Innovation and Microsoft

Robert Scoble's website has an interesting discussion of what Microsoft's contribution to innovation is. Ok most of them are MS bashers who are critical about their "embrace, extend, extinguish" strategy, and argue that almost all innovations are NIH - "Not invented here".

While I agree with most products that the MS bashers talked about, the one attribute that MS has contributed IMHO is the user experience. It is an enviable competitive advantage that MS has to define the next generation of user interfaces in any application that continue to influence consumer and business applications.

Ok - I hear the Mac team screaming already - Notice I did not say that this honor belongs to MS alone.

Perhaps its the touch with the largest number of human beings on the planet that ever use a computer - the first learning with the MS UI suddenly raises the bar with all other applications that compete or that attemt to interact with a user. I have seen this many too often that the question posed is "Why can't you make it work like MS xxx" where xxx can be their favorite product.

In this new world of services-oriented architecture, the user interface title is again up for grabs. Can MS continue to dominate the interface standard with A2A (app-to-app) just as they did with usability for an end-user application? Hmmmm...