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To: Eric Wells who wrote (102104)	4/25/2000 7:24:00 PM
From: Glenn D. Rudolph	Respond to of 164684

Glenn - you must understand that technological innovations generally don't occur in giant leaps - but rather in baby steps. For example many claim that Apple's original Mac OS was a technological innovation - but in reality, it was based on research done at Xerox Park in the 1970's (Xerox developed a mouse-driven graphical user interface there) - and even the Xerox Park research scientists brought with them a broad level of knowledge and experience (they didn't come up with this stuff out of thin air). This is correct that the idea of a GUI interface did not originate with Apple but Apple took this initial idea and made into something really useable in a very short period of time. Eighteen months to be exact for the first final release of the Mac operating system. The Xerox Perk version was not truly functional. Apple did infact innovate here that Steve Jobs saw the possibilities from this simple idea. 1. Customizable and movable toolbars (yes, Excel was the first to offer this) Actually, this was a copy of the Mac Finder interface where the menues in the Finder were custimizable and moveable. Microsoft just copied it in Excel. No innovation there at all. Apple did the innovation and Microsoft copied again usual. 2. PivotTables - this is a big one - but if you've never worked in a corporate finance department you may not even know what a pivottable is. A pivottable is a special table in Excel that allows a user to query multi-dimensional external database data. Excel was the first spreadsheet program to offer pivottable functionality - and I believe to this day, such functionality is not provided in other spreadsheet software. In Excel 2000, Microsoft enhanced the pivottable functionality by implementing support for OLAP cubes. This may appear as technical gibberish - but this is very cool stuff for anyone that has developed a finance or data analysis software application. Eric, please cut me a break. I use pivotaTables often. I can't state if Microsoft was the first with this idea. I do not have enough experience with Lotus to make a comparison. However, this function been available in Mathematic for many years prior I believe excpet one had to type in the formula. So to whom does the innovation belong? Have you ever used Mathematica? 3. Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) - this is another very big innovation, that not only applies to Excel, but to all Office products, as well as several other products developed by Microsoft and by other companies. VBA is a common programming language that is embedded in the applications. Another technology known as ActiveX (formerly also known as OLE) allows software developers to control the applications in which VBA is embedded - ActiveX makes the applications appear as libraries of programmable objects to the software developer. This was copied from Apple Script. Apple had this place to cotrol other application for almost a year before Microsoft copied it. Actually, I found OLE to be a nusiance int hat it interfered with Apple Script so often I disabled it. Apple Script is customizable and OLE is not as fas a I know. 4. I would classify Access an innovation in and of itself. Sure, there were a few other desktop databases that existed before Access (FoxPro, FileMaker Pro, Paradox) - but Access blew them all out of the water. I am quite certain that Access was a poor copy of the engine called Omnis developed by a British firm called Blythe Software. Omnis was in existance why prior to Access, used diagramming for relational database functions and worked seemlessly on Unic, Windows and the Mac. It also used SQL. These features may be all greek to you, but to a database developer, it's important stuff. There are hundreds of thousands of Access database applications in existence in corporations throughout the world today - a few of which I have developed myself. Access resulted in a major decrease in the cost of development of database applications - I think that just about anyone who works in software development would agree with this. Not greek at all int hat I use and still use Omnis as my relational database because it works so well in a mixed operating system environment. Thry Access in a mixed environment and see how innovative it really is<G> Ooops I believe it only works on machine running Microsoft operating systems. I wonder why that is. Do you know? 5. Table drawing tool in Word - released in Word 97, allows you to create tables using the mouse as a pencil. This was hailed as very innovative. I also use Word and soont he drawing function will catch up to the version of MacPaint released in 1985. You must be kidding me in an attempt to give anything to do with grapics as being innovated at Microsoft. They copied everything and did it poorly at that. 7. Automatic error checking in Word - underlines incorrectly spelled words as you type. I believe Microsoft was even the first company to introduce spell checkers and thesaures into it's products - but I don't know this for certain. There were third party spell, grammar checkers and thesaures that worked interactively with MacWord in 1987. I stil;l ahve the old software. Unfortunatly MacWord is no longer being published. I wonder what caused that. 9. Save As HTML - allows you to convert your Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents to HTML files (yes Microsoft was the first to introduce this in a word processor, a spreadsheet and a presentation graphics program - you know how many millions of web pages have been created from this feature - you know how much time and money the feature has saved?) This may be a Microsoft innovation. I can't say. 12. Intellimouse - you know the mouse with the wheel in the middle of it - yes, that was a Microsoft innovation. That works almost was well as the Kensignton programmble mouse with short cut keys that is still popular today but had all that functionalty by 1992. Have you ever used a utility call "quick Keys?" Let me throw the question back to you Glenn - what software non-Microsoft software products do you find to be innovative and why? I believe I answered that. Most innovations were from Apple for third party smaller firs such as Kensington, Wolfram Research, CE Software, Blythe Software, Synmantec, Intuit, Sitka, Adobe, Mlti-Add, Silicon Beach and many others. Glenn