Innovative: characterised by, tending to, or introducing innovations

Innovations

1 : the introduction of something new

2 : a new idea, method, or device : novelty

Many think that Microsoft is an innovative company, depending on how you read the meaning of innovative, they are probably not, remember nearly all Microsoft’s key products are from somewhere else prior to MS buying them and then enhancing them.

They have become old and slow, not as agile as they were in beating off all OS pretenders in the Windows 3.1 to Windows 95 days, remember Apple had a superior GUI back then and it probably still is.

They then tried to counter opposition companies with add ons to the OS Media Player to kill Real Player, Internet Explorer to kill Netscape. What they ended up with was a very poor product and it was always going to be that way. They could not be everything to everyone, but they sure tried and to some extent they succeeded. That success might now be there undoing. MS Office is big, really big and yes it can do some great things, yet I write both for a living and for study and I think even in my day i barely scratch many of the features it has so really it is bloated, and due to the shoddy design of the application we can get a $50 lite version, although that might be coming.

They were slow to respond to the spam problems that plagued Hotmail for some time, which yes they have fixed meanwhile Yahoo had fiked theirs months before.

Google and then Yahoo started dishing out the space and then Microsoft finally followed, yep innovative

Bill said lets do Microsoft Network the ubiquitous MSN, well that was a raging success and no it wasn’t original, Compuserve and AOL had done it for years before, hell I had a Compuserve account when Windows 1 was but a twinkle in Bills eye.

So if you take off the rose coloured glasses and look a bit harder then you see Microsoft is not in my opinion an innovative company. They have also blundered badly with other products in the marketplace entirely With MSN if I recall correctly Bill said something along the lines of “The Internet? We are not interested in it”, basically turning the corporate back on that, but soon after Windows 95 was out and MSN died becasue people got for free what Bill wanted then to pay for, Microsoft changed directions hastily.

So now to today, somewhere they really lost the plot, probably after the launch of XP which had proved to be a good system in the wash up, I think they started to believe some of there own marketing and thought they truly led the industry so they could tell others where things were at. They missed again and found themselves with there current “dog” called Vista.

I dont have to tell you about Vista, but don’t expect anything very exciting from MS with the next release, as they have to try and claw back from their blunder and Apple and Linux are nipping at their heals. A second failed Windows and MS will have a major problem on their hands as Corporate is already branching out to Linux and Apple, It will only get worse if MS don’t deliver their next one, It will have to be simpler, 7 versions was ridiculous, back to XP 2 versions or maybe three, Light, Standard and Extreme. Light will be fast without add ons, no browser, media player, they are going to have to go back and compete for the business on this one oh and no DRM, it is a dead duck, it just needs someone to finally shoot it and MS can do that by delivering the Light OS without it.Medium can contain a set of tools like browser, Windows live Gizmos, bundled in however not embedded, so if someone wants to uninstall something they can and it uninstalls. This will be a hard pill fro MS to swallow however, they need to reduce the attack surface of their OS and that will help.

Well I have said my piece

Lets see what MS delivers, will it be sinner or saint

See ya round

Peter