Is Microsoft Actually Innovating? | Hacker News Reader

Is Microsoft Actually Innovating?

blog.villainousmind.com

15 pointsDeadly_B26 comments

For example, no one wants an iPod. They never have. What people want is to hear the right song at any given moment in time anywhere they are at without any device whatsoever.

That's an adorable bit of engineer-brain reductionism, but I don't think it's right. Having some kind of device in the loop is useful as a symbol. It tells other people that you're listening to music, that you spent a certain amount of money to do so, or that you do or don't pay attention to what's popular. If you bought a certain color, you probably did so to convey (or to avoid conveying) something about yourself, etc. People like to carry around and display tokens of their interests.

People like things.

This certainly seems to be true of some people. I have lost count of the number of times I have heard the phrase "retail therapy" used.

It's hard to give someone "the right song at any given moment in time anywhere they are at without any device whatsoever" for Christmas.

I do feel like Microsoft has been listening to what its consumers are asking for more than it used to. I think they got humbled by Vista more than they'd like to admit.

Microsoft needs to stop this genuine validation shit before they get a class action against them on it. I paid for a PC two years ago that worked up until last night when I got greeted with this:

http://social.microsoft.com/forums/en-US/genuinevista/thread...

Never mind the recovery process now that they don't even ship some computers with the OS disk.

Update: The bastards are magnanimous enough to allow a special mode where a browser can be used to go to pay for a genuine liscense, but no way to restore what you already paid for. So not only do they accuse customers of theft, they hold your pc hostage to extort more from legitimate users. I despise them. Do not trust MS with any data you have.

So did you actually have a genuine copy of Windows on your PC? Why did it suddenly stop working, was it due to an upgrade or something?

As an aside, I don't actually think it's unfair for MS to block access to Windows to users who are using illegal copies of Windows. It's their product; it stays their property so long as you haven't pay for it. If you don't like that, use something else instead (like Linux for example) or pay for the license.

Please note I'm not accusing you in particular of using an illegal copy of Windows. I'm just expressing surprise at people getting outraged when their PCs stop booting up into Windows because they have invalid licences (there was a story in China recently, which as I remember it was reported with glee by one of the Mac sites.)

(PS you could always load up the hard disk on another machine and copy the data from there)

I have a valid liscense that came with the OEM HP computer. Still have the receipts. Vista worked for 2 years until last night when it became invalid and accused me of theft.

Ray Ozzie certainly seems to be changing their corporate culture for the better. On the provided examples, Natal looks like an unambigious winner if it delivers; Sideshow looks more in the pattern of MS delivering an awkward implementation of a basically good idea.

Let me rephrase that. Sideshow looks stupid and the name invites mockery. Make it a tablet touchscreen and say it's the future of the mouse, and then please send me one if this turns out to be profitable.

Microsoft Research has some very cool stuff. But that technology gets into consumer products very slowly, if ever.

http://research.microsoft.com/apps/dp/pr/projects.aspx

"For example, no one wants an iPod. They never have."

Obviously this guy has never watched a television. Apple spends hundreds of millions each year making sure people do want an iPod.

Apple doesn't spend its money making sure people want iPods, they spend their money making sure people want to listen to "the right song wherever they are," and making sure that the iPod is the device that lets them listen to "the right song wherever they are."

Even if this (dubious) claim is true, it doesn't negate Matt's point.

No offense, but that's stupid. Apple doesn't need to spend a dime "making sure people want to listen to 'the right song wherever they are'". People have probably wanted that since wars were fought with sticks and have expected it since the Walkman in the '80s. That's like saying Coke's ad budget is an attempt to convince people to drink something when they're thirsty.

They spend their money on branding ads, to make sure that when people think about "listening to 'the right song wherever they are'" they associate that with an iPod. That's the only explanation, since everybody has known what an iPod is for years and yet they still spend literal hundreds of millions per year on ads for them.

For those unfamiliar with Johnny Lee, I highly recommend is YouTube videos on Wii Hacks ... he is a well recognized genius int the field and was recently employed by Microsoft after graduating Carnegie Mellon university. His involvement in this project ensures that it will have a better chance at survival.

It's easy to sing to the choir. It's also boring and badly written.

Microsoft has made a LOT of innovations. A massive amount of modern computing is based of how accessible microsoft made computing - if we still had to recompile our kernel to enable sound, I don't think we would be near as far as we are.

> Microsoft has made a LOT of innovations. A massive amount of modern computing is based of how accessible microsoft made computing - if we still had to recompile our kernel to enable sound, I don't think we would be near as far as we are.

Sure , they've enabled innovation. How much have they actually done ...

There are many innovative companies like Philips, Amazon.com, Yahoo!, Sun, formerly AT&T, but Apple and Microsoft are not among them. Their core competencies are quality and marketing. There's way more money in that.

Apple did not invent the phone, mp3 player, video player, application store, etc. They just perfected and skillfully crafted hypes around them. Microsoft did not invent the Office suite, IDE's or the hardware acceleration layer, but they did perfect and deploy them through aggressive business strategies.

>Apple did not invent the phone, mp3 player, video player, application store, etc. They just perfected and skillfully crafted hypes around them. Microsoft did not invent the Office suite, IDE's or the hardware acceleration layer, but they did perfect and deploy them through aggressive business strategies.

Is your claim that a company must invent something from whole cloth to be "innovative"?

No, but that's not how they run their business. You shouldn't expect Microsoft or Apple to be innovative, you should expect them to make a better product than everyone else and/or market it better than everyone else.

Amazon.com did invent Cloud Computing, Philips did invent the CD, Sun did invent Java, Toyota did invent the hybrid, AT&T did invent the cell phone, Xerox did invent the GUI. Those are the companies that run on innovation.

"Philips did invent the CD"

A refinement on the laserdisc.

"Sun did invent Java"

A refinement on C, C++, and Smalltalk.

"Xerox did invent the GUI"

A refinement on Doug Engelbart's work at SRI. (Edit: Though many of the researchers working for him later went to PARC, I find no evidence that Engelbart himself ever did.)

Now here's the real question. If inventing a new type of laserdisc that's five inches wide is innovation, why isn't inventing a GUI-based computer system that costs half as much as a Star and a third as much as a Lisa? If inventing a new object oriented language with C style syntax is an innovation, why isn't inventing a smartphone with a multitouch screen and unprecedented amounts of storage space?

Doug Engelbart was working at PARC (Xerox PARC).

I think you have crossed to arguing about words.

What do you mean innovation.

"Apple did not invent the phone, mp3 player, video player, application store, etc."

That doesn't mean they aren't innovative. It's easy to invent the MP3 player. It's hard to invent the MP3 player that people actually want to use. That doesn't suck.

I think it is just dumb to claim that Microsoft doesn't innovate. Comparing them to Apple is also a bit like comparing Apples and Oranges (pun intended).

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