Microsoft fails to make innovations

Wayne is a graduate student in electrical engineering.

By Leonard R. Wayne

Microsoft’s massive public-relations campaign has many
people fooled, including many professional commentators in the
media. The Washington Post editorial page, commenting on the
antitrust case has twice in the last several months referred to
Microsoft as an “engine of innovation.” But Windows has
no business being associated with innovation, and most computer
experts disagree with The Post.

MIT’s Technology Review magazine put it this way in 1999:
“Without real eye-opening advances to its credit, Microsoft
Research has yet to answer the question on the minds of many
computer industry watchers: Can a giant assailed for its lack of
innovation ““ whose cornerstone products such as (Windows)
spring largely from purchased technology ““ find a way to
innovate from within?”

What does The Post think it knows about Windows that the
computer experts have missed? Flawed editorials such as those in
The Post delivered to thousands of readers not only confuse justice
in the antitrust courtroom; they hurt the whole technology sector,
which suffers more than any other from the lack of innovation in
Windows.

Windows is an especially bad tool for the technology sector.
Scientists and engineers in all fields are forced to use it. Yet
Windows is missing many basic technical tools ““ tools that
have arrived with other operating systems for years or decades.

The most egregious example is the powerful “UNIX”
set of tools, well known at universities and research and
development firms. Despite their decades-long history and
overwhelming usefulness for innovation, they do not arrive with
Windows, and only recently have add-on products emerged that
install UNIX tools on the program.

Another example is the popular “Perl” set of tools.
If Windows arrived with these tools, it would be vastly easier to
write data analysis software and share it with work colleagues.
(You can try to install Perl yourself, though when I did Windows
crashed and the whole operating system had to be reinstalled.)

Technical people also frequently complain that Windows does not
allow access “under the hood.” You can, of course, only
configure settings that Windows gives you access to, and there
aren’t many.

Windows has simply never been geared toward the kind of work
technical people do, even though they are forced to use it.

The Windows operating system is so poorly written and so
ubiquitous that tens of thousands of programmers have started
volunteering their time to create an alternative called Linux.

You might think that a loosely-knit group composed mainly of
volunteers couldn’t compete against a giant corporation like
Microsoft with 48,000 employees and a market capitalization of $350
billion. But it is testimony to Microsoft’s incompetence that
despite its vast resources, little Linux has emerged to power
three-fifths as many public Internet Web site computers as all
versions of Windows combined (according to Netcraft). This happened
despite Microsoft’s strong commitment to the market. (The
feat was possible because Microsoft has few monopoly tricks
available to tilt the playing field in this market.)

Linux is “renowned for its speed, reliability and
efficiency,” according to the same issue of Technology
Review. Try to find a computer expert who would say the same of
Windows at any point in its 11-year existence. The Windows
operating system, pathetic as it is, would shrivel and disappear
from desktop computers if not for Microsoft’s monopoly
tricks, though applications such as Word, Excel and PowerPoint,
which are separate from the operating system, might survive.

This story illustrates what a disaster Windows has been for the
technology sector. During the two-and-a-half years I have been with
my current off-campus employer, I have seen nine new technical
employees hired. Six of them ““ three optics engineers, one
robotics engineer, one X-ray astronomer, and one planetary
scientist ““ when they first arrived, wanted desktop computers
running Linux.

Thanks to the Windows desktop monopoly, all six were told,
“No, what you want is not supported here.”