Thank you. I can't count the # of times I've heard Microsoft described as innovative. Yet, nearly every time they try to innovate they fail. MS Bob anyone? Or how about that home automation pitch they made in the late 90s? Or Cablesoft / MS Media Server. Nearly every single one of their successes came from copying the competition (XBox, Windows) or through acquisition (Frontpage, Hotmail). And a lot of their failures (Zune, Vista, Win7 TBD) came from un-successfully copying the competition. Office is home grown, makes a lot of money and seems to innovate on its own, but it seems like the exception to the rule.
It's part of the mythology of American capitalism: if they're a big winner, they must be a big innovator, because innovation drives the economy!
Don't get me wrong, I love American capitalism, and I don't think innovation trumps all other factors (like reliability). The myth of Microsoft innovation is just one of those peculiar cultural myths that, in this case, blocks out the reality for people who don't work in the field.
Reliability trumps innovation if people want to use the same stuff for a long time. In the consumer market it seems it's all about new stuff. People chuck out perfectly serviceable items because there's a new model they want. Which companies would bother to make a reliable mobile phone or computer for the mass market.
The facade of innovation works for larger items too. Why create a vehicle that lasts long after the 5 year bodywork warranty when you're just reducing your market. Entice people with the new model, make sure your goods don't last too long - that appears to be the capitalist way.
The counter-point to that is to recognize the fact that Google has had only three real innovations that worked over the course of its entire existence and it has been been almost five years since their last hit. All of the big players seem to be throwing darts at the innovation wall and taking long lingering looks around the room to see whose ideas they can copy. This is nothing new, but please don't suggest that Microsoft is the only company stuck in this position.
"Innovation" in the strong sense of something super-radically new is not that important, at least to me. Let's not get distracted by that.
The reason I like Google is that things they make are well done. They don't have jingly-bobs popping up all over the place and lots of new "features" that actually make things worse. Their stuff has generally started simple and good, and gotten better. I don't find myself resenting using Google's stuff, cursing at the stupid bugs all the time. Their products have lots of nice little touches, like the way Google search will evaluate a mathematical expression or look up the time in a given location, and it searches PDF and PPT files and renders them decently in HTML. Google Groups now searches bulletin boards and discussion lists as well as Usenet groups. Google Maps does a really nice job of finding bus routes in San Francisco. It often just does what you want it to, without your having to ask, and without getting in the way.
When using most Microsoft products, I usually have the feeling that some "manager" has decided that there's no money in making things work nicely, but there is money in "shipping it". For example, the auto-numbering bugs that have been in MS-Word more than 10 years now and annoy people every single day.
Let me expand, so that those that would downvote a post like this will have something else to read :-)
When we bought Keyhole, we were able to bring a serious amount of datacenter and network resources to the problem of serving tiles, make the consumer client free for use and offer web interfaces to the same. I think that was non-trivial and quite innovative.
That Michael Jones and the Keyholers were able to take advantage of that expertise speaks to their remarkable ability as well. (I really like when I get the chance to work with MTJ, he's brilliant)
So while the team at keyhole were themselves hugely innovative, the combined work of google + keyhole was amazing, more so than either group could have done on their own.
To say that a Google or a microsoft can only be innovative if you only count those people who are hired specifically and only though one mechanism and at one time if seems unrealistic . It doesn't recognize that a company is the combined knowledge of the past work in the space, the employees experience gained at university and previous employers, and through knowledge and employees gained via acquisitions.
(this is not to say that all acquisitions work out, either)
Really good point. It's really of little interest to me whether Google acquired good things or developed them in-house from the start. What I like about Google is that their stuff is good. Unlike many companies, they are doing good work with their acquisitions.
