The word according to Microsoft zdnet.com
That word being "innovation", not the first word to come to mean something else in Microsoftese, I've been beating that dead horse for a long time.. This guy goes into a little more length than my current sarcastic tagline, "Microsoft must be free to imitate, I mean integrate, er, innovate- yeah, that's the ticket", but the point is much the same.
Microsoft has a history of claiming as "new" technologies that weren't originally created by it. Remember your history: Microsoft didn't build the DOS upon which its empire was built. The company first licensed DOS' ancestor and then snatched it away for a criminally low price from Seattle Computer Products in 1980.
The first incarnation of Windows was merely a graphical shell over DOS, and that paradigm was directly influenced by Apple's Macintosh, ideas from which Microsoft borrowed freely. Windows NT? It was designed by David Cutler, who also was the creator of OpenVMS for Digital Equipment. And with every upgrade, NT looks more and more like a mainframe operating system.
It doesn't end there, if you consider the number of products Microsoft develops that were originally designed by others: the browser, the spreadsheet, even my beloved Microsoft Golf. In the credits of that product, Microsoft actually cites as "inspiration" another program, Links 386 Pro.
Innovation, according to Microsoft, must then mean borrowing concepts from the best technology available, recreating them in its own image and dumping them into Windows. And if it can't be borrowed, buy it.
Or steal it, or make somebody an offer they can't refuse. Stac and Cutler's DEC code go with the first, Spyglass and Lernout & Hauspie tend toward the second. Maybe Bill should switch the line to "the world must be safe for Standard Microsoft business practice", or something.
Cheers, Dan. |
