His biggest complaint centered on the fact that the most succcessful products were conceptualized decades ago. Like the car manufacturing alternates, GM, for one, who relied on trucks and SUV’s to make the case for profits, Brass charges that true innovation has been stifled from the inside.

At this site, however, there have been numerous posts about the growth of Windows7, touch screen innovation, Browser modifications, and other technology changes, all coming from Microsoft. It is hard to reconcile the charges that Brass makes with the things we read about the Microsoft does. It does fail, take Vista, but it bounced back within less than four years with Windows 7.

The other charge that was made was that true hardware innovation has come from competitors of Microsoft. Apple, Blackberry, and other companies have run away with the IPhone market; that’s true. But Microsoft has not pursued the hardware market, not in the way that Brass would like to see.

But it is also true that many of the software innovations have been implemented by Microsoft. Touch screen technology is now coming of age because of what Windows7 is capable of doing.  But there are other software innovations that Microsoft has done.

Take the XML innovation. A small Canadian company sued Microsoft, and won, over patent infringement in the XML implementation in Office 2007. Yet it is precisely the fact that Microsoft has used XML in so many products that this technology is now more widely available. This is not to excuse or forgive Microsoft for the patent infringement problem, but it goes to show that without Microsoft, the XML technology would not be widely used.

Many will no doubt say, that Microsoft has squashed the competition unfairly or illegally, and it deserves to fail. Many of those issues have a grain of truth to them. But I’m reminded of J.D. Rockefeller in the late 1800’s when he organized, and later monopolized the oil industry. If you joined him you made money, if not he squashed your company and went belly-up. Microsoft probably did something like that in the 80’s and 90’s. Forced the competition to become partners, or Microsoft simply stole the technology if it couldn’t buy it. Undoubtedly this lead to the US government, and later European governments to go after them. But on the other hand, a lot of companies became very successful using Microsoft products. Just ask Dell, HP, and a host of other PC makers which are reporting sales notwithstanding the present day economy.

Many of the problems that Brass talks about are probably true, but that may have to do more with Steve Ballmer not being the tech guy that Bill Gates was. Ballmer is a good manager, but a visionary, no he is not. His stockholders are probably very happy with him, in the same way that the stock holders at GM or Ford were happy for decades. But look what happened there.

Brass makes the complaint over and over that innovation is lacking at Microsoft. With that I would have to agree. Innovation is the one element that must be maintained, or you are stuck in the past selling typewriters over and over again.

You can read the New York Times article Microsoft’s Creative Destruction.

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Below are some issues of Windows over the last 24 years all the way from Windows 1.0 to Windows 7 which users can buy from tomorrow. I’ve added the images below, as well as some interesting facts about Windows that I wrote to celebrate its 21st birthday 3 years ago.

Which version of Windows was your first? Which version of Windows is your favourite and why?

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21 things you never knew about Windows, Microsoft and Bill Gates:

1. Windows 1.0 was released on 20th Nov 1985 and the hardware requirements were 256KB of RAM, DOS 2.0 and two floppy drives, two years late.

2. The retail price was $100, which is worth about $177 in today’s money – the same as Windows XP Home.

3. Microsoft sent out a press kit featuring a squeegee and a washcloth to announce the launch of Windows 1.0, a full two years before the product was launched.

4. If Bill Gates had got his way, he would have called it “Interface Manager”. 21 years later, I don’t think Interface Manager Vista, or Vista Interface Manager would have had the same ring to it….

5. When Vista was launched Microsoft were David fighting Goliath, and had to fight many court battles:

“We weren’t kidding that we bet the entire company on it,” Gates recalls. “The strange thing was we were a much smaller company at the time. We were competing to establish this platform with companies larger than ourselves.”

6. Windows 1.0 was only out for two weeks before it had to be patched to fix bugs (sound familiar?).

7. Windows crashes an estimated 25m times a day.

8. Windows 1.0 included a large number of utilities that are still part of Windows today – Calendar, Notepad, Terminal, Calculator, Clock, Windows Write and Windows Paint, Control Panel, and the Reversi game.

9. Support for Windows 1.0 was weak, and even Microsoft’s own apps didn’t support it. In fact, Excel and Word didn’t work with Windows until 1987 and 1989.
10. Windows 3.1 was the first stable release, which led to many hardware manufacturers preloading it on their computers. This proved to be a major turning point in Windows history and world domination.

11. Windows 3.1 (Pre-release name Janus) was released in March of 1992. In its first few months on the shelf it sold over 2 million copies (including upgrades). The Windows 3.1x OSs were groundbreaking for their time and they paved the road for today’s modern Microsoft environments.

12. Between 1986 and 1996 Microsoft’s stock soared hundredfold and it was estimated that Microsoft had created 10,000 millionaires by 2000.

13. Bill Gates earns $250 every second, $20m a day and $7.8BN a year.

14. If Bill drops a thousand dollar bill, it’s not worth his while to pick it up, as he’ll make the same amount in the time it takes him to pick it up.

15. If Bill Gates was a country, he would be the 37th richest country in the world.

16. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is the wealthiest organisation for charitable grants with assets of approx $65Bn.

17. Erik Noyes from Charles Schwab came up with the phrase Blue Screen of Death “BSoD” in 1991.

18. Bill Gates scored 1590 on his SAT. Paul Allen, scored a perfect 1600.

19. The Windows operating system has 50 million lines of code (a line averages 60 characters) and grows 20% with every release. It’s put together by 7,200 people, comes in 34 languages and has to support 190,000 devices–different models of digital cameras, printers, handhelds and so on.

20. An estimated 250-300K applications have been developed for Windows.

21. Over 5 million testers signed up for Vista’s release candidates

Jobs made a triumphant return to public life today but what type of Apple has been moulded in his absence?

I believe that we’re seeing with Windows 7 and OS X Snow Leopard operating systems that have been created by the accountants.  Without the creative and domineering input of these two giants, Microsoft and Apple have simply been left to ‘get on with the job’ for the first time, and it’s interesting they’ve both coincided.

What we’ve got are two operating systems that are light on new features but leaner and fitter.  Would we have had these under Gates and Jobs?

We’ll probably never know the answer to this question, however I don’t believe it can be argued that either operating system will be worse off for the change.  Both are much improved over their predecessors, which goes doubly so for Windows 7!

With Jobs back at work will we see more innovation and excitement with the next version of OS X?  Conversely, with Gates now firmly out of the picture, will future versions of Windows turn into something that’s solid and dependable but, ultimately, a little boring? 

Only time will tell. </discuss>

It’s usually an entertaining two hour romp a bit like the Eurovision song contest here in Europe.  You’re waiting for the disasters and the bits that don’t work, and watching over-excited Microsoft employees getting all worked up over a tiny little feature that’s hard to get worked up over anyway.  It’s usually a laugh.

The difference this time is that we won’t have Bill Gates.  It will instead be Steve Ballmer bellowing at the crowd like Brian Blessed addressing his hawkmen in Flash Gordon.  What will the the Ballman’s bellowing boom bring to the mix?

So will you be watching the keynote and what type of event do you think it will be?

It looks like 2009 is going to be a good year for Bill Gates.  Not only has he reclaimed his place as the World’s richest man thanks to the global financial crisis ousting Warren Buffet who lost $25bn (ouch!) in 2008 , but analysts are also predicting that the launch of Windows 7 could add up to an extra $1.5 billion to Microsoft’s earnings.

Why?  Well because Microsoft will be throwing their entire marketing machine behind encouraging customers to upgrade to more expensive versions of Windows 7.  Selling Operating Systems is big business for Microsoft, accounting for 28% of its $60.4 billion in annual revenue.

No wonder Bill is smiling all the way to the bank….

Bill Gates and Steve Balmer will both be present at the conference which has seen its share of important Microsoft announcements in previous years. The interesting question will be how Windows 7 will be shown on the conference. Will it be a theoretical approach where Bill and Steve talk about Windows 7 and what they want to achieve with this new operating system or will they even show one of the Milestone releases of Windows 7.

In addition to just discussing their ideas and vision, it’s rumored the event will actually involve a demonstration of Windows 7 in some fashion. Whether or not we’ll actually see a live build of Windows 7 or purely a technology demo of a specific feature remains a mystery, but it’s sure exciting.

It would definitely be interesting if they would demonstrate an early Windows 7 version to the public.

We’re hard at work, I would say, on the next version, which we call Windows 7. I’m very excited about the work being done there. The ability to be lower power, take less memory, be more efficient, and have lots more connections up to the mobile phone, so those scenarios connect up well to make it a great platform for the best gaming that can be done, to connect up to the thing being done out on the Internet, so that, for example, if you have two personal computers, that your files automatically are synchronized between them, and so you don’t have a lot of work to move that data back and forth.

Previous assumptions that Microsoft would indeed avoid a Vista 2 and make Windows 7 faster and resource friendly seem to come true. Connectivity seems to be another keyword that is taken seriously in Windows 7.

The whole transcript of the speech is available at the Microsoft Presspass website.

That probably would explain why Bill said this week that Windows 7, would come “sometime in the next year or so”. According to a Microsoft spokesperson who was quick to correct Bill, the correct date is more like January 2010.

Personally, I think it will be more like Q4 2010 as Microsoft are notorious at missing product launch dates. Maybe, we should start a sweepstake as to Windows 7 actual launch date where the nearest guess wins!

What would you put your money on for a Windows 7 launch date?