albhum said:
You are right, a few people don't want to give it credit for that because it isn't, and we know, becuae we were part of the (let's say) 2 million people that saw this 1 year ago and you are part of the 100 Million that saw first time because MS copied or bought it. Also the Iphone presentation some 6 months ago made very clear Apple was taking the route of multi-touch input technology, making it the first consumer product using it. DOS: Bought to some poor guy for a misery after they had the contract with IBM to maake them billionaires. Windows: Xerox PARC>Apple>Digital Research GEM>Amiga OS and then much worse, MS. Word: Copy of Wordperfect Excel: Visicalc, Lotus 123 Palm: Windows CE Windows Mobile: Simbian IE: Netscape, Mozilla Messenger: ICQ MSN (1st try): AOL MSN (2nd try): Yahoo MSN Search: Google Xbox: Well, you can fill this one as you prefer... And so on and on and on... I can't recall a single product that it was trully innovative coming from these guys. I admire their great marketing expertise, specially guerrilla and aggressive tactics, but style or innovation, no, these are not their strenghts. And since Ballmer took over it lost even that, now their strengh is milking monopolies till they dry up... billions of profits every quarter? Sure. Market cap above 500 M like in the late 90s? nope, I don't see that ever coming again for this co. cheers,
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I agree with virtually your entire list, but I can think of one product - well, Microsoft may not have been the very first to develop it, but I think they were the very first to (unsuccessfully) commercialize motion-sensing in their Sidewinder gamepad.
