A few years ago, a friend sent me an email that attacked Microsoft's oft-repeated innovation claim. The email listed a number of Microsoft products and where they are supposed to originate. Although I knew some of the history of products like Windows or DOS, I was surprised at the number of products the email suggested originated elsewhere. The idea stuck in my mind, but since the email didn't give any evidence I didn't know whether to trust it. So I started noting down sources that backed up the claims in the email. Here they are...
If you have any additions or comments you can email me here alistairmcmillan75@gmail.com
It's 1980, and the leviathan IBM calls on a rambunctious company near Seattle that IBM hopes can fill the software hole in its embryonic PC project. The young Microsoft can do it, but to close the deal, it needs a crucial element in the package: an operating system for a 16-bit machine. And it needs it fast.
Enter Tim Paterson, programmer at a small Tukwila hardware shop, Seattle Computer Products, and known by Paul Allen to have already written an operating system for a 16-bit processor. In the ragged informality of those days, the program is QDOS, for "Quick and Dirty Operating System." Microsoft acquires the rights to QDOS, 86-DOS officially, and licenses a version to their secret client, IBM.
from Patersontech.com: Father of DOS Still Having Fun at Microsoft
The Lattice C Compiler was endorsed by Microsoft under a distribution agreement whereby Lattice C was repackaged and sold as a Microsoft product.
from Lattice.com: Lattice Corporate History
The Flight Simulator team is made up largely of veterans who have worked on many versions of the product. Although some of us devote time to related products (such as Combat Flight Simulator), most of the team focuses on Flight Simulator full-time.
Some of the staff started years ago with the Bruce Artwick Organization (BAO), the original developer of Flight Simulator back in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Others have joined the team--from other groups at Microsoft or from other companies--since Microsoft acquired BAO several years ago.
from Microsoft: Making Flight Sim
In 1985, Apple and Microsoft entered into a secret agreement. This agreement granted Microsoft a license to use the windows and icons in the development of version 1.0. In exchange, Microsoft agreed to develop software for the Macintosh platform.
from Richmond.edu: Apple v. Microsoft: Virtual Identity in the GUI Wars
Bob is Bob Gaskins, the man who has to take final responsibility for the drawn blinds of high-rise offices around the world and the bullet points dashing across computer screens inside.
...his idea: a graphics program that would work with Windows and the Macintosh, and that would put together, and edit, a string of single pages, or "slides." In 1984, he left B.N.R., joined an ailing Silicon Valley software firm, Forethought, in exchange for a sizeable share of the company, and hired a software developer, Dennis Austin. They began work on a program called Presenter. After a trademark problem, and an epiphany Gaskins had in the shower, Presenter became PowerPoint.
PowerPoint 1.0 went on sale in April, 1987-available only for the Macintosh, and only in black-and-white. It generated text-and-graphics pages that a photocopier could turn into overhead transparencies.
Shortly after the launch, Forethought accepted an acquisition offer of fourteen million dollars from Microsoft. Microsoft paid cash and allowed Bob Gaskins and his colleagues to remain partly self-governing in Silicon Valley, far from the Microsoft campus, in Redmond, Washington.
In 1990, the first PowerPoint for Windows was launched, alongside Windows 3.0. And PowerPoint quickly became what Gaskins calls "a cog in the great machine." The PowerPoint programmers were forced to make unwelcome changes, partly because in 1990 Word, Excel, and PowerPoint began to be integrated into Microsoft Office-a strategy that would eventually make PowerPoint invincible-and partly in response to market research.
from Ohio-State.edu: Absolute Powerpoint
In 1988, Dave Cutler and a group of developers left Digital Equipment Corporation for Microsoft to develop a new operating system (OS) that would scale from the smallest electronic devices to the largest mainframe. The result is what we know today as Windows NT. Given the background of NT's developers and Microsoft's insistence on branding NT as "Windows," a question arises: As IS managers consider NT for business-critical applications, are they betting their companies on Windows, or are they convinced that there is more to the NT story than Windows?
A former Digital executive once told me that, early in NT's evolution, Digital had sued Microsoft for copying portions of VMS. However, neither Digital nor Microsoft wanted this suit to go to trial, so the out-of-court settlement resulted in the Microsoft/Digital alliance. In this settlement, Microsoft paid Digital millions of dollars to train Digital employees, buy Digital hardware, and create a long-term technology exchange between the Microsoft and Digital OS-development teams.
from WinNetMag: Is NT Windows?
The protocol that Samba implements was first invented by Barry Feigenbaum at IBM in early 1983. He initially called it the "BAF" protocol after his initials, but changed the name to "SMB" before the first official release. You may note that the name "Samba" contains the letters "SMB", and that is not a coincidence.
The term "CIFS" or "Common Internet File System" was coined by Microsoft in 1996 as a marketing exercise in an attempt to combat a perceived threat from Sun Microsystems after their WebNFS announcement. The term caught on, and now the SMB protocol is often called CIFS. The two names refer to the same protocol, as is easily demonstrated by connecting a current Microsoft "CIFS" client to a Samba "SMB" server from 1992.
It should also be noted that SMB/CIFS is an evolving protocol. The original design by Barry Feigenbaum deliberately allowed scope for protocol extensions, and a number of groups have taken advantage of this over the years. The largest set of extensions have been made by Microsoft, but some quite substantial extensions have been made by other groups, including SCO, Thursby, IBM, Apple and the Samba Team.
It might be worth noting that of all these extensions, only Microsoft has kept some (but not all) of their additions secret. It is also important to note that in many cases Microsoft clients do not operate correctly with servers that do not implement the Microsoft extensions. That is, fundamentally, why we need to use the "network analysis" techniques described above.
From 1996 until about five years ago Microsoft played a leading role in the effort to standardize the SMB/CIFS protocol. They started the annual CIFS conference series that continues today, they started the effort to create an IETF standard for the protocol and they ran a public discussion list on all aspects of the protocol. For reasons that we still don't fully understand, they have since withdrawn from all of these activities, and now appear to be actively hostile to open standards efforts.
from Groklaw and Andrew Tridgell: Myths About Samba
Adrian [McKie] worked on Protocol Testing and standardization at the National Physical Laboratory. From there he moved to Spider Systems, where he was a founder staff member of the Spider Software Business Unit. He led the SpiderOSI development team and ported SpiderStreams and SpiderTCP to Windows for Microsoft and Reuters.
from Abelon Systems: Abelon Systems: Company Overview
DCE/RPC has a long history. It started off life with Apollo, which was later acquired by Hewlett Packard. DCE/RPC was originally called Network Computing Architecture - NCA 1.0. It was only available over UDP. Later, it became clear that NCA would need to move to TCP and there was also a requirement to run it on DECnet 3.0, so it was redesigned to Network Computing System - NCS 2.0. NCS 2.0 was then submitted to The Open Group, and it became Distributed Computing Environment / Remote Procedure Calls - DCE/RPC.
Microsoft, at some point, contacted The Open Group, wishing to license DCE/RPC. The Open Group's charter mandated at the time that they charge USD $20 per seat. Clearly, Microsoft considered this, in light of their expected market impact, and decided to reimplement DCE/RPC themselves, as MSRPC. It is no coincidence that one of the key founders of Apollo [Paul Leach] is still working for Microsoft.
from Samba TNG: Distributed Computing Environment / Remote Procedure Calls
However, in March of 1988, I showed this prototype to Bill Gates , and he immediately saw its potential. He declared that it was "cool" and that it would have significant impact across their entire product line. Bill said he wanted to buy it, and over the next few months we hammered out a deal.
The decision was made to delay shipping Ruby and to convert it from a shell construction set for all users of Windows, to a visual programming language for professional programmers by adding QuickBasic. At first, I was very frustrated by Microsoft's decision, and argued against it. However, I was impressed by the power of the eventual product, and soon became an enthusiastic Visual Basic supporter.
from Cooper.com: Why I am called "the Father of Visual Basic"
The story of Microsoft SQL Server stretches back beyond the mid-1990s and the release of SQL Server 6.5. In fact, Microsoft didn't build the first version of SQL Server, and it didn't run on Microsoft Windows. It was built by Sybase, and ran on the IBM OS/2 platform. The earliest history of Microsoft SQL Server extends back to 1986, when Microsoft entered into talks with Sybase to discuss licensing DataServer, a database product built to run on UNIX computers.
Those talks led to a product called Ashton-Tate/Microsoft SQL Server 1.0, which shipped in May of 1989. Back then, Ashton-Tate was the unquestioned leader in the PC database world. Ashton-Tate/Microsoft SQL Server 1.0 was an adaptation of Sybase's DataServer for UNIX, to be marketed by Ashton-Tate and Microsoft for the OS/2 market.
Ashton-Tate/Microsoft SQL Server 1.0 got off to a slow start. OS/2 was not the big seller everyone had expected it to be, and in early 1990, Ashton-Tate was struggling to survive. By the summer of 1990, Microsoft and Sybase had terminated the marketing agreement with Ashton-Tate and were ready to ship a new version of the product, simply called Microsoft SQL Server 1.1. In addition to a number of bug fixes, version 1.1 included an important new feature -- support for Windows 3.0, which had shipped in May of 1990.
from Microsoft: Building the Billion Dollar Database: Microsoft SQL Server Climbs to New Heights
The TrueType digital font format was originally designed by Apple Computer, Inc. It was a means of avoiding per-font royalty payments to the owners of other font technologies, and a solution to some of the technical limitations of Adobe's Type 1 format.
Originally code named "Bass" (because these were scalable fonts and you can scale a fish), and later "Royal", the TrueType format was designed to be efficient in storage and processing, and extensible. It was also built to allow the use of hinting approaches already in use in the font industry as well as the development of new hinting techniques, enabling the easy conversion of already existing fonts to the TrueType format. This degree of flexibility in TrueType's implementation of hinting makes it extremely powerful when designing characters for display on the screen. Microsoft had also been looking for an outline format to solve similar problems, and Apple agreed to license TrueType to Microsoft.
from Microsoft: A brief history of TrueType
Both Verisoft and Stac Electronics have announced new versions of their hard disk compression software to compete with Microsoft's Doublespace disk compression bundled with the newly-released MS-DOS 6.0. Verisoft has the advantage of having licensed the compression technology used in MS-DOS 6.0 to Microsoft.
from Newsbyte: Verisoft/Stac compression products versus MS-DOS 6.0 - Stac Electronics
In 1994, Spyglass granted Microsoft a non-exclusive license that gave Microsoft the right, among other things, to include software based on Mosaic as part of its upcoming Window 95 operating system product. Mosaic formed the basis for Microsoft’s initial development of Internet Explorer.
from Microsoft: Tim Krauskopf co-founder of Spyglass testifying in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia
Spyglass holds rights to the original Internet browser technology developed at the University of Illinois and has been licensing it to Microsoft to use in Internet Explorer. The licensing agreement entitled Spyglass to a royalty payment for each copy of Explorer issued, with a total annual cap of $5 million.
The two companies, however, have been at odds over how much Microsoft owes Spyglass under the agreement. Spyglass said on Jan. 2 that it would audit Microsoft to determine exactly how many copies of Explorer have been distributed. But the Jan. 22 settlement means the audit will not go forward. Under the deal, Microsoft will make a one-time payment of $7.5 million in cash and $500,000 in software and other considerations, freeing it to use the technology with no further payments.
from BusinessWeek: Microsoft's $8 Million Goodbye To Spyglass
In 1995 Microsoft needed to woo the game industry onto its new Windows 95 platform. At that time all games ran on DOS, as it was very hard to achieve high performance 3D on Windows. Getting high performance 3D graphics running efficiently on Windows 95 was essential to moving the game industry onto Windows 95.
Microsoft chose to buy RenderMorphics so it could absorb the RenderMorphics team experience and software into DirectX in the form of Direct3D. The RenderMorphics team were then responsible for building a 3D driver model for Windows 95 and implementing both low- and high-level Direct3D interfaces in DirectX for Windows.
Direct3D became hugely successful and enabled the explosion of the 3D graphics hardware market for the PC. This in turn enabled the next generation of hardware-enabled graphics we see in PC games today. 3D was here to stay; PCs and game consoles today support a degree of 3D functionality that was unheard of, except in the highest end workstations, five years ago.
After completing the DirectX work both Servan and Doug left Microsoft, feeling that Microsoft was a great place to ship products but not a place for innovation and new ideas.
from Qube Software: Overview
Microsoft Corp. today announced the acquisition of Vermeer Technologies Inc., a pioneer of visual, standards-based Web publishing tools based in Cambridge, Mass. Vermeer's flagship software application, FrontPage™, is a critically acclaimed tool for easily creating and managing rich Web documents without programming.
from Microsoft: Critically Acclaimed Visual Client-Server Web Publishing Tool to Complement Internet Offerings From Microsoft Desktop Applications Division
Dinkumware, Ltd. has signed an agreement with Microsoft Corporation to develop a version of the Standard Template Library (STL) for use with C++/CLI, a dialect of C++ being developed to support programming in the .NET environment. The agreement also extends support of the Dinkum C++ Library, shipped with Visual C++, for another five years.
The Dinkum C++ Library is widely used in both the desktop and embedded communities. It has been shipped with Microsoft Visual C++ since 1996, and has also been adopted by IBM and other major compiler vendors.
from Dinkumware: Dinkumware to develop STL for C++/CLI
Microsoft Corp. and Immersion Corp. continue to strengthen their collaboration to define next-generation force feedback protocols for inclusion in upcoming versions of the Microsoft DirectX API 6.0 and 7.0. The collaboration, which involves the Microsoft DirectX Group, Immersion Corp., and the Microsoft Hardware Group, builds on successful efforts to establish the force feedback protocols included in DirectX 5.0.
from Microsoft: Companies Redouble Efforts to Deliver Consistent Support, Compatibility Across Wide Range of Products
Microsoft's DirectX DirectInput Force Feedback features were designed expressly to work with Immersion TouchSense. Starting in early 1997, we have worked closely with Microsoft to get Immersion TouchSense fully integrated into DirectX.
from Immersion: Immersion - FAQ - Developer
MouseJet, which Gordon co-invented, works on almost every surface -- not just mouse pads. Unlike a conventional mouse, it won't pick up dirt in its roller ball and fail. This mouse tracks motion not by touching a surface, but by taking pictures of what's beneath it every 1/1500th of a second and then computing the displacement between successive images.
from Agilent: Gary Gordon: Three Fine Mice
Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq "MSFT" ) today announced the completion of its acquisition of Seattle-based Visio Corp. for approximately $1.5 billion in stock.
from Microsoft: Microsoft Completes Acquisition of Visio
Microsoft has purchased the rights to the natural handwriting and ink compression technology including the award-winning CalliGrapher natural handwriting recognition software developed by ParaGraph, a Vadem division.
from Microsoft: Microsoft and Vadem Collaborate to Speed Development Of Mobile Computing Products
Microsoft Corp. today announced it acquired Chicago-based Bungie Software Products Corp., a leading independent developer of action oriented computer and video games. As a result of this acquisition, Microsoft gains exclusive publishing and distribution rights to select Bungie-developed titles, including the highly anticipated sci-fi action epic "Halo."
from Microsoft: Microsoft to Acquire Bungie Software
Microsoft Corp. today announced it has acquired the virtual machine solutions of privately held Connectix Corp., a leading provider of virtualization software for Windows and Macintosh-based computing.
from Microsoft: Microsoft Acquires Connectix Virtual Machine Technology
Microsoft plans to make available to Windows customers a beta version of a spyware protection, detection and removal tool, based on the GIANT AntiSpyware product, within one month.
from Microsoft: Microsoft Acquires Anti-Spyware Leader GIANT Company
Forefront Security for Exchange includes Premium Anti-spam Services, with improved IP blocking, content filtering, targeted spam signature data, and automatic updates to ensure the latest spam attacks are identified and stopped. It’s also important to note that while these two new products are branded under the Forefront name, they are based on proven technologies developed and enhanced over the last ten years under the successful Antigen brand, acquired with Microsoft’s acquisition of Sybari in 2005.
from Microsoft: New Microsoft Forefront Security Products Help Protect Businesses against the Latest Threats
Thanks to Jim Frost, Vladimir Mihai Pacuraru, Graham Bleach, Travis Howell, Norman Palardy and Donald Smith for suggestions and corrections.