6 ms·

> Microsoft's approach was different: let others innovate, then we'll dominate. XBox, Surface and ergonomic keyboards would beg to differ. Not mentioning the c

by laureny 13y ago

> Microsoft's approach was different: let others innovate, then we'll dominate. XBox, Surface and ergonomic keyboards would beg to differ. Not mentioning the countless other innovations that didn't become as popular as these ones. I know the Hacker News hive mind likes to perpetuate the myth that Microsoft doesn't innovate but it innovates at least as much as, if not more than, Google and Apple.

novaleaf 13y ago
xbox is msft embracing and extending the console market, if only to further their "3 screen" initiative. that's why you see xbox devs moaning about how msft is loosing touch with gamers... it's because msft was never in touch with gamers. they wanted the consoles to get into living rooms.
windexh8er 13y ago
You had me until the Google / Apple remark. My feeling of Microsoft is that they didn't understand their innovative success; XBox - or how to capitalize on it going forward. The 360 was likely the last product of theirs I will ever buy. The new console - not innovative and if they weren't paying attention to the fall out around the Sim City debacle then that's just added injury to insult. Baller is a bad CEO by today's success standards. He has always come off as arrogant and assuming. Not something an innovative company strives for. The real dilemma here is that the general population has two unique metrics playing on them in a different manner today. One is a burgeoning idea of rights, ownership and privacy (which Microsoft Flys directly in the face of, in a very bad way) and then there is the subjective problem of attrition and interest that is eroding much faster today as consumers expect "the next big thing" every time a release comes ton market. It's one part "innovator's dilemma" with a sprinkle of fast flux perception. Microsoft is a dead brand. I started saying this in 2004. I still believe it today. Why? Because instead of having more interest annually I have less. If Gates wanted to leave a mark on the world he'd buy back pieces and parts of the behemoth and set them free for the open market, but the reality is it will continue to fade away and generations coming into the world today will view the giant as relevant as tape decks and CDs. The technology industry is in a period of change and maturation. It may not feel like it but my thought is 5 years out products will be more cohesive because consumers demanded platforms that were interoperable. If not, then the future may be a very stark and gloomy state of affairs dictated by a few who hold self-interest and money first. I hope this industry doesn't follow in the footsteps of the financial industry...
- jabr 13y ago
  > If Gates wanted to leave a mark on the world he'd buy back pieces and parts of the behemoth and set them free for the open market I agree with most of your comment, but that line bothered me. In my opinion, the single worthwhile accomplishment of Microsoft was that it led to the formation of the Gates Foundation. I don't even agree with many of their objectives, but simply providing funding for "unprofitable" medical research alone has already left "a mark on the world".
  - zero_intp 13y ago
    This is a dangerous thought, imo. Robber Barons turned philanthropists are still evil old men trying to buy social indulgences. I argue that the weight these monopolists tied around their industries had larger negative impact on GDP and innovation than the positive value of the 'works' their charities re-invest in society.
    - jabr 13y ago
      Oh, I completely agree. The point I was trying to make was simply that increasing funding for medical research on malaria, tuberculosis, etc. was more significant than anything he did (or could do) with Microsoft. But regardless, I agree that the world would be a much better place if addressing our solvable problems didn't require the support of a retired billionaire first.
- laureny 13y ago
  > The 360 was likely the last product of theirs I will ever buy. This kind of categorical statement always baffles me. How can you be so sure that they will never, ever release a product you might want? You can't, so maybe you're just showing an emotional bias against a company, another thing that I find baffling.
  - jodrellblank 13y ago
    How can you be so sure that they will never, ever That's not what they said. They said "likely", in the context of a comment predicting a future of Microsoft decline.
StavrosK 13y ago
When people hear about Microsoft innovating, they think about the Kinect and the Surface, but Microsoft Research is very well respected in academia and constantly creates new technology. An academic friend of mine frequently tells me that Google et al do not compare to MSR in either quality or volume.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- robotresearcher 13y ago
  Jamie Shotton and others at MSR were directly responsible for the pose detection software for Kinect. MS bought in the RGBD camera from outside, but did really good work on the software internally, using the talent at MSR. A great success story for the corporate lab model. I don't know how often things work out as well as that, as the labs must be enormously expensive!
- raverbashing 13y ago
  Yes, but they don't "ship" as often. Having them developing Kinect is obvious, but not so obvious inside MS world
- alanctgardner2 13y ago
  I watched a really interesting talk about how XBox (and presumably the Xbox One) uses a technology they call TrueRank to do player matching. As far as I know this was an MSR project to create a Bayesian version of the ELO chess ranking system. Actually, now that I think of it, it was a whole week of ML talks by academics from MSR. My point being, they produce (and ship) a lot of smaller innovations too, behind the scenes. Sometimes it's just detecting griefers.
  - StavrosK 13y ago
    Yep, I heard about that too. It wasn't just detecting griefers, it was a whole matching system to make sure new players didn't get frustrated while experienced players were still challenged.
SiVal 13y ago
I'm speechless. Well, almost. Apple revolutionized the music industry, how music is sold, and how it's listened to. It revolutionized phones. Its iPad changed consumer computing, media consumption, user interface expectations.... Five year olds are totally at home on an iPad and think a screen without touch "isn't working". As they get older, all screens will have to conform to the new reality. They revolutionized shopping for music, movies, and apps. They revolutionized brick and mortar retailing with the most profitable stores of all time. And Google has changed human access to information so profoundly that I can't adequately explain to my kids what it was like growing up in a world so cut off from things other people knew. Google Earth is something from science fiction. Street View lets me get to know my way around a town before I travel there. I can take my kids for a walk past my old homes in four different countries. Astonishing. And Google's self-driving cars may make driving off-limits to humans in another few years. Then there's Microsoft, with thousands of smart people working for decades with billions of dollars of resources to work with---the most powerful of them all until what feels like "recently" to me. And the evidence of their innovative power: we have one of several game platforms, a billion-dollar write-off tablet that they can't give away, and a kind of keyboard that accounts for less than 1% of keyboards in use today. Oh, and other stuff that "didn't become as popular as these". I'm not saying they never came up with anything new. I'm saying that relative to their size and resources, their innovations were trivial. Their huge impact on business, on consumer use of the Internet, on the tech industry, on governments, and so on, came not from revolutionary innovation but primarily from their relentless efforts to monopolize markets. Of course, the lifeblood of a company is profit, not innovation. Without subsidies from ad revenues, Google's innovations could dry up quickly, and cheap knock-offs could eventually take away most of the markets Apple has revolutionized. But even if their profits prove short-lived, their amazing contributions to society will live on. I doubt many in the future will feel the same about Microsoft's contributions.
- Silhouette 13y ago
  Then there's Microsoft, with thousands of smart people working for decades with billions of dollars of resources to work with---the most powerful of them all until what feels like "recently" to me. And the evidence of their innovative power: we have one of several game platforms, a billion-dollar write-off tablet that they can't give away, and a kind of keyboard that accounts for less than 1% of keyboards in use today. Oh, and other stuff that "didn't become as popular as these". This is not really fair, and I'm sure you realise that. As a random selection, and in roughly decreasing order of significance from "world defining" to "things you'd really miss if they weren't there": We have a standardised desktop operating system that is familiar to nearly every computer user on the planet, with which an array of hardware more diverse than at any point in human history mostly just works, and on which software probably written before some people reading this were born still runs. We have a history of programming languages that have advanced both the state of industrial practice and the state of the art in research, and both traditions continue to this day. Until very recently, the majority of web pages were presented in one of a handful of carefully designed, screen-optimised fonts that brought digital typography far beyond its previous standard, which are available on almost all major platforms, not just Microsoft's. We have a wealth of ideas regarding HCI, from more efficient user interface designs to accessibility techniques to support users with disabilities. It's not difficult to think of more examples, and of course Microsoft have also participated in numerous collaborative endeavours over the years that have advanced the industry in other ways. No doubt an organisation with Microsoft's resources could have achieved much more in recent years with more visionary leadership, but the idea that their work has produced nothing more than a few hardware devices over the years is just silly.
inthewind 13y ago
Yes you can't ignore MS, especially when they still dominate the desktop and workstation market with their OS. I was a sysadmin in the 90s, and other admins I knew loved the Microsoft offerings - having gui control panels to server services. Active directory and the like. It wasn't particularly innovative, but MS managed to put lipstick on a pig and managed to sell it, while cleverly locking down their ecosystem through their proprietry platform. For some the CLI and Linux is still a turnoff, and there isn't that much preventing people from putting lipstick on that particular pig - but you don't see that many offerings (arguably you could say that Apple server is kind of like that).
- Roboprog 13y ago
  Sys admins who have to click on a GUI to patch a rack-full of servers with the same update? That's just sick. Yeah, we can thank Microsoft for that. Now, as a developer who remembers the old days, I have to deal with sys admins who have no idea what the hell they are doing on a *nix box. (some of that is hiring, yeah, but that's the pool we have to draw from now) No, ignore Microsoft at your peril :-(
philwelch 13y ago
Xbox was a response to PlayStation--the only "innovation" of the original Xbox, to use commodity PC hardware, was dropped with the second generation. Surface is an also-ran. Which leaves Microsoft's true innovative legacy as the inventors of the bendy keyboard? Well, that's "as much as, if not more than, Google and Apple" if I've ever seen it.
sitkack 13y ago
You need a hug bro. Sorry about your stock, seriously.
amenod 13y ago
Yes, Microsoft innovates. Their innovations just don't stick. For instance, MS had a "PC tablet" (WinXP based) much before Apple, but it took iPad to make a revolution.
- ikt 13y ago
  You said "just don't stick" and quoted a product that "completely sucked". The PC tablet from MS was a laughable joke. The iPad made a revolution because it was revolutionary. It took Android years to catch up and Microsoft is still trying to fumble something together today.

by laureny 13y ago

novaleaf 13y ago

xbox is msft embracing and extending the console market, if only to further their "3 screen" initiative. that's why you see xbox devs moaning about how msft is loosing touch with gamers... it's because msft was never in touch with gamers. they wanted the consoles to get into living rooms.

windexh8er 13y ago

You had me until the Google / Apple remark. My feeling of Microsoft is that they didn't understand their innovative success; XBox - or how to capitalize on it going forward. The 360 was likely the last product of theirs I will ever buy. The new console - not innovative and if they weren't paying attention to the fall out around the Sim City debacle then that's just added injury to insult. Baller is a bad CEO by today's success standards. He has always come off as arrogant and assuming. Not something an innovative company strives for. The real dilemma here is that the general population has two unique metrics playing on them in a different manner today. One is a burgeoning idea of rights, ownership and privacy (which Microsoft Flys directly in the face of, in a very bad way) and then there is the subjective problem of attrition and interest that is eroding much faster today as consumers expect "the next big thing" every time a release comes ton market. It's one part "innovator's dilemma" with a sprinkle of fast flux perception. Microsoft is a dead brand. I started saying this in 2004. I still believe it today. Why? Because instead of having more interest annually I have less. If Gates wanted to leave a mark on the world he'd buy back pieces and parts of the behemoth and set them free for the open market, but the reality is it will continue to fade away and generations coming into the world today will view the giant as relevant as tape decks and CDs. The technology industry is in a period of change and maturation. It may not feel like it but my thought is 5 years out products will be more cohesive because consumers demanded platforms that were interoperable. If not, then the future may be a very stark and gloomy state of affairs dictated by a few who hold self-interest and money first. I hope this industry doesn't follow in the footsteps of the financial industry...

jabr 13y ago
> If Gates wanted to leave a mark on the world he'd buy back pieces and parts of the behemoth and set them free for the open market I agree with most of your comment, but that line bothered me. In my opinion, the single worthwhile accomplishment of Microsoft was that it led to the formation of the Gates Foundation. I don't even agree with many of their objectives, but simply providing funding for "unprofitable" medical research alone has already left "a mark on the world".
- zero_intp 13y ago
  This is a dangerous thought, imo. Robber Barons turned philanthropists are still evil old men trying to buy social indulgences. I argue that the weight these monopolists tied around their industries had larger negative impact on GDP and innovation than the positive value of the 'works' their charities re-invest in society.
  - jabr 13y ago
    Oh, I completely agree. The point I was trying to make was simply that increasing funding for medical research on malaria, tuberculosis, etc. was more significant than anything he did (or could do) with Microsoft. But regardless, I agree that the world would be a much better place if addressing our solvable problems didn't require the support of a retired billionaire first.
laureny 13y ago
> The 360 was likely the last product of theirs I will ever buy. This kind of categorical statement always baffles me. How can you be so sure that they will never, ever release a product you might want? You can't, so maybe you're just showing an emotional bias against a company, another thing that I find baffling.
- jodrellblank 13y ago
  How can you be so sure that they will never, ever That's not what they said. They said "likely", in the context of a comment predicting a future of Microsoft decline.

StavrosK 13y ago

When people hear about Microsoft innovating, they think about the Kinect and the Surface, but Microsoft Research is very well respected in academia and constantly creates new technology. An academic friend of mine frequently tells me that Google et al do not compare to MSR in either quality or volume.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
robotresearcher 13y ago
Jamie Shotton and others at MSR were directly responsible for the pose detection software for Kinect. MS bought in the RGBD camera from outside, but did really good work on the software internally, using the talent at MSR. A great success story for the corporate lab model. I don't know how often things work out as well as that, as the labs must be enormously expensive!
raverbashing 13y ago
Yes, but they don't "ship" as often. Having them developing Kinect is obvious, but not so obvious inside MS world
alanctgardner2 13y ago
I watched a really interesting talk about how XBox (and presumably the Xbox One) uses a technology they call TrueRank to do player matching. As far as I know this was an MSR project to create a Bayesian version of the ELO chess ranking system. Actually, now that I think of it, it was a whole week of ML talks by academics from MSR. My point being, they produce (and ship) a lot of smaller innovations too, behind the scenes. Sometimes it's just detecting griefers.
- StavrosK 13y ago
  Yep, I heard about that too. It wasn't just detecting griefers, it was a whole matching system to make sure new players didn't get frustrated while experienced players were still challenged.

SiVal 13y ago

I'm speechless. Well, almost. Apple revolutionized the music industry, how music is sold, and how it's listened to. It revolutionized phones. Its iPad changed consumer computing, media consumption, user interface expectations.... Five year olds are totally at home on an iPad and think a screen without touch "isn't working". As they get older, all screens will have to conform to the new reality. They revolutionized shopping for music, movies, and apps. They revolutionized brick and mortar retailing with the most profitable stores of all time. And Google has changed human access to information so profoundly that I can't adequately explain to my kids what it was like growing up in a world so cut off from things other people knew. Google Earth is something from science fiction. Street View lets me get to know my way around a town before I travel there. I can take my kids for a walk past my old homes in four different countries. Astonishing. And Google's self-driving cars may make driving off-limits to humans in another few years. Then there's Microsoft, with thousands of smart people working for decades with billions of dollars of resources to work with---the most powerful of them all until what feels like "recently" to me. And the evidence of their innovative power: we have one of several game platforms, a billion-dollar write-off tablet that they can't give away, and a kind of keyboard that accounts for less than 1% of keyboards in use today. Oh, and other stuff that "didn't become as popular as these". I'm not saying they never came up with anything new. I'm saying that relative to their size and resources, their innovations were trivial. Their huge impact on business, on consumer use of the Internet, on the tech industry, on governments, and so on, came not from revolutionary innovation but primarily from their relentless efforts to monopolize markets. Of course, the lifeblood of a company is profit, not innovation. Without subsidies from ad revenues, Google's innovations could dry up quickly, and cheap knock-offs could eventually take away most of the markets Apple has revolutionized. But even if their profits prove short-lived, their amazing contributions to society will live on. I doubt many in the future will feel the same about Microsoft's contributions.

Silhouette 13y ago
Then there's Microsoft, with thousands of smart people working for decades with billions of dollars of resources to work with---the most powerful of them all until what feels like "recently" to me. And the evidence of their innovative power: we have one of several game platforms, a billion-dollar write-off tablet that they can't give away, and a kind of keyboard that accounts for less than 1% of keyboards in use today. Oh, and other stuff that "didn't become as popular as these". This is not really fair, and I'm sure you realise that. As a random selection, and in roughly decreasing order of significance from "world defining" to "things you'd really miss if they weren't there": We have a standardised desktop operating system that is familiar to nearly every computer user on the planet, with which an array of hardware more diverse than at any point in human history mostly just works, and on which software probably written before some people reading this were born still runs. We have a history of programming languages that have advanced both the state of industrial practice and the state of the art in research, and both traditions continue to this day. Until very recently, the majority of web pages were presented in one of a handful of carefully designed, screen-optimised fonts that brought digital typography far beyond its previous standard, which are available on almost all major platforms, not just Microsoft's. We have a wealth of ideas regarding HCI, from more efficient user interface designs to accessibility techniques to support users with disabilities. It's not difficult to think of more examples, and of course Microsoft have also participated in numerous collaborative endeavours over the years that have advanced the industry in other ways. No doubt an organisation with Microsoft's resources could have achieved much more in recent years with more visionary leadership, but the idea that their work has produced nothing more than a few hardware devices over the years is just silly.

inthewind 13y ago

Yes you can't ignore MS, especially when they still dominate the desktop and workstation market with their OS. I was a sysadmin in the 90s, and other admins I knew loved the Microsoft offerings - having gui control panels to server services. Active directory and the like. It wasn't particularly innovative, but MS managed to put lipstick on a pig and managed to sell it, while cleverly locking down their ecosystem through their proprietry platform. For some the CLI and Linux is still a turnoff, and there isn't that much preventing people from putting lipstick on that particular pig - but you don't see that many offerings (arguably you could say that Apple server is kind of like that).

Roboprog 13y ago
Sys admins who have to click on a GUI to patch a rack-full of servers with the same update? That's just sick. Yeah, we can thank Microsoft for that. Now, as a developer who remembers the old days, I have to deal with sys admins who have no idea what the hell they are doing on a *nix box. (some of that is hiring, yeah, but that's the pool we have to draw from now) No, ignore Microsoft at your peril :-(

philwelch 13y ago

Xbox was a response to PlayStation--the only "innovation" of the original Xbox, to use commodity PC hardware, was dropped with the second generation. Surface is an also-ran. Which leaves Microsoft's true innovative legacy as the inventors of the bendy keyboard? Well, that's "as much as, if not more than, Google and Apple" if I've ever seen it.

sitkack 13y ago

You need a hug bro. Sorry about your stock, seriously.

amenod 13y ago

Yes, Microsoft innovates. Their innovations just don't stick. For instance, MS had a "PC tablet" (WinXP based) much before Apple, but it took iPad to make a revolution.

ikt 13y ago
You said "just don't stick" and quoted a product that "completely sucked". The PC tablet from MS was a laughable joke. The iPad made a revolution because it was revolutionary. It took Android years to catch up and Microsoft is still trying to fumble something together today.