Windows was never that great of a system to begin with. So millions of fanboys extol the virtue of operating systems when they’re all derivative. Microsoft stole the windows concept from Apple, who got it from Xerox. Microsoft built DOS off of technology from other companies, and at the time their biggest claim to fame was their own variant of Basic.
So what made Apple a great company; their own admitted attempt at an OS was failing miserably until Jobs came back and rebuilt the OS off of Unix. Apple has had some great successes at innovative hardware, until the iPhone, which started out great but is running into some lags in it’s implementation. Linux has the look and feel which Apple is built off of, being that Debian was the original inspiration for the OS. Apple idiot proofed Debian and built a great OS off of a viable platform.
Microsoft, the geniuses they were, reinvented the wheel, for God knows why. They idiot proofed DOS and slapped a GUI on top of it and called it an OS. Yet their fanboys continue to troll Internet forums and try to evangelize an OS that already runs on the overwhelming majority of PCs around the world.
Microsoft has great ideas, unfortunately their OS isn’t one of them. The real innovation at Microsoft is going to be in hardware, not software, and in Internet appliances, as opposed to traditional programs running on traditional PCs, an age which is pretty much over anyway. Surface is a revolutionary product, just not affordable, Zune has some really great features and when the 360 works it offers a viable alternative to the overpriced PS3.
Yet instead of staying committed to a future in hardware, Microsoft is trying to compete in the Web 2.0 when they failed miserably at making a considerable impact in Web 1.0; figure that this company never fully provided a viable web platform. MSN is still so-so, Live is a joke, though it has some interesting experiments there, and even .Net isn’t that much of an answer to Java. What is left isn’t really that exciting; Silverlight.
It is really, really difficult to tell if Microsoft is really creating anything new or just trying to find great applications for technologies after the fact of their being created by someone else. They used to do a great job of that, you know, reverse engineering. But then newer technologies from other companies entered the marketplace from companies that actually knew what to do with them, that actually knew how to implement them.
