Microsoft Disagrees With 'Clumsy' Criticisms
Microsoft refutes Dick Brass's comments; says everything is huge and awesome.
Yesterday former Microsoft VP Dick Brass wrote an opinion piece for the New York Times calling the software giant a "clumsy, uncompetitive innovator."
Frank X. Shaw, Microsoft corporate VP of communications, responded (and disagreeing) in the official Microsoft blog by touching upon points brought up by Brass.
"At the highest level, we think about innovation in relation to its ability to have a positive impact in the world. For Microsoft, it is not sufficient to simply have a good idea, or a great idea, or even a cool idea," Shaw wrote. "We measure our work by its broad impact."
To highlight his point, Shaw said that ClearType now ships with every copy of Windows and is installed on around a billion PCs around the world.
"This is a great example of innovation with impact: innovation at scale," Shaw states. "Now, you could argue that this should have happened faster. And sometimes it does. But for a company whose products touch vast numbers of people, what matters is innovation at scale, not just innovation at speed."
Shaw pointed to Microsoft's OneNote product as being "essentially created for the Tablet and is a key part of Office today."
Shaw also rejected Brass's assessment of that Xbox being an equal contender in the game console business: "Fact is, Xbox 360 was the first high-definition console. It was the first to digitally deliver games, music, TV shows and movies in 1080p high definition. The first to bring Facebook and Twitter to the living room."

MS is a pathetic innovator, just as all big software companies (and indeed most companies in every market) are. They rely on patenting the whole world so that they can sit on their existing products' success and keep out the competition through lawsuits. True innovation comes from sharing ideas freely, not locking them up in a complex web of restrictive licences and closed-source programming.
my laptop has done this for a very long time. as well as many televisions.
MS is a pathetic innovator, just as all big software companies (and indeed most companies in every market) are. They rely on patenting the whole world so that they can sit on their existing products' success and keep out the competition through lawsuits. True innovation comes from sharing ideas freely, not locking them up in a complex web of restrictive licences and closed-source programming.
my laptop has done this for a very long time. as well as many televisions.
movies to the living room, and it was the first to be obsolete. The PS3 is the Bluray player of choice
and it plays all the same games the Xbox360 does and then some. Windows itself is also a sleeper, yes
they lead in technology but what do they have for competition???? Basically in a nutshell, Nobody! Yes they
do drag their feet and we all accept it, until someone comes along and really challenges them it's going to
be the same old same old year after year after year..............
Neither innovates unless they absolutely have to, and Microsoft "features" tend to include tying everything into Active Directory, which in turn ensures that if you use somebody else's web-browser/database/whatever, that you'll lose tons of features and integration(anybody who works with AD knows what an epic-fail of a standard it really is). Intel, on the other hand, does the same thing with hardware, with the recent Ion, Pinetrail and Westmere shenanigans, they're scared shitless that Nvidia might make $20 off of one of their motherboard sales, they'd much rather force you to have their shit graphics....
Uninovative? 93% of the PC market uses their software. That alone creates a standard and thus driving innovation world-wide.
MS brought gamming into the 21st century, a feat that Sony, Mac, Nintendo, Sega, and the thousands of other competitors can't lay claim to. X-Box alone has created a gaming network far superior to any other console available. Quibble if you will about bugs and flaws, but ask yourself, "Would be here were it not for MS?"
Ask yourself, "Would my favorite game or software be here were it not for MS."
That logic would make water and air the most innovative things in the world. There is also the fact that that same 93% use GNULinux software every day, but don't know it.
Ok, people, MS is NOT a particularly innovative company. But I don't see that as their role. MS position is more to drag their customers, screaming and kicking ("I want DOS!" "Who needs 64-bit!") along in a rapidly changing world of technology.
They've mostly been good at that, though there are some bad holes in their performance.
Like their once war on standards. It has held back business developments for all, thus making MS miss huge opportunities. And it has only marginalized MS in a lot of areas, where they are the proprietary owner of #C and whatnot that no one wants to use for exactly that reason.
The guy who IMO was mainly responsible for a lot of that mess (as well as the Vista mess), has recently left MS. Hopefully that means a brighter future in the long run.
A threat right now, I think, is that XBox focus damage PC-gaming. I think MS need to do much more on PC-gaming. It and DirectX is one of their fundamentally best entrenched positions, it's weird to see how little they care about that these days. I think maybe we again can see some of the negative dynamics Brass mentioned.
Linux = Core OS layer, primarily involving hardware management and drivers
GNU = All of the command line utilities that userland applications depend on, and for gnome users, the desktop environment
Of course they do. Wouldn't you if you owned a company that someone said that about?
No news here.
Jobs called it "clunky old PC software' at the iPad announcement.