I have had countless arguments with people who whole-heartedly believe Microsoft is an innovative company. While most people simply don’t care about where the technologies they use came from, I don’t understand how people can make ANY argument on behalf of Microsoft in terms of innovation.
This list has a bunch of “proposed” inventions/innovations supposedly led by Microsft (or so Microsoft claims) over the years. But the truth is, even withough doing research, I was able to mentally cross out a few simply because I have followed the OS and related software industry for long enough…
The best example why I think Microsoft is not an innovator though, is Microsoft Internet Explorer. When IE was competing fiercely with Netscape in the mid-90’s, the heat was on for both companies to come up with better iterations of their browsers. But when it became apparent that IE was dominating the browser war, that was when new features stopped showing up in subsequent releases of IE. New releases from IE 5.0 and on were all about bug fixes and security patches. Essential support for standards like CSS is still broken even with IE 6. It wasn’t until Firefox started making some dents in IE’s market share that Microsoft started talking about including tabbed browsing, better support for CSS 2.x and other nifty “modern” features worthy of the new millennium (which IE 7 now has — released in 2006!).
But it’s easy for me to be critical of Microsoft. Let’s see what it’s got now the resurgence for innovation is happening again on, seemingly, all fronts where Microsoft has businesses interests in — search engine, web mail, Microsoft Office suites, game development, browsers… etc.