Visual Studio -> Just about every other IDE out there rips off features that appear in Visual Studio first.Intellisense is the obvious example here.
Office -> Open Office, parts of Google Docs
Powershell -> Open source projects are directly copying this shell for linux
WPF -> KDE 4, Nokia
Gazelle -> Google is doing something very similar to this
As for the line:
Apple: IPhone
I was trying to get the point across that this was the only product from apple that I could think of which has been copied by others. Perhaps you could make a case for parts of OSX as well. Either way my main point was that it's easy to find products that illustrate Microsoft's innovation.
I find it frustrating when people dismiss Microsoft's products as inferior to the alternatives when they haven't even given them a fair evaluation. I find I encounter a lot of people where I work that immediately dismiss Microsoft's products, just because it's Microsoft or because it costs more than the open source alternatives. In my mind this is nothing more than "software racism". It shows that these people are just closed minded.
I see your point, and I do agree that it is stupid to dismiss something just because it's from Microsoft (the same goes for any vendor/platform/etc.).
I disagree however with your list. I'm not familiar with Gazelle or WPF, but the rest of these items were not "invented" by Microsoft either and can be sourced back to some other point of origin. So it's not fair to say Microsoft's technology is being copied in these cases because they themselves copied the ideas.
The frustrating part is that, similar to General Motors, Microsoft does have good engineering going on but most of the results that come from these efforts never see the light of day in commercial productions. This is the nature of a large company organized in this way, and why we tend to see innovation in newer, smaller companies that don't know any better.
The companies copying Microsoft products:
C# -> Novell
Visual Studio -> Just about every other IDE out there rips off features that appear in Visual Studio first.Intellisense is the obvious example here.
Office -> Open Office, parts of Google Docs
Powershell -> Open source projects are directly copying this shell for linux
WPF -> KDE 4, Nokia
Gazelle -> Google is doing something very similar to this
As for the line: Apple: IPhone
I was trying to get the point across that this was the only product from apple that I could think of which has been copied by others. Perhaps you could make a case for parts of OSX as well. Either way my main point was that it's easy to find products that illustrate Microsoft's innovation.
I find it frustrating when people dismiss Microsoft's products as inferior to the alternatives when they haven't even given them a fair evaluation. I find I encounter a lot of people where I work that immediately dismiss Microsoft's products, just because it's Microsoft or because it costs more than the open source alternatives. In my mind this is nothing more than "software racism". It shows that these people are just closed minded.