Microsoft and Innovation

The commenter's on Jeff Atwoods latest post tend to fall into two camps. On one side you have the people who make their living with Microsoft products, most of them are also open source advocates, without being mouth breathing fan boys.

On the flip side, you have the Anti-Microsoft trolls. These people are often there just to take potshots at Microsoft. Ironically, most of them can not agree on what technology they do endorse, considering the amount of flame that goes around on the popular open source haunts.

It is the latter camp that prompted Chris Pratley (A project manager for Microsoft Office) to write this on his blog:

I've been a little gun-shy of blogging about Word for fear of being inundated by what are as far as I can tell a gang of "net thugs" who roam the net making outrageous claims about Microsoft and its behavior, motives, etc in every public forum they find (little of which information they are privy to or have evidence for, and which I find personally offensive, not to mention incorrect - since they often are implicitly about me if the talk is about Office and therefore I for one know them to be incorrect). But enough about that - let's just dive in and see what happens. Hopefully the net-dwelling paranoid delusional conspiracy theorists won’t descend upon me… :-)

It doesn't take much wit to see past the trolls weak arguments, but I was particular struck be a reoccurring theme on Jeff comments.

This theme in a nutshell was:

"Microsoft does not Innovate, they only copy."

While this statement is laughably ridiculous, I thought I'd try to think of a handful of innovations that have come directly from Microsoft. Here, in no particular order, are just a few thing that the "evil empire" came up with first.

The Taskbar

Popularized with Windows 95, the taskbar was actually a feature of Windows 1.0. A crude representation of active tasks laid were represented in a horizontal bar on the bottom of the screen. This was two years early than the Acorn Author operating environment that many Anti-Microsoft people cite as the first task bar. The taskbar was gone from Windows until Windows 95.

In the early 90's, I had a chance to tour the Microsoft Redmond campus, and play with what was then known as Cairo. While Cairo never saw the light of day, its unique user interface was carried over for Windows 95.

Real Time Spell Checking

This was first featured in Microsoft Word 6.0, and has since been incorporated into every word processing program on the planet.

Rapid Application Development

RAD was a hugely popular industry buzzword during the 90's, and it was born with Microsoft Visual Basic.

Introduced in 1991, Visual Basic was a innovative new way to rapidly develop applications and it turned the programming industry on its head. The closest competitor to Visual Basic (Borland Delphi) was not released until 1995.

OLE and COM

OLE was originally designed by Microsoft in 1990 by the Microsoft Office team out of necessity. It was used to allow real time embedding of Excel documents into Word, and vice versa. This paved the way for what became known as COM (Component Object Model) a technology that allowed any COM compliant object to be used by any application. COM allowed reuse of objects with no knowledge of their internal implementation because it provided interfaces that are separate from implementation.

COM is heavily adopted and is used in nearly every windows application even to this day and was actually imitated by the open source movement with CORBA.

.NET and the Microsoft CLR (and DLR)

The CLR (Common Language Runtime) was not the first JIT compiling virtual machine, but it was innovative because it allowed an application to be built in any .NET language (or a combination of them) with seamless integration. Want to use VB for the front end, C# for the database layer, and C++ for some intensive graphics calculations? No problem!

The DLR continues this practice by creating a platform for dynamically typed languages such as Ruby and Python.

Active Desktop

Introduced with IE 4.0 and Windows 98 and powered by COM/ActiveX technology, Active Desktop was Microsoft's vision of integrating desktop applications with web applications.

Litigation kept Microsoft from fully leveraging the concept, but the idea lives on now in many open source projects :)

XMLHTTPRequest and AJAX

Believe it or not, the radical technology that changed the web and the technology that powers Gmail was stuck into IE 4.0 without any fanfare.

The Microsoft Outlook team needed a way to communicate behind the scenes on their new Microsoft Web Mail client, so they built an ActiveX component for IE 4.0. This little component remained under the radar for several years, before the rest of the world discovered its power and AJAX was born.

I wonder if Google has ever said "thank you".

Windows Powershell

Powershell is the long awaiting replacement for the default windows shell and is different from any scripting shell environment ever created.

Scripting is fully object oriented by leveraging the .NET CLR. Objects (known as cmdlets) can have their output piped with a single keystroke. If you have not had a chance to check out PowerShell yet, check it out. It is amazing.

This is just the tip of the iceberg on Microsoft innovations. Microsoft employs some of the brightest minds in the industry, and they and throw out more innovations every day than any of the Anti-Microsoft trolls have ever come up with.

So, regardless of what operating system you are reading this post on. Next time you visit an AJAX enabled website, or correct your spelling in a document, remember that Microsoft innovation is the reason you have it, and perhaps give them a the credit they do deserve.