The irony about Microsoft is that it's spent the past 20 years or more trying to leverage its dominance in small stuff (consumer and corporate desktop OS's and applications) into market share in the big stuff: corporate servers and enterprise software. To some extent, they have succeeded. They seem to have just about put Sun out of business, for example. True, Linux was a large part of that, but Windows seems to have grabbed about half the server market.

But now they're losing their grip on the small stuff!

The essential problem with Microsoft is that they never act, they are always in the reactive mode. I mean, if somebody else comes along with a successful innovation, Microsoft will inevitably try to carve out a chunk of their market share by putting out out a rival technology or device (often not a very good one). But when it the last time Microsoft has taken the lead in pioneering something new, brought it to market, and made a success story out of it? Playing perpetual catchup is a good formula for losing. There seems to be something deeply embedded in Microsoft's corporate culture that discourages innovation. Part of this may be the personalities of the guys at the top, and part of it might simply be the hugeness of the corporation: any new idea probably has to be filtered through so many committees and mid-level managers that it's guaranteed to come out of the process d. o. a.

"There seems to be something deeply embedded in Microsoft's corporate culture that discourages innovation."

I know that Apple is the hot ticket du jour in the new, shiny things game, but Microsoft has done plenty of innovating lately. Surface was showing off advanced multitouch capabilities before the iPhone was announced, the Project Natal they just demoed at E3 is a completely different manner of interacting with an electronic device, and the Sync platform for integrating a computer into vehicles is pretty much alone in its class. I'd also point out that Windows Server isn't in the strong position it's in because of reaction.

Just because Microsoft didn't have a viable netbook platform hardly means that all they do is react.

Sorry, I still think what I said is true. Please note what I said: innovate, and bring to market a viable and commercially successful finished product.

The answer is never. Microsoft has never been innovative in sense except for business plans.And they've been damn successful there, so it seems hard to denigrate their strategy at least from a financial perspective.

They have never innovated??? They were the first company to produce an operating system independent of the hardware. That was HUGE in the 1980s, and contributed a great deal to the dominance of mainstream PCs (i.e. not apple, sun, etc) to this decade.

And what operating system was that DOS, which was purchased from Seattle Computer Projects?

86-DOS - which is what Microsoft bought from SCP - could only be run on 8086 processors. Microsoft (well, Gates) didn't just buy it and then immediately relicense it.

At any rate it's a little ludicrous to assume that a company that's been successful over essentially the entire lifespan of an industry hasn't done any innovating whatsoever.

Microsoft has done PLEANTY of innovating through the years, although it may not be stuff that non-developers use, or that they are aware of. But in the developers' world, they've put out lots of stuff that has made our jobs easier and more productive. That has a lot to do with why there are so many more applications developed for Windows than for Apple. Along those same lines, Microsoft has also advanced the technology behind the internet. Some of it's their own, some of it's integrated (effectively) from others. They're masters at taking technologies that show potential, and making them usable in the real world.

Also, you have to give them credit as a major driving force for industry standards, which have made it possible for so many different products (browsers, for instance) to coexist and work together.

"Also, you have to give them credit as a major driving force for industry standards, which have made it possible for so many different products (browsers, for instance) to coexist and work together" Woof, that's some statement!!! More typically, what Microsoft does is take an industry standard and try to replace it with a proprietary one of their own in order to maximize their own commercial position, or at least to put their own proprietary spin on it. Usually, thank God, they fail. Look at how they tried to bitch up HTML so it would only work properly on IE (if you don't believe me, just create a document in Word, do as Save as HTML command, and look at the resulting code).

Microsoft has done PLEANTY of innovating through the years

Like what? Like C#- a rip off of java? Like their attempt to replace Javascript with first VBScript then JScript? SQL Server, which they bought from Sybase? For Access- the most over-bloated, over-glorified spreadsheet in existence?

You can't have worked with MS technologies and really think they've been a driving source for industry standards, unless by standards you mean forcing everyone to do it their way via monopoly power. You can't really be a developer and believe what you're writing.

Microsoft's entire strategy is based on waiting to see what other people do, and either buying the technology or throwing lots of money at creating their own version.

Microsoft developed the first implementation of XMLHttpRequest, the Javascript bit that powers Web 2.0-type "AJAX" sites.

More here:
<link>

<link>

I'll be gracious and grant them a few points for the XMLHttpRequest object, especially since I respect the author and appreciate his taking the time to engage his readers. But considering tthat in the late 1990's web developers were doing somersaults coming up with ways to achieve the same effect and overcome the stateless nature of HTTP, there's reason to question how many points Microsoft deserves. Plus, they immediately have to give some of those points back for all the security holes allowing ActiveX controls in IE caused.

Maybe I'm starting to turn into one of thus crusty old programmers who turns up there nose at every new thing, but I still haven't figured out how Web 2.0 is anything other than a marketing term.

It's not that Microsoft isn't innovative, it's that they are not good at innovation that the broader public can see. All the great Microsoft stuff mentioned in this thread is so much gobbledy-gook to me, a complete tech caveman. I didn't see any I-Pods, or I-Phones, or Netbooks in the list. Microsoft is a tech nerd company. The vast majority of computer users are no longer tech nerds. Microsoft is very opaque and uninteresting to us.

In response to "I didn't see any I-Pods or I-Phones or Netbooks in the list," in all fairness to Microsoft it ought to be pointed out that they are essentially a software company and when they do try to get into the hardware business, as with the XBox or the Zune, the result is painfully imitative of somebody else's creativity and they typically fall on their faces. So it's a little hard to compare them to Apple, which is equally good and equally creative at both hardware and software (and also marketing). But it's hard to think of a Microsoft "killer app," so innovative or so many light years ahead of the competition that everybody's just gotta have it. The last truly great Microsoft app. I can remember was Word 5.1. I'd like to see just one MS app. that would make me say "hey, why didn't anybody else think of doing THAT?" I don't think that its because Microsoft lacks bright and creative people. As I said above, I think there's something about there internal culture that fails to allow their ideas to rise to the surface (that "something" may be named Ballmer).