Innovation

I am not a big Microsoft(MS) fan. But i greatly admire there developers who came up with easy to use and understandable User Interface (UI). Barring a few, no one has come close to the UI of MS, even after there disastrous vista. Looking at MS future plans and there current state, i feel there are loosing even that competitive edge. There is a interesting article on the MSDN blog about the new game plan MS can take. This is a good read in general about innovation, individual development vs community development approach etc... Some of the excerpts are below

"Is innovation the act of creating something new (as the dictionary claims) or is it building upon the work of others? To me this is a fundamental question that Microsoft as a company and as a culture has gotten horribly wrong. We deal with the consequences every day. It shakes our self-esteem and cripples our ability to innovate.

The right answer is that innovation is enhancing the work of others—nothing is new. Consider what people claim to be innovative—the iPhone, hybrid cars, and Facebook. Are those new? Are you kidding? Not only would those advances have been impossible without the foundational technologies behind them, but almost every aspect of those innovations had been created earlier in some form. The innovation was putting old technologies together into compelling new experiences and successfully marketing them to a broad audience"

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Read the rest here