Microsoft Disagrees With 'Clumsy' Criticisms
Microsoft refutes Dick Brass's comments; says everything is huge and awesome.
Yesterday former Microsoft VP Dick Brass wrote an opinion piece for the New York Times calling the software giant a "clumsy, uncompetitive innovator."
Frank X. Shaw, Microsoft corporate VP of communications, responded (and disagreeing) in the official Microsoft blog by touching upon points brought up by Brass.
"At the highest level, we think about innovation in relation to its ability to have a positive impact in the world. For Microsoft, it is not sufficient to simply have a good idea, or a great idea, or even a cool idea," Shaw wrote. "We measure our work by its broad impact."
To highlight his point, Shaw said that ClearType now ships with every copy of Windows and is installed on around a billion PCs around the world.
"This is a great example of innovation with impact: innovation at scale," Shaw states. "Now, you could argue that this should have happened faster. And sometimes it does. But for a company whose products touch vast numbers of people, what matters is innovation at scale, not just innovation at speed."
Shaw pointed to Microsoft's OneNote product as being "essentially created for the Tablet and is a key part of Office today."
Shaw also rejected Brass's assessment of that Xbox being an equal contender in the game console business: "Fact is, Xbox 360 was the first high-definition console. It was the first to digitally deliver games, music, TV shows and movies in 1080p high definition. The first to bring Facebook and Twitter to the living room."
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Read as, we don't care how good or cool an idea is unless we are 100% sure we can make a shit load of money off it.
Innovator? Yes, but purely by market share. Microsoft innovates purely when driven to by consumer reaction (7 being the most obvious example after Vista, but also XP after '98ME, or the way IE had to change suddenly to compete with FF). There is no feel of actual step-change thinking in a lot of MS products - it's all evolution, not much revolution.
ClearType was an innovation? Feck awf - ClearType was a necessary improvement to Windows' type rendering since them there new fangled TFT monitors were blurred to hell.
Name ONE thing that's truly been an innovation, Microsoft?
Shipping Media Center... they were first to do that (after they bought the initial tech from someone else like everyone does thogh). Media Center is awesome.
Media Centre's not innovative - it's a built-in DVD player that does a bit of organising and recording of TV