD people probably don’t care, and the BSD license is pretty much designed to allow people to steal code, but it is stealing none-the-less.
>>KDE and Gnome look exactly the same to me, except Gnome2 appears to
>>have better antialiasing (though Linux is such a nest I can’t really
>>tell if it’s Gnome that’s doing it or Redhat or…). Oh, and it’s a
>>lot slower too, especially when rendering icons on menus. Eww! At
>>least XP can render the icons in my menus pretty quickly.
>don’t like gnome & kde? switch to another window manager; plenty to
>choose from…. just like ms… (explorer or explorer or explorer…)
When I ran Linux full time for a year, I always used WindowMaker. Best. WM. EVER.
But after realizing it wasn’t worth it, I switched back to Windows. These days I run 90% BeOS, 10% XP, but that could change at any moment knowing me.
>>Oh, but it’s Microsoft. It HAS to be crap. Nothing good could ever
>>come out of oh-so-evil Microsoft! Linux 4ever!!!!
>i notice a distinct lack of mention of anything that you find
>exceptional (or even a good rating) that you find from ms. stumped
>like the rest of us i suppose. whenever it really comes down to
>details, ms loses every time.
I don’t remember when I bought XP (I think December 2001… I might’ve even been a Linux guy back then), but I do know that after being amazed by it I decided to stick with it. I’m sorry, but if you think Mandrake 9 is more of a coherent system than XP, you’re a zealot.
And MS loses every time? Hey, I personally use OpenOffice on any platform I get to, but most people (even at Slashdot) are always talking of how behind OpenOffice is from Office, sooo… (I actually disagree, but hey ;p)
>>I’ve _NEVER_ had problems like this in Windows or BeOS. I’m just
>>tired of all the Linvocates spreading FUD everywhere they go.
>1 – don’t lump beos with ms, it’s an insult to beos, and unearned and
>undue praise to ms.
XP is certainly comparable to BeOS! But you probably mysteriously have a 25MHz Cyrix processor that runs XP so slowly and just BLAZES on Linux.
>2 – i suppose you’ve never been to DLL hell….. msvcXXX.dll version
>what? and i need to find a VB runtime version what? the list goes on.
This is the silliest argument ever. I have _NEVER_ had to constantly look for DLLs in the past 4 years. Maybe I’d need one DLL to run something, but I’d quickly find it. That issue was taken care of what, 7 years ago, maybe? Funny how the Linux community doesn’t like it when people mention flaws that Linux had which it doesn’t have anymore, but they’re so quick to point out old flaws in Windows.
>every idiot vendor takes the attitude that they’re loading their DLL’s
>no matter what. nice job of organizing the os, for a 3 year old.
GBAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!! You call RPMs a good way of managing an OS?!? EVERY EVERY _EVERY_ Linux distro that’s RPM based has forced me to spend HOURS at rpmfind. I never used apt4rpm much (either it wasn’t invented back when I used Linux or it just wasn’t popular yet), but what I have used is pretty good. .so hell sucks, and you know it.
and
>speaking of nice jobs: job of watching that idiot ms invention called
>the registry whirl in the background eating up cpu cycles and then
>crashing and taking your entire installation with it.
Uhh, I prefer it to having 300 files in /etc, 400 in /usr/etc, and 300 more in /usr/local/etc and then not knowing where to edit things.
oh, and nice job
>on the paperclip in office. and nice job on the vapid, homogenous
>looking icons on XP, i can almost tell them apart, there’s probably 3
>or 4 pixels that are different.
The XP icons are quite pretty. I believe one of the XP themes is also doing quite well on KDE-Look, despite not even having transparent top-left and top-right corners. Interesting how such a terrible implementation is doing so well, hmm?
>3 – linux people can’t spread FUD, since FUD is a defensive strategy
>used by those in power. linux people do spread their hatred and
>contempt for ms though, but it’s not FUD.
Uhhh, no. “IT’S SO EASY!” “IT’S READY FOR THE HOME USER!” “THE COMMUNITY IS SO NICE!”
>4 – and you’ve seen no innovation from linux? right. try doing
>something simple like reading freshmeat.net where there’s a parade of
>innovation from filesystems to programming languages to you-name-it on
>a daily basis.
Let me requote myeslf.
I’m sure
someone’s going to pipe in and say “oh, but Linux can do xyz and that’s totally new!”, though. It’s too bad xyz is some
little feature buried in the kernel that’s been unknown to even the kernel developers themselves for the last 5 years. Oh,
and you’ll have to download the xyz-lib RPM to get it to work, too. But your gcc version is a bit outdated, so you might
want to download the latest gcc and compile it.
s/kernel/freshmeat (and reword some parts too, but you get the idea ;p)
And don’t get me started on how impossible it was for me to run apps on Freshmeat, too.
>5 – ms is real big on innovation, especially things like building
>monopolies, bribing the president and wiping their arse with the law.
Let me ask you a question. When you go to eat at, let’s say, McDonalds (please don’t say you don’t eat at McDonalds because they’re a big evil corporation, if you don’t like them, pretend we’re at Wendy’s or something), and you go to the fountains to get your drink, YOU’RE NOT GOING TO SEE COCA COLA AND PEPSI TOGETHER. It’s called marketing, my fellow Linux zealots. When you buy a computer, you’re not going to see Linux and Windows together. I’m sure someone’s going to pipe in and say how “bah, that’s a bad analogy! More like… ‘when I go to a net cafe, I can’t choose between Linux and Windows’!” or how “at least you can choose between Pepsi and Coke, even though the restaurant you’re at doesn’t give you the choice!”, though.
I don’t mind you, since you’re giving a totally valid answer to me. I agree, Enlightenment is great, even though I haven’t used it enough to fully understand it. I just don’t like it when people act like Linux is 5000 times better than Windows just BECAUSE.
Re: Anonymous
>> KDE and Gnome look exactly the same to me, except Gnome2 appears to have better antialiasing
>Funny, antialiasing is not done by KDE or Gnome themselves.
>> KDE and Gnome look exactly the same to me, except Gnome2 appears to have better antialiasing
>Yes, you’re unknowing. Thanks for demonstrating it.
I will repeat myself once more for the apparently deaf zealots.
(though Linux is such a nest I can’t really tell if it’s Gnome that’s doing it or Redhat or…)
Bah, I really ought to have checked my response before submitting it. Before some zealot decides to tell me that Windows has been ruining my intelligence…
Let me ask you a question. When you go to eat at, let’s say, McDonalds (please don’t say you don’t eat at McDonalds
because they’re a big evil corporation, if you don’t like them, pretend we’re at Wendy’s or something), and you go to the
fountains to get your drink, YOU’RE NOT GOING TO SEE COCA COLA AND PEPSI TOGETHER.
Uhm, replace “let me ask you a question” with something along the lines of “let me tell you something”. Quick and easy fix ;p
that’s what I say. We don’t need no stinkin innovations, no stinkin new technology. Well, of course we still need them but there’s something a lot more important these days:
We need standards and we need software that adheres to these standards.
The features that are going to matter in the future are the emergent features (I think that’s what it’s called) of a networked world, the features that don’t sit in any one device or any one piece of software. The really important features of the future will come from the cooperation of many different pieces of software running on many different devices coming from many different vendors.
Microsoft’s answer to that: Sure, no problem, as long as all your software comes from Microsoft. They think “Hey, the trick of integrating not-so-successful MS products with successful MS products has worked in the past and it will work even better in a networked world!” Wrong! Microsoft can’t be “among the best” or even just “good enough” in *all* software areas – no company can do that. And so, MS’s vision of a networked world will always be incomplete compared to what the open-standards world will come up with.
Concerning all the talk about (non-)innovative GUIs. Guess what: None of the major contenders has come up with anything really ground-breaking in the last 20 years at least. Mac, Windows, BeOS, KDE, Gnome…: It’s all just variations of the stuff they came up with at Xerox Parc. The major improvements in GUIs have been gradual improvements. Sounds boring, but that’s what GUIs really need: a lot of attention to detail and no big innovative we-do-everything-differently-now features. A lot of people talk about how X or Y lacks innovations, but I have never seen any one of them actually come up with an idea of what these innovations should look like or what problem they should solve – or, if they came up with an idea for what it should look like, it’s usually either very similar to what we already have or so nutty that 99% of users would say “eeww, give me my old GUI back!”.
To sum things up: practically all the important software puzzle pieces we need in the next, say, 10 years are already there. People should concentrate on refining them and make them fit together instead of wandering around searching for the Next Big Thing(tm).
Trust a Windows zealot to start a holy war against people using Linux. Nobody mentioned that Linux was a more capable desktop system – you just inferred it.
The article was saying that MS should innovate like the open source model of software development has. There was NO mention of Linux at all in the article.
Besides, OSS has innovated: consider: Sendmail, BIND, TCP/IP, the graphical web browser to name a handful of the major innovations.
MS – clippy maybe?
microsoft has little incentive to innovate. They own the market. Innovation, even by them, could result in a situation that would threaten their position. Hence all of their alledged innovation is really an attempt to perpetuate their monopoly position and not innovation at all.
MS’s instinct to protect and stop change, the same as any dominant company, will be their downfall.
Ironically, i think that IBM might have a hand to play in that downfall through their support of linux and apple.
There you go again. The big difference is that Microsoft claims they innovate while in reality they almost don’t innovate. Linux may not be innovative but at least people don’t claim Linux innovates!
Besides, OSS has innovated: consider: Sendmail, BIND, TCP/IP, the graphical web browser to name a handful of the major innovations.
I think that we should make out a certain difference between “open source” environments. There is Internet based GNU development, and there is ARPA based BSD/university/consortium development.
TCP/IP was defined as a standard first, and then the Berkeley implementation came out as the first ready-made and reusable one. There were several runners in the TCP/IP race, on DoD (IIRC) request.
As for Sendmail and BIND, what is so innovative about them?
As for Mosaic (which I suppose you’re referring to), its first phase of development had very little to do with the Sourceforge model dominating current open source development, and very much with Marc Andreesen and the NCSA to do.
“As a bit of interest, does anyone know of a site that lists all the ORIGINAL innovations that have come from Microsoft.”
The previously mentioned Microsoft Bob is the primary innovation to come from Microsoft. Read “The Road Ahead” by Bill Gates III to learn about his great vision. Also, he mentions how NT was developed directly from OS/2. Appropriately, the cover of the book depicts a vacant road.
Unfortunately (for Microsoft), Microsoft Bob failed in the marketplace. Personally, I couldn’t wait to get rid of Bob on the first computer I purchsed that came with Windows preinstalled.
Looking back, it was a great idea, however the hardware of the day severely limited how far the concept could be taken. I know a few people who try to use computers today who would really benefit from an interface like Bob.
For example; against my advice my father, who is confused by a mouse with two buttons, bought a computer that’s running NT. Explaining to him over the phone, thousands of miles away, how to use his computer is an difficult task. Covering the concepts of resizing windows, dragging and droping, minimizing windows and copy and pasting incurred many hours of long distance charges.
As Microsoft Bob died, the company had no choice but to try and copy or buy anything that looked like it had market potential. That is the business model that Microsoft has developed and is stuck with.
Technological Darwinism determines that Microsoft is a dying species, unable to adapt to the changing environment.
I remember MS Bob. It was so incredibly idiotic. I remember thinking at the time how could anyone expect the public to take this seriously. There was a great take-off on MS Bob available on the various BBS sites of the time called Bubba. MUCH more fun than Bob. Now Bubba, that was innovation!
Everyone is acting like innovation is the end-all be-all measure of goodness. Sure some innovation is good, and definitely healthy. Improving on someone else’s ideas is good too. I mean, gee, Gnome is crap because it’s not innovative. Its just a copy of Windows, a copy of Mac, a copy of Xerox, etc. Yes it’s great when someone discovers a new way to do things, but that doesn’t mean other companies can’t improve on it and be successful. Interesting to hear this coming from the open-source camp as well. Open-source is trying to catch up in many areas as well. Only recently have fonts been “de-uglified” out of the box in most Linux distributions. I mean, that’s not innovative at all. And w.r.t. Bob, open source has never had any failed projects? Is that the best example you can find? One failed project? Why not just enjoy computers and operating systesm? Do you need to bash your competition? I know open source currently has less market share (desktop-wise), but that doesn’t mean you have to go around constantly over–compensating attacking your competition. I’ve tried Linux, its not for me. So what? Does that mean I need to bash Linux in every story that comes around? Yes I will respond to some bullshit , but I don’t need to make “droppings” on every story like I see on every Linux story (hi Croanon!). Anyway, just get over it.