Microsoft started developing a tablet computer nine years ago. About two minutes later, Microsoft started working against tablet development. Former Microsoft veep Dick Brass (great pr0n name!), in today’s New York Times, has the sad story:
When we were building the tablet PC in 2001, the vice president in charge of Office at the time decided he didn’t like the concept. The tablet required a stylus, and he much preferred keyboards to pens and thought our efforts doomed. To guarantee they were, he refused to modify the popular Office applications to work properly with the tablet. So if you wanted to enter a number into a spreadsheet or correct a word in an e-mail message, you had to write it in a special pop-up box, which then transferred the information to Office. Annoying, clumsy and slow.
So once again, even though our tablet had the enthusiastic support of top management and had cost hundreds of millions to develop, it was essentially allowed to be sabotaged. To this day, you still can’t use Office directly on a Tablet PC. And despite the certainty that an Apple tablet was coming this year, the tablet group at Microsoft was eliminated.
Brass concludes that Microsoft has become “a clumsy, uncompetitive innovator” because it “never developed a true system for innovation.”
Back in ’95, Bill Gates turned Microsoft around on a dime, when he (somewhat belatedly) recognized that the future rested on the internet, not on a CD-ROM. I doubt Steve Ballmer can do the same thing in 2010.
UPDATE: Brass also shares a gem about the development of ClearType, developed by his team in the late ’90s:
Engineers in the Windows group falsely claimed it made the display go haywire when certain colors were used. The head of Office products said it was fuzzy and gave him headaches. The vice president for pocket devices was blunter: he’d support ClearType and use it, but only if I transferred the program and the programmers to his control. As a result, even though it received much public praise, internal promotion and patents, a decade passed before a fully operational version of ClearType finally made it into Windows.
ClearType is so superior to anything else, it’s the one and only thing I miss about using Windows machines.
Microsoft has never, ever been an innovative company. Gates built it on co-opting other peoples’ ideas, and then strongarming the market to force them down the end-user’s throat.
Keep telling yourself that, Bohemond, if it helps you sleep at night. I suppose that’s easier than admitting that MS ever did anything even slightly creative or innovative.
Stephen, those are some interesting quotes from Brass (who does sound like he has some). They would seem to indicate a major hardening of the mental arteries in MS-land; one wonders if they’re the next GM.
I just hope Apple doesn’t fall into the same trap the Republicans did, thinking “those idiots are so lame we don’t even have to try hard; they’ll beat themselves.” The iPad would indicate that Apple hasn’t dropped the metaphorical ball as yet.
Microsoft has certainly innovated, and at times been very, very clever.
The story of the Office 2007 UI and the ribbon comes to mind – they made all those decisions based on real use data (from the opt-in “help us improve office!” popup you get on first run); Paste is that giant button and the first thing on the ribbon by default because it is literally and provably the most used command and the most used button from previous versions.
I think the biggest problem at MS is they have too much inertia and bureaucracy (which is the other side of the coin from not having a single User Experience Monomaniac like Jobs in charge of everything… it’s a risk and a benefit to Apple), which leads (as shown) to too much infighting and NIH syndrome (and plain bureaucratic overhead).
Casey: In that market, I think it’s Google providing the real competition. Android comes close to iPhone-quality UI and has more-or-less equal real functionality … Windows Mobile isn’t even competing.
Microsoft can and does compete in the OS realm, though. Windows 7 is nice, and shows they’re paying much more attention to user experience now.
(Though Windows Backup can’t compete with Time Machine (yet).)
Gee, Casey- perhaps you can point to an innovative MS product developed in-house, as opposed to those they purchased (or stole) from elsewhere?
(It is traditionally at this point in the discussion that someone with a bow tie and plaid jacket pipes up and says:)
Microsoft Bob?
(Wocka wocka wocka!)
Casey –
I think back in the ’80s and ’90s the industry needed a Microsoft to force workable standards on a market segmented between Apple, Commodore, IBM, Tandy, Atari, etc. Even individual companies made completely incompatible lines (VIC, C64, PET, 128 for Commodore; Apple ][, Apple ///, Mac, Lisa for Apple; etc.).
In a similar vein, we probably once needed an AT&T, too. And although I don’t think either company should be (or in AT&T’s case, should have been) broken up… maybe MS has outlived its usefulness.
I’d never heard of ClearType before today. Thank you for telling me of its existence, for it is a thing of beauty.
Alsadius –
Before ClearType was “fully implemented” (whatever Brass meant by that), you had to do some real digging to learn about it. And even then you had to go to a supersecret MS web page, install some very fancy ActiveX components, and then jump through a bunch of IE6 hoops to make it work.
And it was so worth the effort.
Isn’t ClearType just subpixel rendering?
And if so, isn’t it available in equivalent form in Mac OS X, in varying levels of smoothness?
Apple had to license the technology from Microsoft, according to Wikipedia, but still, my question stands… is it really something you “miss” from Windows because it doesn’t exist elsewhere? I always found that Windows’ subpixel rendering was really invasive and too colorful compared to the Mac’s, which seemed otherwise equally smooth and readable…
If this URL works:
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/06/12.html
Brian –
Having used both implementations, I find the Windows version far superior. Also, it offers (or at least used to, as late as 2006) many more customization options. In OS X, it’s either on or off.
So let’s see what we have here, an apparently monolithic company that dominates all that it surveys. Over time the capacity to innovate is lost as individual functions within the whole turn to competing against one another. It’s typical human behavior, without an external threat, the necessity of a greater coalition is unsustainable.
Larger companies over time become unstable because they start to become like government.
Bohemond, two good examples come to mind just now (just got home from work & it’s midnight): Windows 95 was the first widely popular, mass-market OS for microcomputers featuring interrupt-driven multitasking. Yes, OS/2 may have beaten them to market, which is why I specified “widely popular.” While Warp was a great product, IBM demonstrated how not to market it. At that time the Apple OS was still using cooperative multi-tasking in a manner similar to Windows 3.x.
The other is the original Windows NT, before MS screwed everything up by cracking open the security to attract the gamers. Pretty much by definition, an optimal gaming system allows direct access to hardware, which is also an optimal security vulnerability. I never, BTW, said I wouldn’t crack on MicroSoft myself.
The original NT kernel was powerful, flexible, and secure. Alas, the Dick Brasses lost control to the Office products crowd in this case.
Come to think of it, MS-DOS 5.0 was one of the few “version 0″ releases they got right.
MS also (eventually) converted “Plug’n'pray” to a useful Plug & Play interface for Windows back when the Linux propeller-heads were still mounting volumes by hand just to get access to a CD-ROM drive. Don’t even talk to me about removable media like memory sticks.
I’ll also give props to MS for driver support. While one may debate the wisdom of their determination to maintain a high degree of backwards-compatibility, they’ve done a good job, overall.
The difference between you and I is that I can recognize where MS has done well, while also recognizing where they’ve done poorly. I’m not a Windoze-fanboy, nor am I an Apple-sider. Hell, the first micro-computer I owned ran CP/M. I’m still using a white-box system on Windows XP because I sure as HELL was not about to use Vista, but the Apple/Intel systems are too expensive for me. I may finally relent on the Mac Mini, as I am informed that newer versions now have dedicated video memory, instead of using shared system RAM. That’s one of my hot buttons; I refuse to plunk money down for a system that uses system RAM for video memory. Urk!
Sigivald made a good point: MS has busted their butts with respect to real-world usability testing. Too bad they didn’t spend some of that energy, time, and resources to security issues six years ago, but you can’t have everything.
Brian T: I’ll spot you MicroSoft Bob, and raise you MS-DOS 4.0. I think I just threw up in my mouth a little bit, there. It’s probably the only MS-DOS version I’ve never tried to collect.
Stephen, I agree completely MS was once useful, and that the company may have outlived its usefulness. Please recall in my first comment I posited a parallel between MS and GM.
Brian, saying that ClearType is “just” sub-pixel rendering is like saying that Stevie Ray Vaughn “just” played rock/blues covers. Your linked comparison between MS & Apple implementations underlines the point. MS emphasized readability of on-screen text, while Apple emphasized “preserving the design of the typeface.” SCREW that. I want something I easier on my eyes , and I don’t give a fat rat’s buttocks about the theoretical superiority of a different system when transferred to a different medium. The Apple implementation is (quite likely) esthetically superior, but the MS implementation is just plain easier on the eyes on a screen. The irony is that ClearType was designed to enhance LCD monitors, but it also works wonders on CRT monitors as well.
Segueing back to Stephen’s original post, (now that I think about it) ClearType is an excellent example of MS innovation. It “just works.”
But, yes; one may compare MicroSoft to AT&T, GM, or AOL. Anyone remember AOL? Or Compuserve? Or BIX?
Not too long ago, anyone suggesting that GM or Chrysler (two of the biggest auto makers in the world) would go belly-up would have been laughed out of the room. Now, not so much.
These days, MicroSoft is frantically playing defense on multiple security vulnerabilities while Apple smugly highlights the UNIX ancestry of their FreeBSD kernel.
Feh. That’s enough for one post. Both major possibilities irritate me the same way my only two real choices in politics are Democrats and Republicans. And nobody better compare Linux to the Tea Party movement, as the latter is far simpler to comprehend and implement than the former; to which would prefer to compare to (say) Ron Paul or Ralph Nader…
Practical utility trumps aesthetic elegance. …And wasn’t that the issue between Apple’s sub-pixel smoothing vs. MicroSoft’s?…