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Comment by mw63214 | Hacker News Reader

I still don't get how all these articles frame the debate as Microsoft playing catch-up with all the "innovation" coming out of Apple? I get the management culture and internal struggles and "analysis paralysis" that comes with the cover-your-butt mentality, but as far as I can tell, Microsoft is one of the very few companies that has entire departments dedicated bringing cutting-edge technologies to market. The only other companies that comes close(that I've seen) are Google and perhaps Philips. Talk to researches at elite technology schools, and I would venture to guess that they would put Microsoft far ahead of Apple, and maybe Google, in the innovation race. However, if you talk management or P/E people, they would probably give you a different answer. So I guess I'm in agreement that there's an internal problem at Microsoft, but that it lies with the culture, not the actual scope of their ability to innovate.

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I'm sure Microfot has many smart engineers that make a lot of cool stuff in their labs, but almost none of those are coming to market, so in the end all that research goes to waste, or perhaps to patents that they'll only use to sue others later.

Oh, come on. How about F# and Kinect, to name but two?

They bought Kinect from another company – the hard work of getting approvals and resources and everything else to start on it had already been done outside of Microsoft.

It's definitely an impressive bit of tech, but would it have been possible were its genesis subject to the byzantine internal politics of Microsoft? I dunno. I wouldn't put money on it.

Meanwhile, consumers don't buy functional programming languages.

the hardware was licensed from another company, but the body-tracking software was developed in house (by a small incubation team in Redmond working with researchers at MS Research's UK office). the whole product definition as well.

"Meanwhile, consumers don't buy functional programming languages."

Unlike Apple, Microsoft is also interested in business models that aren't B2C.

They bought the sensor. The machine-learning approach that allows the kinect to run @ 200 fps was built @ MSR by Shotton et al.

> Microsoft is one of the very few companies that has entire departments dedicated bringing cutting-edge technologies to market.

So where are these technologies? And why isn't Microsoft hauling huge sacks of money home each year from multiple products that didn't exist in the 90's? As far as I can tell, they make money from vendor lock-in with Office and Windows, and a gaming division founded by a visionary who left because he couldn't stand working there anymore.

Kinect is pretty impressive, and I think WP7 is innovative in its ability to display content on a small screen in a natural way.

I don't know if I agree that they are ahead of Google and Apple, but they have come up with a few cool things.

Kinect is awesome, but as I said here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2420579

They bought Kinect from another company – the hard work of getting approvals and resources and everything else to start on it had already been done outside of Microsoft.

It's definitely an impressive bit of tech, but would it have been possible were its genesis subject to the byzantine internal politics of Microsoft? I dunno. I wouldn't put money on it.

As to WP7, it's actually more of an indictment of Microsoft than it is a credit to them. Consider how much of a clusterfuck their mobile strategy has been for the last four years. It took them forever to get their bureaucratic shit together and actually ship something that resembled a next generation smartphone, and once they did, they did a piss-poor job supporting and improving the platform, despite the very high standard set by both Google and Apple for the same. It's a perfect example of their inability to execute or respond to changes in their industry.

Office is also legitimately innovative. Love it or hate it, the whole "ribbon" thing was a big deal.

Excel is a thing of beauty. But let's be real:

When you've got other companies bringing home billions in revenue on product categories that did not even exist five years ago, it's tough to be impressed that Microsoft gave a facelift to a product that was new in the early 90's.

I am being real. Even discounting some mis-steps (Kin, Zune, Vista) the incremental improvements made to Xbox, Windows, Windows Server, Visual Studio, SQL Server, and even IE9 are impressive.

It's perfectly possible for a company to be successful and innovative without having huge successes in product categories that didn't exist until recently.

From a perfectly selfish perspective, if Microsoft totally gave up on tablets, phones, search, and social. I wouldn't care or even notice because Apple, Google, and Facebook are meeting my needs nicely. Maybe it's unrealistic to expect them to just keep making the things that I use every day better and better. I don't know.

Another example would be on the developer tools side. Things like C# 4.0, Linq, Entity Framework, ASP.NET MVC.

Not all of the their developer stuff is great (I actually had a MSFT PM to apologize to me for the unit-testing stuff built into Visual Studio) but I can't imagine life without Linq.

"Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have." —Steve Jobs

I've begun to wonder lately if all of the money they've spent on "innovative technologies" shouldn't be counted as marketing expense for their core products.

I mean they're not going to convince many people to buy Office for the first time with advertising. People buy Office because it's what you do when you have a PC.

On the other hand by spending money to appear to be a cutting edge technical company they can more easily justify (sell) to their business customers the need for another round of version upgrades.

I wonder if Microsoft needs to define themselves, as Apple and Google have. Apple: "Make it Shiny", Google: "Don't be Evil", Microsoft "Not afraid to fail". Maybe they could increase the velocity of bringing their research infrastructure in-line with their broader interests.

Finally some opinion I can agree with. I have a suspicion it's some perception thing, like the opinion leaders proclaimed that "Microsoft isn't innovative" and every media repeat that.

Actually, Microsoft is an innovative company, and after reading the blog of the Win7 developers, their software development methodology is far ahead of most other software companies. Maybe, just maybe, they are around for a long time a became very big, so people expect more of them...or, I don't know.

I'm sure Microsoft has many smart engineers that make a lot of cool stuff in their labs, but almost none of those are coming to market, so in the end all that research goes to waste, or perhaps to patents that they'll only use to sue others later.

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