"Microsofts creative destruction" + Microsofts response.

[WereKitten]

JaggedSac said:

WereKitten said:

Indeed, they were the first to propose the concept of the async requests. And that led them to develop a rich showcase of never-possible-before web applications taking advantage of it, and wooing the world of web developers... oh, wait, that was gmail and Google maps :) But they updated their browser to optimize its use in complex JS... woops, in the JS race among v8/squirrelfish/tangerine IE is basically sitting on the bench :)

Seriously, AJAX is an example of what I meant when I said that they clearly have people coming up with great ideas, but they often seem unable to dogfood and bring them all the way through to the next steps.

Google/Apple/Mozilla were the real force in pushing AJAX and more generally heavy-duty webapps: they optimized the relative JS engines, designed APIs, proposed new open standards. Google and others created some amazing, rich content. Meanwhile the original XMLHttp object was left aging in the ghetto of ActiveX, probably because by then MS' focus was shifting to Silverlight and they were aiming their guns at Flash.

(Ironically today the future looks brighter for HTML5+JS+canvas/SVG+new file APIs+new persistence layer APIs than for Flash. I wonder how long will it take for IE to catch up, and how will the Windows Phone 7 devices cope with it...)

Either way, AJAX is a MS innovation that other companies took and enhanced.

And MS added the XMLHttpRequest object to its IE scripting library soon after the initial draft specification for a standard was made.  It wasn't left in ActiveX.  This is a MS innovation that was standardized.  How the standard was used afterwards has nothing to do with MS.

And you do realized that before GMail, there was Outlook Web Access right?  Only people needing offsite access to their coorporation's Exchange servers needed use it.  Much like most of MS's software, it was aimed at business usage and not the populous.

The timeline: MS added it to IE5 as an ActiveX call for the Outlook Web project, it was then implemented in Gecko as a native JS object in 2001-2002 with a similar interface and later in Opera and Safari. We're talking 1999 to 2004. Thus since 1999 MS had quite some time to develop amazing AJAX applications and to build around the concept. They didn't. Gmail and Google maps went public about 2004 (after adoption in Gecko and Safari of XMLHttpRequest had made it a de facto standard) and AJAX' sails really unfurled. Meanwhile MS had left IE rotting at version 6 and the XMLHttpRequest was still a wrapper around the ActiveX call. Only in 2006 the W3C has drafted a formal standard specification, and MS has added a native implementation in IE7+ alongside the ActiveX one.

My point was that it's not that important to just come up with something, you have to finalize it, incorporate it into your overall strategy and push it - that was the big deal with the ClearType example in the OP. Not that there's no creative spark, but that the spark is smothered by the company processes.

I can't for the life of me remember who first introduced smartphones with touch screens or who first experimented with multitouch on a mass device. We all know who made it a hit, who pushed it into the lives of people as a genuinely useful, integrated, and pleasant experience.