[desertfreedom765]

Microsoft has never been an innovative company. They have always stolen ideas from smarter companies then crush them with their market monopoly.

This isn’t going to work with Google and Apple. Both companies are way to smart and too large themselves for this strategy to work. Open source also grows stronger every day.

Inertia will carry them for another 10 years or so. But if they can’t change the company culture then they will be a diminishing force.

[antiRepublicrat]

Microsoft has never been an innovative company.

I have to disagree. I can think of a few important ones off the top of my head.

• Real-time spell checking (first appeard in Word)
• AJAX (yep, XMLHTTPRequest, the backbone of AJAX, first appeared in IE to do Exchange web mail)
• Intellimouse was the first ergonomic mouse