4 ms·

Surely Microsoft innovated, in a less-than-spectacular way most of the times with things like direct3d, plug-n-play etc. They added tcp/ip stack to windows and

Surely Microsoft innovated, in a less-than-spectacular way most of the times with things like direct3d, plug-n-play etc. They added tcp/ip stack to windows and created internet explorer, even brought the internet directly to the desktop initially. While they did use their monopoly to push their products thus eliminating rivals, they did not directly block competition. You could still install netscape and windows is still a very open platform. I 'm not going to defend MS monopoly tactics of course, or make a scientific account of microsoft's pros and cons, but Windows had competitors in the open market, and yet they prevailed, not always because they were the better system, but they were not significantly worse than others. Compare that to the oft-praised Apple model: directly block competitors from making similar functionality instead of competing with them and lock people into their systems. Does that model not impede technology from advancing?

matwood 15y ago
like direct3d You just brought up the horrible memories of computer gaming pre-directX/3d. What a mess it was. Wonder if I have a floppy lying around with all my old custom autoexec.bat files? :)
- jiggy2011 15y ago
  This. I remember having to play games without any sound because I couldn't figure out how to fit the SCSI Hard Disk driver and CD Rom driver and soundblaster driver into the 640k especially since lots of games flat out refused to work if you loaded himem.sys or QEMM which allowed you to load the drivers into the extended/expanded memory areas.
hype7 15y ago
Direct3d? Why not use OpenGL? Plug-n-play? That's a standard? Adding TCP/IP - thanks, Microsoft, for not embracing and extending that one. Internet explorer? Gee, thanks Microsoft for abusing your monopolistic powers to knock out Netscape and start embracing and extending the HTML platform? The best defence you can mount is that they prevailed because they weren't significantly worse than others. That in itself says a lot -- but I'd make the argument they prevailed because they used tactics that make it hard for others to compete (including illegal ones).
- angelbob 15y ago
  Plug-n-play? That's a standard? It is in the "ISA-compatible hardware that doesn't need jumpers" sense, yes. It has a silly-sounding name, but it's a very specific set of hardware standards. It was a huge, huge advance, speaking as somebody who got multiple graphics and sound cards working, simultaneously, with jumpers, back on an old pre-PnP 486 tower. I literally had a piece of paper with my IRQ and DMA channels and what cards they were assigned to, along with similar mappings for memory ranges, so that I could move the jumpers to reasonable locations for the next piece of hardware I added. If you screwed it up, the new peripheral (and the old one it fought with) just stopped working. And then you got to go remap everything by literally moving a little fiddly piece of plastic from pin to pin on a card you had to open your computer to get at. Plug-and-Play was huge. I originally griped about it too, back when it meant new hardware wouldn't work in my 486 :-P
  - vidarh 15y ago
    Plug-and-Play was a shitty alternative when far superior systems existed on other platforms. Instead they opted for a really horribly limited system. Compare Autoconfig on the Amiga, for example, which was older and provided far more advanced capabilities and was well documented if they could've been bothered to at least copy something that worked well instead of coming up with yet another technically inferior solution.
    - WalterBright 15y ago
      I bought one of the early Amigas. They used commodity hardware, but would alter the connector so you had to buy it from them. No thanks.
      - beagle3 15y ago
        Microsoft did the same with software. It's called "Embrace & Extend". Of the available evils at the time, the Amiga was ridiculously better thought out and implemented. The PC hardware of 1995 was still quite far behind the Amiga hardware of 1985 (which had 14 bit stereo DMA sound or 4 channel 8 bit DMA sound, 2D hardware acceleration and sprites, and more). The PC operating system of 1995 was starting to equal the Amiga operating system of 1985 (Win95 had separate memory space, which was better than AmigaOS 1.0's shared space -- but otherwise, Win95 was mostly inferior) I'd wait 1-2 years for cheaper standards. I'd rather pay a little more for getting to the future 10 years in advance.
vidarh 15y ago
Adding TCP/IP to Windows was an innovation? Winsock was pretty much lifted from BSD. The API is so compatible that you can target both with a simple include file to #define away some differences (that's a good thing, but it hardly indicates innovation on Microsofts side), largely because Windows can't easily support the equivalence between filehandles and sockets that implementing the BSD socket API 1:1 relies on.
- zerostar07 15y ago
  I didnt list it as an innovation. It sped up the adoption of internet technologies.
andrewmu 15y ago
Direct3D was initially much worse than OpenGL, which they saw as a threat because it was cross platform. To this day they are doing something similar with the refusal to adopt WebGL as a standard in their browsers.

matwood 15y ago

like direct3d You just brought up the horrible memories of computer gaming pre-directX/3d. What a mess it was. Wonder if I have a floppy lying around with all my old custom autoexec.bat files? :)

jiggy2011 15y ago
This. I remember having to play games without any sound because I couldn't figure out how to fit the SCSI Hard Disk driver and CD Rom driver and soundblaster driver into the 640k especially since lots of games flat out refused to work if you loaded himem.sys or QEMM which allowed you to load the drivers into the extended/expanded memory areas.

hype7 15y ago

Direct3d? Why not use OpenGL? Plug-n-play? That's a standard? Adding TCP/IP - thanks, Microsoft, for not embracing and extending that one. Internet explorer? Gee, thanks Microsoft for abusing your monopolistic powers to knock out Netscape and start embracing and extending the HTML platform? The best defence you can mount is that they prevailed because they weren't significantly worse than others. That in itself says a lot -- but I'd make the argument they prevailed because they used tactics that make it hard for others to compete (including illegal ones).

angelbob 15y ago
Plug-n-play? That's a standard? It is in the "ISA-compatible hardware that doesn't need jumpers" sense, yes. It has a silly-sounding name, but it's a very specific set of hardware standards. It was a huge, huge advance, speaking as somebody who got multiple graphics and sound cards working, simultaneously, with jumpers, back on an old pre-PnP 486 tower. I literally had a piece of paper with my IRQ and DMA channels and what cards they were assigned to, along with similar mappings for memory ranges, so that I could move the jumpers to reasonable locations for the next piece of hardware I added. If you screwed it up, the new peripheral (and the old one it fought with) just stopped working. And then you got to go remap everything by literally moving a little fiddly piece of plastic from pin to pin on a card you had to open your computer to get at. Plug-and-Play was huge. I originally griped about it too, back when it meant new hardware wouldn't work in my 486 :-P
- vidarh 15y ago
  Plug-and-Play was a shitty alternative when far superior systems existed on other platforms. Instead they opted for a really horribly limited system. Compare Autoconfig on the Amiga, for example, which was older and provided far more advanced capabilities and was well documented if they could've been bothered to at least copy something that worked well instead of coming up with yet another technically inferior solution.
  - WalterBright 15y ago
    I bought one of the early Amigas. They used commodity hardware, but would alter the connector so you had to buy it from them. No thanks.
    - beagle3 15y ago
      Microsoft did the same with software. It's called "Embrace & Extend". Of the available evils at the time, the Amiga was ridiculously better thought out and implemented. The PC hardware of 1995 was still quite far behind the Amiga hardware of 1985 (which had 14 bit stereo DMA sound or 4 channel 8 bit DMA sound, 2D hardware acceleration and sprites, and more). The PC operating system of 1995 was starting to equal the Amiga operating system of 1985 (Win95 had separate memory space, which was better than AmigaOS 1.0's shared space -- but otherwise, Win95 was mostly inferior) I'd wait 1-2 years for cheaper standards. I'd rather pay a little more for getting to the future 10 years in advance.

vidarh 15y ago

Adding TCP/IP to Windows was an innovation? Winsock was pretty much lifted from BSD. The API is so compatible that you can target both with a simple include file to #define away some differences (that's a good thing, but it hardly indicates innovation on Microsofts side), largely because Windows can't easily support the equivalence between filehandles and sockets that implementing the BSD socket API 1:1 relies on.

zerostar07 15y ago
I didnt list it as an innovation. It sped up the adoption of internet technologies.

andrewmu 15y ago

Direct3D was initially much worse than OpenGL, which they saw as a threat because it was cross platform. To this day they are doing something similar with the refusal to adopt WebGL as a standard in their browsers.