kaled - 2:00 am on Oct 17, 2008 (gmt 0)

Visual Basic is a sad and pathetic joke when compared with Delphi (but I think MS did just about get there first).

I think MS were first with Visual C++ too, but I remember a friend demonstrating the MS and Borland packages sometime around 1996 I think (with a minimal click-button/hello world program). There was no doubting the superiority of the Borland package in terms of ease of use (which is the main criteria for a visual development environment).

I'm not sure what to say about Outlook (never used it). From what I do know it's just an amalgam, nothing special, but reasonably well-liked. If it was the first single program to perform those functions then I suppose it's an innovation of sorts (but it's not exactly html/http/xml, i.e. something that made a real difference). All the examples I gave above of real innovation were new technologies, not programs.

How about this though, file searching (for text) worked beautifully in Windows 98 and 2000. In Windows XP, they introduced a silly animated puppy, but broke the main search function (and I don't think they fixed it even in SP3 but I haven't checked). Then along came Vista, and the file search became even worse. Many of the changes in Vista are retrograde steps that serve no purpose (other than to distinguish it from XP). Is that innovation?

Most of the hate they face is deeply rooted jealousy.

I don't hate Microsoft and jealousy isn't really part of my nature, but Microsoft have wasted millions of man-hours of people's time by producing faulty products (and not releasing full documentation on the Windows API).

Kaled.