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I was traveling in tram to my office listening to my zune player(bought it from those $150 available to MVP’s ) and in front of me was a lady listing to her Ipod that’s when a thought struck in my mind, is Microsoft really into innovation as most of the stuff Microsoft is into is really are actually derived from some or the other pre existing product.

Be it Zune player which is more or less like Ipod, which definitely came into market existence after Ipod was a huge success. Even the rumors about ZunePhone to be launched are out having features much like iPhone. From phones I go to the software part of it i.e. the Compact OS For Mobile phones/PDA , Microsoft does have Windows Mobile with a good market share but this also came into existence after Symbian and Palm already had a presence in the market.

If we start to talk about OS, DOS never belonged to Microsoft and even the first versions of Windows OS were derived from iMac (source Fire in the Valley: The Making of The Personal Computer by Paul Freiberger and Michael Swaine). Later operating systems Like XP and Vista have a good resemblance to Mac OS and some flavor of Linux. If I talk about  Server based operating system Windows NT model was largely derived from VMS(not so well known though), but it was VMS which actually turned the tide for mainframes.

This mysterious series of replication stuff also continued when Microsoft announced Next Generation Windows Services (NGWS) now known as .NET framework which I fell is very much Java-like software programming language.

Now lets move to web, our very famous Internet explorer’s development started after the launch of Netscape Navigator. It gave a good competition to Netscape, but the later versions are highly inspired from Mozilla Firefox.Hotmail also was never developed by them, they just bought it. To keep its footprint in the search engine market they still don’t have a good answer to Google, rather the only answer they have is to buy out Yahoo.

Talking about  database systems, this concept was a major topic of discussion when in 1970’s Mr. E.F.Codd   drafted his 12 rules, Oracle and DB2 were the first to enter the market with their products, Microsoft entered at a very latter stage with SQL Server.

Microsoft’s Office products were also largely inspired from Lotus 1-2-3 the most famous spread sheet application which belonged to IBM (am not so sure about the real owner but right now it’s IBM).

Even in the gaming console business Microsoft has a fairly successful product XboX in the market but even over here they are not pioneer, just followers as in other cases.

This list goes on and on for me. The only place where I was unable to find any inspiration for a Microsoft product is its Surface. Also might be the case where Microsoft might have been the pioneers but they didn’t come out with the product before thier competitors. Even you might have figured out by now that while their competitors have just foothold in one or very limited area of business, they have mostly found a good foothold in most of the business/ventures they have entered into being more like Jackal of all trades, of course market leaders in many too.

To end on a lighter (much heavier for someone) note: The most innovative stuff I like about Microsoft is the blue screen of death, which I guess no other OS has been able to provide it as easily as Windows OS provide it.

Disclaimer: I am not Anti-Microsoft, I am a developer by profession and I work only on Microsoft technologies, it was just a thought of my mind and I posted it over the blog. The information may be wrong; I don’t mean to hurt anyone (especially Bill Gates and his army of loyal followers/programmers).