For years we’ve all listened about Microsoft innovations, how their products changed our life and how technology in general has benefited from this stream of excellent products and services, but I am still searching for those so called innovative products and I haven’t found one, so let’s take a look to Microsoft Products and its history. This is a small list of products and their real developers, I am still collecting a ton of Microsoft innovative products.

BASIC: Microsoft BASIC was the foundation product of the Microsoft company. It first appeared in 1975 as Altair BASIC, which was the first BASIC (and indeed the first high level programming language) available for the MITS Altair 8800 hobbyist microcomputer.
The Altair BASIC interpreter was developed by Microsoft founders Paul Allen and Bill Gates with help from Monte Davidoff, using a self made Intel 8080 software simulator running on a PDP-10 minicomputer. The dialect of BASIC was similar to Digital Equipment Corporation interpreters, especially in string operations, which varied between BASIC implementations. (Wikipedia.org)

MS-DOS:
In 1981, Microsoft launched the MS-DOS, MS-DOS as based on a product named QDOS written by Tim Paterson (QDOS=”Quick and Dirty Operating System”), Microsoft renamed QDOS for MS-DOS, so there is not innvoation in the MS-DOS.

Microsoft Windows:
Microsoft cash-cow wasn’t and isn’t more than another copy from a product and adapted to Microsoft benefits, Windows 1.0 was inspired by the GUI of the Apple Macintosh.

Excel:
A spreadsheet based on previous works done by VisiCalc (1978) and Lotus 1-2-3, Excel is now part of Microsoft Office and is a gold mine for Microsoft Business. Lotus and VisiCalc are gone as we know them.

Internet Explorer (IE):

The most talked, balked and well known piece of software and the less innovative of all, it was based on the NCSA Mosaic web browser, the Internet Explorer killed Netscape when it was bundled with every copy of Windows.

Active Directory
A re-implementation of the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) with a variant of MIT’s Kerberos.

Direct3D – Rendermorphics.
Microsoft in 1995 bought Rendermorphics, a company responsible for the 3D API for Windows Games, Microsoft saw the potential of Rendermorphics and then acquired it, Rendermorphics turned its 3D API into Direct3D.

Microsoft Frontpage
Microsoft puts its feet into the web development space with Frontpage, but Frontpage was an applicationt deleveoped by Vermeer Technologies Inc, then acquired by Microsoft and folded into the Internet Division. (More)

Intellimouse
Microsoft acquired MouseJet, a company that was developing a mouse tracking technology, Intellimouse was based on MouseJet research.

Halo
Halo was an almost released product from Bungie when we received the sour note that Microsoft bought it when it acquired Bungie, a sour note because personally I was expecting to read this new about Apple buying Bungie, not Microsoft.

Virtual PC
Virtual PC was a famous mac application that lets mac users run Windows on Macintosh simultaneously, it was an ultra buggy and slow emulation that provided a solution for those that really needed to run Windows applications on macs. VirtualPC was acquired by Microsoft from Connectix.

Windows Defender:
An Antispyware application made by GIANT Company Software Inc, Microsoft acquired GIANT Company Software Inc. and launched the Windows Defender a month later. (More)

Flight Simulator
“In January 1979, Flight Simulator (FS) was launched for the Apple II. Then, as now, most of the users of FS were not pilots themselves. SubLOGIC continued to grow and came out with a number of different versions of FS and other entertainment programs. Their products were extremely popular on the Apple II, Commodore 64, and Atari 800, the home computers of the day. Early in 1982, FS became the top-selling software for Apple.

Artwick then got a call from Microsoft. Microsoft was working with another company that was coming out with a new computer that they predicted would revolutionize the industry, and they wanted to put FS on it to show off the machine’s graphics capabilities. At the same time, Artwick recevied a similar call from IBM. He opted to work with Microsoft, and the new, revolutionary computer turned out to be the IBM PC. Artwick figures he had the first IBM PC in Champaign-Urbana. In November 1982, FS became the first entertainment program available for the IBM PC, and naturally it became a bestseller as well.”

Flight Simulator was acquired by Microsoft in 1995… (More)

PowerPoint
Microsoft Office PowerPoint was originally developed by Bob Gaskins and software developer Dennis Austin under the name Presenter for Forethought.
Forethought released PowerPoint 1.0 for the Apple Macintosh in April 1987. It ran in black and white, generating text-and-graphics pages for overhead transparencies. A new full-color version of PowerPoint shipped a year later after the first color Macintosh came to market.
Microsoft Corporation purchased Forethought and its PowerPoint software product for $14 million on July 31, 1987. In 1990 the first Windows versions were produced for Windows 3.0. Since 1990, PowerPoint has been included in Microsoft Office suite of applications — except for the Basic Editions of the suite.

TrueType
Microsoft started including Apple TrueType fonts in Windows 3.1 (here), but recently Microsoft and Adobe launched a totally new font technology called OpenType, again, based on the TrueType technology. (more)

Source:

http://www.mcmillan.cx/innovation.html

Wikipedia.org
Google.com
Microsoft
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