That was just mean. You had me all excited that I had not been giving Microsoft enough credit. I eagerly went to the ribbon link expecting to find out it was a lot more than I thought it was...it's not.
The ribbon looks, to me, to be similar to the other things you mentioned. It is Microsoft's implementation of an existing idea. The ribbon is Microsoft's implementation of the property panes that graphics tools have used for years. It allows different sized things, different grouping of things, disables and enables stuff based on context,etc. The same stuff that was in photoshop 1 and was in the Next OS years ago (I seem to remember it in CAD, and development tools too, but I don't remember specific products offhand :)). They tweaked it to make it dock (which some stuff did before too - I think the original Macromedia tools did this) and called it a revolution. Frankly, it was an evolutionary step within Office based on the work of others. It was a good idea and they were smart to adopt it, but it is hard to call it an innovation. You could make more of an argument for the start menu. However, I remember SunOS and other CDE based interfaces that had a less attractive, right click version of the same thing. Not revolutionary, but a good solid evolution. So, yes they have innovated within their own platform, but not from an industry perspective. Arguably, the work that they have done on Kinnect, is the first real innovative product I have seen out of Microsoft since NT. I am not trying to be anti Microsoft or hateful, I could be wrong and would love to find examples where I am wrong. I just don't see them as an innovative company anymore. LES On Nov 11, 12:39 am, Cédric Beust ♔ <[email protected]> wrote: > On Wed, Nov 10, 2010 at 9:02 PM, Steve <[email protected]> wrote: > > On Nov 11, 2:18 pm, Cédric Beust ♔ <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > That's a myth. If you look back over the past fifteen years, you will see > > > that Windows has innovated in the GUI department more than any other OS, > > > including Mac OS. > > > Examples? > > > The search dog was pretty cool. > > I think I started paying attention to Windows' GUI innovations when Internet > Explorer 3 came out (1996). I'm not sure how many of you remember, but it > featured a toolbar of flat buttons. > > This was basically unheard of. > > Windows 3, Windows 2 and the Visual Studio libraries had been shipping for a > while with the standard toolbar of 3D buttons, but Microsoft decided that > the look was too encumbered, so they decided to flatten it, and it looked > great. Strangely enough, the disappearance of the 3D affordance was really > not an obstacle to people realizing that they were actually buttons. > > Needless to say, all the toolbars are flat these days. > > My next observation was with Powerpoint, I believe. I noticed that when I > was using the scrollbar, Microsoft had added a little tooltip that was > informing of which slide I would land on if I released the thumb at that > moment. That was extremely clever and very useful too. This idea is still > alive today and they actually improved it by showing whole mini previews of > the destination slide as you scroll the thumb. > > I thought the Windows 95 "Start" button was pretty innovative too and widely > copied (except by Mac OS. Maybe Microsoft has a patent on that one?). > > I have quite a few other examples in mind but I'll give you just one more > innovation, which I think is absolutely revolutionary: the Ribbon. > > If you have no idea what it is, Jensen Harris wrote an entire series > explaining in details how they designed it, all the usability studies they > did, how they went, the mistakes they made, etc... Here is one his many > posts on the > subject<http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jensenh/archive/2005/09/14/467126.aspx>. > I guarantee that you'll end up respecting Microsoft's innovations a lot > more after reading the entire series. > > I can think of five or more right innovations just off the top of my head, > but I'll stop here for now. I just love this stuff and I think Microsoft > deserves a lot more credit than they are usually given in the area of > innovations. > > -- > Cédric -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
