Well, a lot of what they've done in recent years has been downright clone-ish in nature.
However, MS is really going to leave apple in the dust with this multitouch stuff. MS will be launching products supporting full screen multitouch, "multitouch" in the air, this new multitouch "around" thing, and so-on, all while apple is somehow adding multitouch to their mightymouse.
Exactly They have a ton of great products....it's just that their biggest one (Desktop Windows) is the biggest disappointment. Office 2007 is great, their mice/keyboards are great, Xbox is great, and bash it all you want, the Zune is a pretty decent DAP. I work in IT, and their enterprise stuff is my favorite, because it makes my job a hell of a lot easier. Very robust, integrates well together, and because it is primarily GUI driven, it is easier to pick up on new products/features than it is with a command-line interface. (Although that is available in many of their products...consoles can be much more efficient if you know how to use them...I manage most aspects of Exchange with the console). The other advantage is I can train interns/temps very quickly on how to add a user, and anything I don't train them on they can figure out more quickly, because it's easier to hunt and peck around a GUI for an option than trying to find the right command.
Hickeror how has there stuff been cloneish? Microsoft helped start this whole touch craze. Remember bill gates said about tablet pc's and stuff? Everybody thought it was crazy but now everybody including apple is getting on the bandwagon.
Tablet PCs are still holding on for dear life. Their sales are abysmal across the board. Apple is also not working on a tablet PC. There is also a grand total of less then 5 multitouch tablet PCs out there and all of them have 3rd party software for the multitouch support. Read: Windows doesn't yet support it.
Aside from that, look at the rest of their products. I wasn't even referring to their touch stuff. For the most part they're still adding features that have been in competitors products for a long time now. There's a video somewhere on youtube that has the Vista "features" being touted at one of the MS events. The screen is overlaid by OSX and they're showing the same features in OSX which have been there for years. MS was basically just copying things they knew people had wanted for a long time.
As a whole, MS no longer "innovates." SideSight is one of the nice exceptions, but probably won't ever make it to market. Multitouch was being researched and used by apple (and plenty of others) long before MS created the surface. Other than the surface, MS produces a grand total of ZERO multitouch products.
“An engineer explained to us that hundreds of ear impressions were gathered in the name of research, and while each one obviously boasted its own unique shape and size, one single characteristic remained uniform across the board: the entrance into the ear canal is not a perfect circle, it's an oval.”
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Now who said microsoft's not innovative
Bring on the "Minority Report" version already!
MS does some amazing things in their R&D labs. I'd like to see more of their stuff actually make it to mass market.
Well, a lot of what they've done in recent years has been downright clone-ish in nature.
However, MS is really going to leave apple in the dust with this multitouch stuff. MS will be launching products supporting full screen multitouch, "multitouch" in the air, this new multitouch "around" thing, and so-on, all while apple is somehow adding multitouch to their mightymouse.
Exactly They have a ton of great products....it's just that their biggest one (Desktop Windows) is the biggest disappointment. Office 2007 is great, their mice/keyboards are great, Xbox is great, and bash it all you want, the Zune is a pretty decent DAP. I work in IT, and their enterprise stuff is my favorite, because it makes my job a hell of a lot easier. Very robust, integrates well together, and because it is primarily GUI driven, it is easier to pick up on new products/features than it is with a command-line interface. (Although that is available in many of their products...consoles can be much more efficient if you know how to use them...I manage most aspects of Exchange with the console). The other advantage is I can train interns/temps very quickly on how to add a user, and anything I don't train them on they can figure out more quickly, because it's easier to hunt and peck around a GUI for an option than trying to find the right command.
Hickeror how has there stuff been cloneish? Microsoft helped start this whole touch craze. Remember bill gates said about tablet pc's and stuff? Everybody thought it was crazy but now everybody including apple is getting on the bandwagon.
The best inovations from MS in my opinion is Media Center in 2002, The Tablet PC in 2002 and the WMP11 that apple copied on Itunes.
The table surface looks great.
major:
Tablet PCs are still holding on for dear life. Their sales are abysmal across the board. Apple is also not working on a tablet PC. There is also a grand total of less then 5 multitouch tablet PCs out there and all of them have 3rd party software for the multitouch support. Read: Windows doesn't yet support it.
Aside from that, look at the rest of their products. I wasn't even referring to their touch stuff. For the most part they're still adding features that have been in competitors products for a long time now. There's a video somewhere on youtube that has the Vista "features" being touted at one of the MS events. The screen is overlaid by OSX and they're showing the same features in OSX which have been there for years. MS was basically just copying things they knew people had wanted for a long time.
As a whole, MS no longer "innovates." SideSight is one of the nice exceptions, but probably won't ever make it to market. Multitouch was being researched and used by apple (and plenty of others) long before MS created the surface. Other than the surface, MS produces a grand total of ZERO multitouch products.
I hate to say anything that might get me accused of being a fanboy, but Apple copied Windows Media Player 11 and made iTunes?
iTunes 7 had just been released when WMP11 was released, and if anything, iTunes had gotten uglier while WMP had gotten better-looking.
As far as funtionality, both play music... and iTunes plays some video formats.