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To: Earl Mincer who wrote (26475)	6/21/1999 11:14:00 AM
From: James B. Ditsworth	Respond to of 77400

Microsoft innovate? Absolutely. Microsoft has made countless innovations in many of their products. Speaking as a professional software developer with Microsoft certification in MS Access, I can speak with authority about the Access 97 product. I began using MS Access in 1994 when the Access version was 2.0. Next came Access 95, then Access 97 and this Summer we now see Access 2000. Each new version of the product has come out with hundreds of new features. Granted, some of the features have been seen before in large database products such as Oracle's, but to package them all and integrate them seamlessly into a "desktop" product is, in and of itself, very innovative. In short, they have a brilliant product. Just 3 examples of their innovation: 1) A graphical layout of the database schema. 2) The ability to save reports and queries as .html files for easy distribution on the web. 3) Ease of use features throughout the product, making MS Access one of the fastest quick-and-dirty development tools in the business (and I've used Borland products, mainframe-based c and cobol program generators, and various programming languages). And now many of Access's neat capabilities are showing up in SQL Server. I will stop here but if I wanted to get industrious I have little doubt that I could come up with many, many 'little features' in the MS Access product that would qualify in my view as innovative. Putting them all together yields an overall product which qualifies as 'highly innovative.' I am well aware of many other little innovations in Windows 98 and Excel 97 but won't belabor this. Microsoft's strength is marketing. But to blindly say that Microsoft is not innovative is a slap in the face to the thousand of hard working programmers who work there. Microsoft innovates with the best of them all.