Microsoft the Innovator (part II)

Google worries endlessly :)

In the computing industry very few innovators have succeeded. The Mac was based on one of the 3 big ideas developed at Xerox Parc and started at SRI before that in Engekbart’s ARC project.

IBM has actually done an amazing amount of good research, but a lot of that it never developed well. It was Oracle that became huge on relatonal databases.

Microsoft was never none as an innovative or state of the art company. Even in the eighties the DR version of DOS was better and it’s graphical extensions superior. Quarterdeck allowed multi prgramming.

Back then most of Microsiofts application programs wee second best. Because of it’s cash cow and it’s lead in Window’s it seized control of many markets, often by buying rivials. It’s strength is that it keeps on plugging. In some areas such as Mac applications software it was the only reliable game in town.

With MS you buy a mediocre product that will innovate behind the competition, but keep on improving, which has the market and cash to be there years down the road. This is ilike IBM in the seventies, there were other, better approaches but it offere the full range and was reliable.

Nobody who is technically oriented things of MS as an innovator. Though the full depth and power of some of their products is rarely appreciated, but this in itself is an indicator of the market, few want the meta links in word or all the capacities of excel though many of these powers are useful. Most people are using a computer at the fraction of it’s power.

But one thing about MS systems is that their byzantine complexity means that you wll be able to weak as you need. Aple was very slow in supporting hard drives and networking in the eighties, and at that time the GUI ws too complex for most professional programmers to build for. MS provided a lowest common denominator with many rival and competitive hardware platforms.

I am uncertain if it has the base and capacity to reform and survive as IBM has done, but it has provided an evolving product that is in many respects a standard and economies of scale. In the eighties the basic applications of fair less sophistication that are routinely bundld into a 500 dollar computer cost nearly twuce that without the computer.

As for “microsoft as innovator” this is one of those useful checks on technical discussion, as soon as you hear that you know the individual hasn’t the foggiest notion about technology and they are spouting cliche nonsense.

Please give us an example of a company that innovates. This should be good.

Amazon
Nokia

I agree with dookie. Take your first pick Google. Search – done before. Local search – done before. Online ad brokering – done before. Maps – done before. Blog search – done before. Desktop search – done before. Shopping comparison – done before. Image search – done before. Mobile search – done before. Messenging – done before. Etc. They’ve improved on some things and not on others. But if improvement is your criteria then it’s hard not to add Microsoft. Are you sure you are aware of their thousands of products and what’s innovative and not in each? Have you used their development tools for example?

If doing a single blatant copy of someone else is your criteria for a non-innovative company (MSFT copying the book search) then how does their messenger exempt them from being non-innovative? Why didn’t you roll your eyes when Google did that? Lots of people did.

You may like Google and that’s fine. But I don’t understand how you base your statement in fact? Unless this is your standard pontificating pundit site. But I thought it was more than that.

Maybe everyone does forget but I don’t. Search was not crappy pre-Google. It was quite functional. Even obscure search engines like Aliweb were good in their time. Google came alone and improved it. If improvement is innovation, are you saying Microsoft didn’t come along and improve anything?

Please list these ‘astounding’ innovations.

So stock price is the arbiter or innovation? I thought you were a Wall Street guy. You’re embarassing yourself.

Microsoft is almost a monopoly. You cannot expect innovative behaviour from a monopoly. You can expect high prices.

“What is this incessant touting around of innovation? Who gives a crap? Who cares who innovates? Give me the best product at the best price and be done with it.”

If we are going to think this way, we might as well rescind all intellectual property protections. Instead of “he with the best idea wins,” it can be “he with the biggest cash horde wins.”

And of course, Microsoft is a pipsqueak compared to Uncle Sam.

So whenever a little guy comes up with something cool, we’ll just let the government muscle in and develop it at taxpayer expense.

After all, it really doesn’t matter ‘who’ comes out with the product right? No need to worry about the downstream effects on the idea stream, right?

Good grief.

Google did improve search, but only incrementally. The genius, if we can even apply that word to a commercial advertising company, was in the business model it chose to monetize search.

From my own experience I became a Google user primarily because of the clean uncluttered webpage not because of the quality of their search.

There’s a lot of innovation at Google. I’ll just touch on a couple, but in every one of dookie’s “done before”s there’s an innovation. I don’t know if I’d say “astounding” innovation, but clever, and worth respect. Innovation simply means “The act of introducing something new.”

Google search’s “clean uncluttered” interface was a major innovation: every other search was alive with banners and “news.” The thinking of the time was that everyone was trying to be a “portal,” so they crammed as many things as they could into that first page. Now, Google’s recreated that, *IF* you want it, with its drag & drop interface (first time I’d ever seen it, although I’ve seen it several times since).

PageRank was incredibly innovative. All other search technologies used the page itself as a source of information, but the engineers at google hit upon the idea that the worth of a page wasn’t so much what it said about itself (do you remember pages with long lists of irrelevant “keywords” in their META tag? Don’t see those so much anymore, do you?) but what OTHERS said about it.

Sure “maps on the internet” were done before Google did them. But Google’s tool is inherantly different from Mapquest or Yahoo. Rather than a static map, with clickable directional arrows, Google presents the map using a streaming technology, allowing you to move through the environment much more fluidly. With the addition of keyhole’s satellite imagery, they added a whole new wrinkle, allowing you to literally fly through the Grand Canyon, if you so choose. And rather than lock all that capability away (as is the typical approach of a media company) they published the API, allowing people to “embrace & extend” their product. This is a highly innovative marketing approach, as very few IntelProp companies allow others to use their products in this way.

I realize I’m just feeding the trolls, but I’m pretty proud of the performance of my shares of GOOG, and I’m not getting out anytime soon.