[geeks] Microsoft Surface...

[Mark]

On 3 Jun 2007, at 21:20, William Kirkland wrote:

> Microsoft tends to acquire a company with a particular piece of
> technology they find interesting. Apple tends to invent and design.

The latter is a sweeping statement that doesn't hold true in a lot of  
cases. Look at Thses major Apple products of recent years:

Mac OS X - based off of NEXTSTEP, which was developed by NeXT and  
bought up by Apple in 1997.

Shake - One of the industry's most popular post-production  
applications, as used by LucasFilms among others. - this was  
developed by Nothing Real, and bought up by Apple in 2002

Logic Pro & Logic Express - A defacto industry standard music  
production suite. This contiionues to be developed ny Emagic, but  
marketed and sold exclusively by Apple, who own Emagic after buying  
them out in 2002.

iTunes - Possibly Apple's most ubiquitous and widespread application,  
perhaps apart from Quicktime. iTunes was directly taken from a great  
MP3 player for Mac OS called 'SoundJam' (I have  a copy of it as a  
historical monument). SoundJam was developed and marketed by Casady &  
Greene, who Apple bought out in 2000.

Final Cut - Final Cut was born out of the abandoned 'KeyGrip' project  
at Macromedia. Apple bought it in in 1998 in an incomplete state and  
finalized it as a product.

Also as a few people have already intimated, the interface technology  
that is used to do the multi-touch screen on the iPhone was bought in.

That just goes to show Apple do acquire major pieces of technology in  
software, and occasionally hardware. Sure all these proiducts have  
had significant added features and inward development since  
acquisition, but so have Microsoft's - Vista is, after all, an onward  
development of Windows NT - which Microsoft bought in in the early 90s.

>  Sun also has a much better tendency to invent rather than acquire
> technology.

If anything Sun are way better at it than Apple even. They tend to  
forge alliances to innovate and (unlike Apple and IBM) produce  
significant and exciting results (well, they are if you're a  
geek ;) ). I'm sure even they have acquired technology though. The  
fact is everyone operates on the 'if we can't invent it we'll buy it'  
policy - the difference between one company and the next is how much  
they are willing to try and innovate before they give up and acquire.

> While I do not know off hand who first developed an optical mouse,
> the first ones I saw were out long before Microsoft thought of an
> optical mouse.

Yes, and they sucked because you needed a special mouse mat. Sun's  
was a classic example. Microsoft's were one of the first 'any  
surface' optical mice IIRC. As soon as I saw an optical USB mouse on  
sale that worked anywhere I bought one. I was sick of cleaning the  
roller ball on conventional mice!

> Oh, what about SCSI ... that was such a nice decision to go with
> IDE ... today, we are still limited to two disk drives on each bus.

I just got 2 new PCs at work an neither have PATA. It's dead. Forget  
about it. SATA2 and SAS has blown it away. SATA is still not SCSI  
(but SAS is, but enough confusing the issue!) but it's reduced  
interrupt levels and cabling hassle to more than acceptable levels.

> Microsoft chose IDE because Apple was suggesting SCSI. The only
> reason that IDE is cheap, compared to SCSI, is the quantity of sales.
> *IF* Microsoft would have shifted when they saw their decision to be
> less than optimal, we could have 256 devices on one SCSI bus,
> including the use of multiple computers on that same bus.

I can get you're point, but at the same time SCS is harder to  
configure, it has gremlins that give even seasoned SCSI veterans like  
myself a headache. If you think educating people in how to set 1  
Master/Slave jumper is hard, try explaining setting up SCSI buses and  
using Binary ID codes to them. That's ASKING for them to glaze over :o).

>> Doug McLaren, dougmc at frenzied.us     Life - Sexually transmitted,  
>> always fatal
>
> I like your signature.

I like that too :)

-- 
Mark Benson

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