"Innovation" != "Different Idea".

I'm sure some people like Ribbon or Metro, but I haven't met any; I've been looking for WP7 "in the wild", and over the last 6 months found exactly one.

Intel innovated with the Itanium - but that wasn't useful innovation.

> where does that put Kinect?

In the PrimeSense / 3DV innovation camp. Yes, MS did bring it to the masses. But they didn't get the thing working themselves - they licensed from one innovator, and bought (and closed down) the other, shutting everyone else out of that market for a while.

Personally, I think Metro and Ribbon are both from the same design school: They look beautiful when you look at someone else using them, but they actually get in the way when you're trying to get things done. I've spent an hour playing with a Metro based WP7 to see what it's about; I feel that their "throw all other tiles, then replace the one you pressed" wastes time. I know what I pressed - let me get there.

Well, that's a reserve around their natural habitat. It's a far cry from "in the wild".

I work at a company with a large contingent of non-Windows users. (several thousand people on CATIA workstations, most have done little to zero MS Office work, most are fairly internet/computer illiterate). Ribbon based Office works very well for them. They weren't proficient at the old office and the ribbon is a lot more approachable.

The same goes for my parents. They can get a lot more done in the new office vs the old office.

I think most of the negative opinions on ribbon come from people that were good with the old interface. The transition to the ribbon was all pain with no pay off. But for those that couldn't navigate the old office (many people), the ribbon makes finding functionality a lot easier.

Your point about licensing vs inventing a lot of the technology is fairly moot, Apple licensed a bunch of the multi-touch technology from various inventors (including the university I went to).

I suspect you are correct. The big question I have no answer about is what percentage of users was good with the old interface. If it was <10%, the ribbon is definitely warranted. If it was >80% ... maybe not so much.

An additional data point - my parents weren't really good with the old interface (need to call beagle3 tech support often), and the ribbon only made it harder for them (and for me, because it is harder to describe over the phone).

> Your point about licensing vs inventing a lot of the technology is fairly moot, Apple licensed a bunch of the multi-touch technology from various inventors (including the university I went to).

I don't disagree.

I'm amused that whenever someone says "Microsoft/Google is $UNFLATTERING_ADJECTIVE", the retort is "Apple is just as $UNFLATTERING_ADJECTIVE if not worse!", even if that was the first mention of Apple in the discussion.

So, to elucidate my point - the GP mentioned Kinect as a proof that Microsoft is a top notch innovator; They may very well be, but what I was saying was that Kinect is not an example for that.

My experience is that number was probably way lower than 10% -- basically, most people use Word as glorified typewriter. They do know to change font, and that's it. They indent/center text by inserting spaces in the front. They have no idea how to insert image..

The comparison you cited is between revenue, and is a fair direct comparison.

But it is likely also true that iOS devices generate more profit than Microsoft's total revenue (this is an unfair comparison, biased in Microsoft's favor).

>> a dividend paying company's stock price looks different from that of one which is focused on accumulating cash

Both AAPL and MSFT have announced dividends (http://investor.apple.com/faq.cfm).

There are estimates that the iPhone business does generate more profit than Microsoft as a whole.

The same place as Siri - interesting technology, bad execution, with lack of competent follow-through, becoming a mild laughingstock of their respective fields, and causing users to be mildly embarrassed that they believed all the hype.

* The difference between Macintosh 1984 and the Alto is bigger than the difference between before and after Ribbon. The difference between Macintosh 1984 and Macintosh 2012 even more so, to say nothing of the gap between Macintosh and iOS. Microsoft almost always followed Apple's lead in UI design though.

* Kinect is a game controller. There's no Kinect UI paradigm yet, certainly not the way multitouch is a UI paradigm over capacitive touchscreens. Again, the gap between mouse and Macintosh is at least as big as the gap between capacitive touchscreen and iPhone.

That's not say that there aren't a lot of things that one can do much more quickly with the iPhone (e.g. maps and surfing the web), or that these don't tend to make it more useful...though I don't find the touch keyboards quite as fluid for writing as Graffiti under Palm OS (hardware phone keyboards being another matter).

Comparatively, Microsoft's PocketPC PDAs of the time took many steps backwards from the Visor in the quality of the user experience. That's despite a multiple-times CPU power and RAM advantage over the Visor. I remember being dumbfounded at that. Putting out PocketPC OS that is less enjoyable to use than a Handspring Visor--that's not innovation.

Sure, Microsoft broke some new ground with .NET and CLR and C#. Sure, their Visual Studio toolchain got way better--after the competition from Eclipse and IntelliJ. Sure, their C++ compiler standards support got better--after GCC began lighting a fire up underneath MSVC (you could do just enough with GCC and mingw to displace MSVC in plenty of situations).

You can clearly see the "Windows must be everywhere" idea stunting Microsoft's growth. The problem is that the PARC UI sucks. Windows sucks. Mac OS X sucks. It sucks for the uninitiated computer user, who can't imagine what the hell "windows" are on the screen. Why are there thin bands of things that must be clicked on and some path followed (menus). Why did suddenly clicking in one place made the web page disappear (accidental click on a background app brings it forward). The modern operating systems are STILL a fucking minefield, waiting for you, dumb computer illiterate user, to make that unlucky key press or a click that loses hours of your work.

Microsoft has (or at least had) no intention of recognizing that and addressing it. Microsoft, having penetrated almost the entire tech industry and all the personal tech markets that were willing to put up with Windows, rested on its laurels. Microsoft's improvements were all narrow-sighted and thus only capable of giving up small gains in the market. That's not innovation, that's incrementalism.

This is why Apple's iPad is whipping the llama's ass. It's the uncomputer computer. There's no windows. There's no chrome or close buttons or colored bubbles. There's just the one thing you're working with on the screen. People have been waiting for this shit since the first time they had to swap floppies between drives A: and B:.

It's amazing to me that enough other companies haven't figured this out yet. Apple is eating the competition because the competition has their heads up their ass. The competition needs to step away from geekdom and design something fresh. We will have a true Apple competitor (don't know how soon--I say 4 years), and when that competitor comes, it will be blindingly obvious why nobody can compete today. It's the TRUST in a quality, unpunishing TOTAL user experience. It's fucking everything. It's the A to the Z. TRUST in that exploring won't rake you over the coals, but will be rewarding. TRUST builds the kind of loyalty that gets the people to stay and pay premium.

When people talk about innovation I think they often mean disruption. The day the iPad came out everyone changed what they were doing (except MS). A light switched flipped and Tablets became something totally different than what they were before. Who has copied ribbon? Lots of people don't even think it's a good idea. Metro is too early to tell.

>or developing the .NET framework and the development of its associated tool chain

You mean a VM... like Java?

>If capacitive touch screen development is seen as a great leap forward by Microsoft's competitors, where does that put Kinect?

You mean that product that MS bought?