To: Charles Hughes who wrote (14278 ) 11/19/1997 5:27:00 PM From: Larry Sullivan Read Replies (4) | Respond to
Your list is very accurate and I am always stunned that PARC could never get the rest of Xerox off there respective duffs and roll some cool technology out, but I don't think that that takes away from the premise which is Microsoft does a very good job of bringing technology to the masses and innovating - especially within product categories. I will use this example - OLE (the old original crusty OLE from Win3.1, it wasn't the most elegent solution but it worked and allowed apps on the Windows platform to create compound documents with live links before the competition. Maybe SOM or OpenDoc were better theorectically but they did not produce in the marketplace. Also you are correct that Microsoft did not invent the word processor, the spreadsheet or presentation software but they did innovate in these categories with things like AutoFill in Excel among others. And I think many people find the natural language help in Office97 much better than previous help and I would call this innovative. They may not live up to what some people want to call innovative but the customers wanted these features and Microsoft delivered.Aside to Larry: MS has a well deserved reputation among engineers, scientists, and software designers as a black hole for technology. And this is engineering, BTW, not science. Lay people often get confused by this because they dont understand that engineering always has a research component. Pure science (which there is damn little of these days) is distinguished by it's lack of an explicit development component. Actually not just lay people get confused by this. Research people of all kinds are too apt to lay the mantle of science on what they are doing, when they really are research scouts for technology. It's just a status thing.
