Agreed. Microsoft is criticized for not being innovators, instead just regurgitating ideas pioneered by someone else. There's truth in this criticism, but we c

Agreed. Microsoft is criticized for not being innovators, instead just regurgitating ideas pioneered by someone else. There's truth in this criticism, but we can also view it differently. Microsoft's success was in figuring out how to commoditize the bleeding edge tech. For example, I remember early in my career the industry trying to argue out CORBA standards, something that never achieved any widespread acceptance because the perfect solution they were after was endlessly being debated, and so complex. But Microsoft cut through that Gordian Knot, and put out their own DCOM technology. DCOM didn't achieve all the goals of CORBA - not by a long shot - but it put a viable object brokering technology into the hands of every developer, a fundamental requirement that the CORBA folks couldn't achieve.