Ellison on MS

“...I totally agree with Steve, Microsoft's software is rarely first rate. They never, ever innovate, but —they're pretty good copiers...So what's Microsoft's single greatest innovation? Take your time. —It's a trick question. There aren't any. All that money Microsoft spends on research; what have they got to show for it? Nothing!” [1]

What a great time to release this article, right after the PDC... lol. Let's see, the first OS with built in NLP support, a fully managed class library, xml based / object oriented file system, WS-* compliant transaction and messaging architecture, complete vector based 3d rendering pipeline.... but, I guess they are just wasting all that money... great words from teh guy who said, “We can't explain what we do unless we compare it to someone else who does it differently.“ [2]

(Of course, this isn't even to mention that I and the rest of the developed world are looking forward to the release of Yukon with a lot more anticipation than the next release of Oracle's next DB server)

[1] SOFTWAR footnotes excerpt. Mathew Symonds and Larry Ellison. http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,4149,1368429,00.asp

[2] SOFTWAR excerpt. Mathew Symonds. and Larry Ellison. http://www.eweek.com/print_article/0,3048,a=111046,00.asp

4 Comments

  • You mean Mac Os X? (3d rendering pipeline for gui) Longhorn is 2.5 years away, remember.



    Clearly he's overreacting, but nevertheless he's right in a way... When looking at solely databases, he's right except for one thing: SqlServer's runtime optimizer, which Oracle is now copying into their own systems.

  • I think microsoft does a great job in general but I think that the inovation is limited because their hands are tied.



    Imagine for example their research boffins came up with a new language that was completely different to anything we know now. Sure it may be cool but millions of their customers like us have got jobs to do, we havent got years to learn a totally new paradigm.



    Similarly in operating systems, if they came up with something radically different they might lose millions of existing customers and their too smart to do that.

  • He made his billions ripping off IBM's RDBMS technology. Went on to create Oracle for Macintosh (I still have a copy) which was unmitigated disaster - he abandoned the Mac market and left thousands of customers high & dry. His mouth is big as his ego and is a legend in his own mind, the size of which is inversely proportionate to his mouth.

  • That money Microsoft spends on "research" is probably spent on "research & development." Obviously creating Longhorn and all that takes a lot of time and money. But, Larry is essentially right, what has Microsoft come up with first? Nothing that I can think of. This isn't necessarily a horrible thing. People used to say the same about the Japanese. But Microsoft and its defenders shouldn't harp about being innovative unless they truly become so.



    Here's a great example of innovation that I came across again a couple of days ago. I needed to check something with my AT&T MasterCard so I called their customer service line. Instead of having to press buttons to make menu selections, you can speak and it understands what you say. There is no training; it just works. No one else has this. When I worked at Bell Labs ~12 years ago, my office mate was working on this voice recognition system. Bell Labs was an innovator here. At that time, too, they were working on handwriting recognition and I saw a demo of that working.

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