Microsoft's Innovations the Microsoft Hall of Innovation =================================== Close Combat Popular game purchased from Atomic Games Flight Simulator Purchased from the Bruce Artwick Organisation Age of Empires Collabaration with Ensemble studios(Gopal R S) FrontPage Microsoft's HTML editor was purchased from Vermeer Technologies in 1996 FoxPro This database application came along with Microsoft's purchase of Fox Software in 1986 Internet Explorer Desperate to play catch-up in the fast-moving Internet world Microsoft licensed code from Spyglass Inc one of the two licensees of the original Mosaic code base in 1995 and called it MSIE Microsoft then proceeded to distribute MSIE for free denying Spyglass substantial royalties for their key contribution to the product MS-DOS The original Microsoft cash cow this CPM clone then called Q-DOS was purchased from the Seattle Computer Company in 1981 Microsoft then proceeded to thwart Seattle Computer's license rights to the product The tiny company sued Microsoft and prevailed in court Object Linking Environment OLE Microsoft settled a suit with Wang Labs over patent infringement code portions of OLE which is also the heart of Microsoft's ActiveX PowerPoint This presentation software package was renamed and re branded after Microsoft's purchase of Forethought Inc in 1987 SQL Server This important database product is based on code purchased from Sybase in 1988 Visual Basic Ruby the foundation for Microsoft's highly important Visual Basic product was purchased from Cooper Software in 1991 Visual C Microsoft purchased the Lattice C code compiler which became Visual C Microsoft's software development environment Visual SourceSafe Purchased from OneTree Software Shortly after OneTree's SourceSafe was released Microsoft preannounced a similar application called Microsoft Delta which failed to sell Microsoft then purchased OneTree and renamed SourceSafe as Microsoft Visual SourceSafe Windows Technologies used in Windows multitasking came to Microsoft with their purchase of Dynamical Systems in 1986 Portions of the interface were licensed from Apple Computer also in 1986 XENIX Microsoft's version of Unix was actually written under contract by the Santa Cruz Operation(SCO) MS is a desperate sHiiIty company ***************************************** Mukesh Sundaram Monday Sep 09, 1996 Occupation: ENGINEER Location: SAN JOSE, CA TalkBack directly to Mukesh Sundaram I wondered just how long it would take for this sort of thing to come out. Microsoft has good products but their ethics make me gag. Just watch the spin coming out from the Northwest. I liken this licensing model to an auto company selling a base model car with a limitation on the type of road it can be driven on, and stating that 'while our base model is only licensed on state highways and surface streets, our LX model is licensed to be driven on freeways at any speed.' TalkBack directly to Mukesh Sundaram ******************************************* Microsoft's Rise to Power ---------------------- Many people believe that Bill Gates is a visionary. In fact, Microsoft's current market position was acquired only through luck and anti-competitive business tactics. Take, for example, MS-DOS, Microsoft's first big success. In 1980, IBM was preparing to release its much-hyped personal computer as an attempt to catch up with Apple, the pioneer of the personal computer market. They lacked an operating system, however, and knew that they could not release one in time for their computer's debut, so they sought to find one from another firm. Although several companies were developing one, the only company which possessed an operating system that would run on IBM's new 16-bit computer was the Seattle Computer Company. Its operating system was basically a 16-bit copy of Digital Research's 8-bit CP/M operating system, which was written in 1975 for computer hobbyists. Seattle Computer's CP/M take-off was named QDOS (for Quick and Dirty Operating System, which sums it up just right). Microsoft, having chanced upon QDOS, bought it for $50,000, renamed it MS-DOS, and immediately licensed it to IBM for use in its computers. When IBM's computer made its entrance into the market, everyone was so anxious to fall in line behind IBM, that very few people actually considered purchasing another kind of computer -- until the clones, that is. And so you'll hear that Microsoft outsmarted IBM by predicting the personal computer revolution. In actuality, neither IBM or Microsoft predicted the emergence of the IBM clones, Microsoft's real money maker. It was a short while later when Compaq Computer Corporation discovered that the IBM PC could be reverse-engineered. This led to an entire IBM clone industry, and since most of the IBM clones shipped with MS-DOS to be compatible, transformed Microsoft into a multi-billion dollar company virtually overnight. Although MS-DOS was the dominant operating system being used in the clones, it was not the only one, and certainly never the best (remember, it was a copy of a command-line operating system designed in 1975 for computer hobbyists using 8-bit computers, and it was now the mid-80's with its 16-bit computers). But Microsoft made sure that their dominance in the OS market for IBM PCs quickly turned into a near-monopoly. They devised a licensing agreement that required any company which desired to use MS-DOS on some of their computers pay Microsoft for each computer they sold, regardless of whether MS-DOS was on that specific computer. Since MS-DOS was already the dominant operating system, the business model of the majority of the IBM clone manufacturers depended on selling it with some of their computers. They were therefore left with no choice but to agree to Microsoft's licensing plan. But now that they had agreed to it, they were required to pay for two operating systems when they wanted only to put a non-Microsoft operating system on their computer. This, of course, made it rare to find a computer which did not come with MS-DOS, establishing Microsoft's monopoly in the IBM PC operating system market. It wasn't until 1994 when the US Justice Department ordered Microsoft to stop this anti-competitive behavior, but the damage was done. Then, in 1984, Apple Computer released the Macintosh computer, which used a graphical user interface to represent a desktop metaphor, with folders, files, and a trash can, among other things. It is common belief that Apple stole the idea from Xerox. This is not true. Apple bought the interface from Xerox for a rather hefty amount of Apple stock, and the final result was very different from the one that Xerox invented. By 1985, Microsoft had become quite a large company. They were the dominant software provider for IBM clones as well as for the Macintosh. Although Microsoft was putting down the Macintosh by claiming that it was for lazy people and that it was less powerful than MS-DOS, they were at the same time well aware of its superiority in both ease of use and functionality, and seeking to mimic it in their own operating system. Microsoft approached Apple, requesting to license some of the key interface elements from the Macintosh for use in what was to be called Windows. Apple, of course, declined. Microsoft again used its dominance in one market -- this time Macintosh software -- to force the industry to bend to its wishes. It threatened to discontinue development of Macintosh applications unless Apple licensed portions of the Mac OS. This would have been a major blow to Apple, since Microsoft was the dominant software provider for the Mac. So Apple was strong-armed into licensing parts of their OS to Microsoft. Windows 1.0 was introduced later that year. In 1990, Microsoft released Windows 3.0. By then, Microsoft had clearly gone far beyond its licensing agreement with Apple, and had stolen patented intellectual property. Apple took Microsoft to court, and many industry experts thought Apple had a very strong argument and was going to nail Microsoft. Apple lost the case. Microsoft released Windows 95 on August 24, 1995, supposedly completing their theft of the Macintosh look and feel, but the change was only one of appearance. Deep down, Windows 95 is still QDOS. Despite this fact, Windows 95 was a wild success, and is used today by 85% of all computer users, with another 5% of consumers using its expensive cousin, Windows NT. A few months later, Bill Gates finished writing his "visionary" (book), The Road Ahead. It wasn't until the latter half of 1995 that Microsoft noticed the Internet, and Bill Gates ordered a complete corporate turnaround -- as well as rewriting The Road Ahead -- to address it. Lots of people will claim that this turnaround is proof of Bill Gates's visionary characteristic, but I see it another way. The fact that it took Bill Gates that long to notice the Internet and that his "visionary" (book) required a complete rewrite one year after its release shows us just how little of a visionary Bill Gates really is. Is this the kind of company we want leading our industry and providing all of our "innovation" (a term that Microsoft uses so casually)? So, as we've seen, Microsoft's dominant market position was not earned by innovative products and a vision, but was acquired through luck and deception. ************************************************* Microsoft's Theft of Intellectual Property ---------------------- Previous: Microsoft's Rise to Power Bill Gates said once in 1983, "imagine the disincentive to software development if after months of work another company could come along and copy your work and market it under its own name ... without legal restraints to such copying, companies like Apple could not afford to advance the state of the art." What few people saw was that this practice of stealing intellectual property was exactly what Bill Gates had in store for Microsoft. Why would a company spend tremendous effort developing a product only to have another firm come along and steal the idea, claiming the work as its own? The use of this activity would stunt innovation in the industry, because no person could afford to develop products if he/she is not to reap the rewards from the market. The truth is, this has been Microsoft's business strategy from the beginning. Bill Gates and his supporters would have you believe that he wrote MS-DOS himself. As we've seen, this is not true. It originally started life as CP/M at Digital Research, was cloned by the Seattle Computer Company as QDOS, and then sold to Microsoft. This claim mirrors Microsoft's claims for all of its products. The idea behind the interface of the Mac OS was stolen from Apple and renamed Windows. Excel was not a product of Microsoft's own creative thinking, but was a take-off on VisiCalc, the killer application in the late-80's. Internet Explorer is a copy of Netscape Navigator. The Network PC tries to mimic the functions of the Network Computer. The Palm PC is a clone of the PalmPilot. In fact, if you look closely enough, you can take virtually any Microsoft product and find the true originator of it lying outside of Microsoft's corporate walls. It is understandable that one may "borrow" an idea or two from someone else and improve upon it. This practice can even increase competition and innovation in the industry. But when one man gains a stranglehold on our economy while consistently producing bad products and stealing intellectual property from others, this is in no way, shape, or form a benefit to anyone but the man himself. So people will call Bill Gates a genius for taking advantage of loopholes in the law. And I'll concede that he is pretty smart. But why are we praising a man for finding ways to act immorally that he can get away with? Instead, we should be exercising our power as consumers to protest against Microsoft by boycotting its products, while at the same time endeavoring to improve our laws so that they prevent people like Bill Gates from doing as much damage to the economy as he has. ************************************* Microsoft's Poor Product Quality ---------------------- Previous: Theft of Intellectual Property Microsoft might be forgiven for stealing intellectual property if they actually improved on the product's that they stole from their competitors. But instead, Microsoft has consistently churned out expensive, buggy, hard-to-use, memory-hogging software. For the average computer user, it seems perfectly natural for their computer to crash once per day. But is this really normal? Windows 95 (and still with Windows 98), Microsoft's mainstream operating system, frequently reports cryptic error messages or hangs on its user. In contrast, many other operating systems rarely crash more than a few times in a year. This is the result of using an operating system originally designed in 1975 for a different computer and for a command line text interface, and applying patch after patch to it for the past 23 years. The number and complexity of problems that Windows 95 and Windows 98 users face daily can be accurately viewed by taking a quick browse through the Internet newsgroup, alt.os.windows95.crash.crash.crash. Although Microsoft would have you believe otherwise, even they know that Windows NT, Microsoft's industrial strength OS, is less stable than most flavors of its primary competitor, Unix. Microsoft's buggy work doesn't end with its operating systems. From Office to FrontPage, Microsoft does not seem to be capable of producing a stable piece of software. ActiveX actually permits any web page you visit to shutdown your computer without your consent, or worse. There was once a time, right after the debut of Internet Explorer 3.0, when bug fixes were literally being released at the rate of several per day. IE 4.0, its latest incarnation, has caused Windows 95 computers everywhere to become significantly slower and much more crash-prone than before, and it's very hard to delete, as some unhappy customers have discovered. According to John C. Dvorak, a columnist for PC Computing, he recently received a Visual Basic error while running Office 97. Was Office really created using Visual Basic? If so, that would explain its slow, unstable performance. Due to "features" that most users will never have a practical use for, Microsoft programs are so bloated that sluggish performance has become their trademark. And memory requirements are outrageous. Office takes up over 150 megabytes of hard disk space, and requires 32 megs of RAM to run with somewhat bearable performance. ClarisWorks, one of its competitors, can fit on three megabytes of hard disk space and run swiftly on a computer with eight megs of RAM, while being capable of accomplishing the majority of tasks that Office is used for and still being easier to use. Furthermore, Internet Explorer 4.0 takes up over 60 megabytes of hard disk space and requires a good 10 megs of RAM all to itself! Netscape Navigator, by contrast, takes up only 15 megabytes of your drive and uses merely four megs of RAM. All that bloat, and their programs still produce mountains of headaches while not being nearly as productive as the competition. I've had my own experiences. The user interface of Microsoft software is so counter-intuitive that it took me two days just to help someone transfer his Outlook 97 files from one computer to another! Windows 95, despite its claims of being Mac-like, is still "dirty" (though not so "quick") at its heart. What's worse, Microsoft charges several hundred dollars to upgrade most of its products. But these upgrades are mandatory. Try opening an Excel 97 file with Excel 95 and you'll see what I mean. And what merits the spending of this fortune? A few bug fixes (with many more new bugs) and some more features you'll never use. Windows 98 simply "integrates" Internet Explorer with the operating system so that instead of having to spend time double-clicking on an icon to browse the Internet, you can instead spend time waiting for your computer all the time while the web browser slows it down because it's always running. Finally, Microsoft has added another "innovation": the interface of the Internet being incorporated into Windows. What Microsoft doesn't realize is that the interface of web pages is a huge step back from the standard desktop metaphor, and only exists because it's easy to program for and saves bandwith. Arrogantly, Microsoft is charging $95 to upgrade, when all that Windows 98 is is simply a bug fix that spent three years in the making. You can expect many more bugs, too. Despite Microsoft's lousy products, technical support costs $95 "per incident," and usually Microsoft will end up claiming that either you have done something wrong or that it's the hardware's fault. Good luck. I've got to give Microsoft credit for its advertising, however. Bill Gates knows that most people don't buy good products. They buy good marketing. ******************* Microsoft Today: A Destructive Monopoly ---------------------- Previous: Poor Product Quality Today, Microsoft's lust for power reaches far beyond an operating system monopoly. Witness their countless recent investments in media companies, their involvement with banks, and their aggressive movement into the Internet. Microsoft is attempting to control our media, commerce, and communications of the future. Bill Gates will insist that Microsoft is only a software company, with no interest in media, banking or other markets. Several years ago, he made that same contention about the Internet, but today Microsoft claims that integration of the Internet with the rest of its products is a "natural step in software innovation." How can we believe Microsoft now when they claim that they intend to expand no further? We can't. Microsoft is investing everywhere: Comcast, Hotmail, Real Networks, WebTV, MSNBC, Firefly and the list goes on. Microsoft, although it did not earn its position in the market place, now has the ability to ensure its dominance for years to come simply by investing in every new technology that emerges and leveraging its Windows 95 monopoly and excessive advertising budget to gain share in other markets. The API (application programming interface) of an operating system is the part of it which determines how application developers write their software. Microsoft has been known to incorporate features into the Windows API without telling other companies, so that they can prevent them from competing by improving their programs in certain ways. Furthermore, Microsoft is notorious for using its "control of the battleground" in which the application wars are fought in order to "break" its competitors' products. Take, for example, the infamous alteration of the "WINSOCK.DLL" file, which controls how programs communicate with the Internet. After installing the Microsoft Network, America Online mysteriously fails to operate correctly, or after installing the Windows Media Player, RealPlayer no longer launches when opening Internet media files. As if this wasn't enough, Microsoft also uses their operating system monopoly to make consumers take other products, such as their forced bundling of Internet Explorer with Windows. Consumers, having no choice but to purchase Windows because of its monopoly, must also take Internet Explorer. Microsoft can now prevent virtually any company from achieving an important role in the market place by leveraging its pre-existing monopoly. They are using that monopoly to grow into other markets, and achieve a monopoly of those markets too. What will follow if Microsoft gets its way is that software will become mediocre while carrying a large price tag, every Internet transaction will include a Microsoft tax, and innovation and competition in the computer industry will be non-existent. Microsoft must be stopped. *********************

:)

So all this time that people have been complaining about microsofts buggy products it was realy all of those other companies fault. My landlord didnt build this apartment complex. He didnt plant the trees or or seed the grass. See where im going with this? I love the morning.

I can't resist commenting on your diatribe. MS is the company we all love to hate. Accepting some of the things you have pointed out; 1)it is also fair to say that without the standards that MS imposed, literally non of the software would work well with each other, 2)many of your comments are naive about how businesses run since there are few breakthough innovations, most develop step-by-step building upon past experience, and 3)you should recognize that this is a help forum and not a place to vent your political thoughts and views.

A new Politics & Opinion message board! That's what we need. That was an impressive post, though.

Very well. What shall we do? Pitch FORKS yes we could go after them. Like in the old days. Burn the witches. Sorry, microsoft will doom them selves give it time. Thanks for the post. Well Done

now we know why we need bigger and bigger hdd's and more and more ram, because MS products are getting bigger and more bloated as time goes on. programing is getting sloppier and programmers are getting lazier. ten to fifteen years ago we used to do some of the same things we do now using a fraction of the hdd space and ram with the same results and without all the crashes. i'm not talking about games, as i believe games should be kept on playstations and the like. i'm talking about real computing and buisness use. i tend to agree with the above post in most respects as i've been into computers since 1983 and seen it develop and watch innovative companies, ahead of their time and current technology, get taken over by MS, who a few years down the track when technology has cought up releases the product it bought years ago and claim it as it's own development. this has happened time and again. so is the above post wrong? i dont think so.