And you would be Correct. What new Innovations have come out of M$ lately? It certainly would'nt be Outlook Express, this program STILL Propagates Virii and Worms by Sending Subjective Code to Everyone in the users address book without the Users Knowledge or Permission. This has been a serious problem for 3+ years now and M$ still has not yet fixed it. So where is this so called new Innovation??
Oh yea it's WinXP, where the users have to call Uncle Bill and get Permission to Upgrade their Hardware...........it's called WPA. Innovation my foot-------

You can't say that.. there is innovation. They brought togeather a good amount of GUI design, and usability. Made it simple for a lot of people to use their computers.
As for Outlook, it was innovation for it's time. How many programs for Windows do the same thing as outlook, as well as it does?
(except for the viruses, it's not virri, it's viruses, any book on biology will show you that, except for the handfull which get it wrong. I know places online will say that it's virii, but it's worng. Look in webster, viruses) There might be programs now, but in it's day, Outlook was the best for what it did.

I suggest you look up what research MS has done, they have hundred of reasearchers, doing comp. sci. stuff 24/7. Most of the articles are free to download, there are literally thousands on their ftp server.

In my opinion, most truly innovative software is not released as free software. This probably has something to do with people investing so much into new technology wanting to make a return on their investments. I'd like to see more groundbreaking software released under the GPL, but capitalism's tendencies work against that.

I honestly don't know when Microsoft could have been considered innovative. Their earliest product, a BASIC interpreter, was a pretty quickly done clone. MS-DOS was bought from someone else, and that was a quick and dirty clone of CP/M for the x86. Microsoft got the GUI idea from XEROX PARC and copied ideas from Apple. Visual Basic, the RAD IDE, was a technology bought from someone else; it was soon inferior to Borland Delphi. Many applications in the Microsoft Office suite were originally bought from other companies and only improved under intense competition from WordPerfect, Lotus SmartSuite, etc.; with that competition now virtually dead, development is minuscule. Microsoft Internet Explorer was built on Spyglass Mosaic, which was descended from NCSA Mosaic; it was made to halt Netscape's growing importance. Microsoft's .NET platform is a response to Sun's Java platform.

Where's the innovation in all that? I only see copying competitors' successful ideas and using their superior revenue and market dominance to push out the competition.

My take on the commercial vs. innovation argument is this. It's a good soundbite, but like most good soundbites, it's only value is in easy repetition. The truth is often very different.

On commercial innovation: Walk into a computer store nowadays, what do you see? Hardware, lots of games, a few educational/self-help titles, and a tiny amount of other software. Stores like Electronics Boutique, and other former software stores are now primarily stocking games, or have gone out of business altogether. There simply isn't enough demand to command commercial prices for other types of software, as far as these places are concerned. Aside from an office suite, a browser, and a few games, what other software is used by the majority of users? (Keep in mind that the majority are barely comfortable with even those items.)

This is where Open Source truly shines. It doesn't take a market to produce or justify it's existance. It simply takes a need and someone willing to fulfill that need. Most of the time, that need isn't "innovative" in any respect.

This is where the confusion enters. Most Open Source Software isn't innovative. Most commercial software HAS to be innovative in order to exist. This is a vital difference. Yet, OSS can create it's own market, simply be existing long enough.

OSS allows software innovation to be much more subtle, yet over the long term, this can add up to a great amount of innovation. We're already beginning to see this, as software like Mozilla and others mature. One thing to remember, is that much OSS had to catch up with commercial software. As it did however, new ideas were brought in, and though not directly implemented, were prepared for. Now mature, the developers can begin to add those ideas into the software. This is contrary to commercial innovation, where the product is produced, then new ideas are "bolted-on" to existing products, then need to be improved with succeeding versions.

One caveat with the commercial vs. OSS argument. The two aren't exclusive, as is obvious to anyone paying attention. OSS is only a threat to those who have grown comfortable to huge profits with little risk. Kinda like US automakers were towards imports in the 60's. At the time, they were correct, those vehicles weren't threats to them. However, things changed, the imports improved in areas that the larger automakers didn't think mattered, and in the end, the US automakers were given a severe lesson in listening to customers.