3 ms·

Wow I honestly can't believe that pg is so short sighted. Let's compare work that's being directly copied by competitors: Microsoft: C#, actually for that mat

by actf 18y ago

Wow I honestly can't believe that pg is so short sighted. Let's compare work that's being directly copied by competitors: Microsoft: C#, actually for that matter the entire .NET Framework, Singularity, Gazelle, Visual Studio, Powershell, Office, WPF, Silverlight, Photosynth, the list goes on and on Apple: iPhone Microsoft is by no means "dead" or "irrelevant". Generally I like reading Paul Graham's essays, but I think this one is a bunch of gibberish.

jasongullickson 17y ago
Fascinating. What would be illuminating is if you would point to the competitor and the copied product instead of just listing Microsoft products. also, what does the line "Apple:iPhone" have to do with this? (admittedly, Singularity is very, very cool)
- actf 17y ago
  Sure, I'll provide some examples The companies copying Microsoft products: C# -> Novell Visual Studio -> Just about every other IDE out there rips off features that appear in Visual Studio first.Intellisense is the obvious example here. Office -> Open Office, parts of Google Docs Powershell -> Open source projects are directly copying this shell for linux WPF -> KDE 4, Nokia Gazelle -> Google is doing something very similar to this As for the line: Apple: IPhone I was trying to get the point across that this was the only product from apple that I could think of which has been copied by others. Perhaps you could make a case for parts of OSX as well. Either way my main point was that it's easy to find products that illustrate Microsoft's innovation. I find it frustrating when people dismiss Microsoft's products as inferior to the alternatives when they haven't even given them a fair evaluation. I find I encounter a lot of people where I work that immediately dismiss Microsoft's products, just because it's Microsoft or because it costs more than the open source alternatives. In my mind this is nothing more than "software racism". It shows that these people are just closed minded.
  - jasongullickson 17y ago
    I see your point, and I do agree that it is stupid to dismiss something just because it's from Microsoft (the same goes for any vendor/platform/etc.). I disagree however with your list. I'm not familiar with Gazelle or WPF, but the rest of these items were not "invented" by Microsoft either and can be sourced back to some other point of origin. So it's not fair to say Microsoft's technology is being copied in these cases because they themselves copied the ideas. The frustrating part is that, similar to General Motors, Microsoft does have good engineering going on but most of the results that come from these efforts never see the light of day in commercial productions. This is the nature of a large company organized in this way, and why we tend to see innovation in newer, smaller companies that don't know any better.

by actf 18y ago

jasongullickson 17y ago

Fascinating. What would be illuminating is if you would point to the competitor and the copied product instead of just listing Microsoft products. also, what does the line "Apple:iPhone" have to do with this? (admittedly, Singularity is very, very cool)

actf 17y ago
Sure, I'll provide some examples The companies copying Microsoft products: C# -> Novell Visual Studio -> Just about every other IDE out there rips off features that appear in Visual Studio first.Intellisense is the obvious example here. Office -> Open Office, parts of Google Docs Powershell -> Open source projects are directly copying this shell for linux WPF -> KDE 4, Nokia Gazelle -> Google is doing something very similar to this As for the line: Apple: IPhone I was trying to get the point across that this was the only product from apple that I could think of which has been copied by others. Perhaps you could make a case for parts of OSX as well. Either way my main point was that it's easy to find products that illustrate Microsoft's innovation. I find it frustrating when people dismiss Microsoft's products as inferior to the alternatives when they haven't even given them a fair evaluation. I find I encounter a lot of people where I work that immediately dismiss Microsoft's products, just because it's Microsoft or because it costs more than the open source alternatives. In my mind this is nothing more than "software racism". It shows that these people are just closed minded.
- jasongullickson 17y ago
  I see your point, and I do agree that it is stupid to dismiss something just because it's from Microsoft (the same goes for any vendor/platform/etc.). I disagree however with your list. I'm not familiar with Gazelle or WPF, but the rest of these items were not "invented" by Microsoft either and can be sourced back to some other point of origin. So it's not fair to say Microsoft's technology is being copied in these cases because they themselves copied the ideas. The frustrating part is that, similar to General Motors, Microsoft does have good engineering going on but most of the results that come from these efforts never see the light of day in commercial productions. This is the nature of a large company organized in this way, and why we tend to see innovation in newer, smaller companies that don't know any better.