originally posted at Perri Nelson’s Website

A lot of people like to claim that Microsoft doesn’t innovate. I think this Reuters article in the Washington Post proves them wrong. To get there though, you have to remember a little bit of history. 

Do you all remember Janet Reno’s big anti-trust suit against Microsoft? I do. It affected the work I did directly. It wasn’t really about a monopoly at all, although that’s the way it appeared to have played out. What it was about was Netscape’s claim that by bundling the Internet Explorer browser with Windows 95 and Windows 98 Microsoft was taking over the browser market and shoving Netscape aside.

Never mind that both browsers were free. Never mind that Netscape’s browser was losing market share rapidly before Internet Explorer was bundled into the OS, because Internet Explorer 3.0 was actually a superior product to Netscape 3.0. Never mind that more and more web sites were “optimized for Internet Explorer”. Never mind that IBM had integrated a browser into OS2 Warp, or that Netscape was commonly bundled onto Windows computers by OEMs.

Anyway, the reasons for the anti-trust action aren’t the point of this post. The results are.

You see, one of the reasons that Microsoft integrated the browser into Windows at that time was because of a few innovative features. For example, HTML based help was a new feature of windows at the time, and Microsoft’s HTML based help was, quite naturally, optimized for Internet Explorer. It didn’t work as well with Netscape’s browser.

Another innovative feature was the Active Desktop. Sure, there were a few problems with the active desktop, but it was a very cool feature. With the Active Desktop, you could subscribe to XML based “channels” that kept “active” content on your desktop, including little widgets to track news headlines, stock portfolios and other items of interest.

Thanks to the anti-trust action, Microsoft was forced to remove the Active Desktop feature from Windows, because it was based on Internet Explorer. That directly affected work I had been doing on Microsoft Site Server 3.0.

And let’s face the facts. It was a pretty innovative addition to the OS. With Windows Vista, the Windows Sidebar brings a little of that 20th century technology into the 21st century. Only now, almost a decade into the 21st century is that old technology coming back to the foreground…

NEW YORK (Reuters) - From tracking stock portfolios and mortgage rates to menstrual cycles and baby due dates, widgets are the latest Web wonder to hit desktops.

Widgets, or shortcut links downloaded to computer desktops, are gaining so much popularity that corporations are using them as a marketing tool.

“The user’s desktop is extremely valuable, it’s prime real estate,” said Paul Brody, Yahoo vice president of desktop products, in Sunnyvale, California.

Desktop widgets, also known as gadgets or modules, serve as short cuts to other Web sites. They are becoming very diverse, represented by pictures, logos and or even interactive games.

Yahoo recently launched Widgets 4 and has more than 4,300 widgets, many written by third parties but that include company-branded ones.

“If you have that application running there (on the desktop) all the time, from an advertiser and a brand’s perspective, that’s obviously an opportunity to connect with their key audiences,” said Brody.

Wigets allow the user to access information by desktop without opening a web browser.

…

There’s more to the article, go read it. Learn about all of the so-called new technology that’s coming to your desktop. When you do though, don’t think that this “new” technology is all that new. Microsoft, that company that supposedly can’t innovate, so it has to buy technology, came up with this one on its own in the 1990s.

The world is only now beginning to catch up to what Microsoft had back then.

Janet Reno and Netscape managed to set the world’s technology back 10 years.

Do we really want governments dictating what technology a company can create? Do the anti-trust lawyers in the U.S. and the E.U. really know how to do good software design?

I don’t think so. And I think that this little article is good evidence that they don’t.