Let's be honest; Microsoft has never been an innovator. Their brilliant, effective and cut-throat business tactics are what brought them where they are, not their ability to develop new products or software.

Take Windows, for example. The desktop concept which replaced DOS for most PC users - a brilliant step that made the average person able to understand how to work a computer - was ripped directly from the Macintosh operating system.

Most of us, however, saw it first as Windows.

Microsoft was always been better at buying innovation and selling products than it has been at coming up with good ideas. This simply is not the company's strength.

Unfortunately, the once sleek, quick business has now become a juggernaut and is even slower to react to the innovation of others. So when Apple cames out with the sleek iPod years ago, it was years later when Microsoft responded with their lackluster counterpart, Zune.

Another example is Internet Explorer. Until the most recent update, this program was incredibly outdated. Even now, the program is still not capable of taking advantage of the latest Web design features capable with CSS.

Worse still, most Microsoft software is coded so densely that their products don't work as well as others - even cheaper or free software. Again, see Internet Explorer for an example, a product that is ages behind items such as Mozilla's Firefox. (I shouldn't even need to point out the latest in Microsoft's hideously resource-draining applications: Windows Vista.)

So Microsoft has never been an innovator. But they were pretty savvy, we must admit, at building their empire.

Learn more about this author, Matthew Christopher.
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