Microsoft get all their best ideas from other people

Richard M · 03-08-2005, 07:45

But what news is that?

M$ Start:
http://www.start.com/3/

Google (launched months ago):
http://www.google.com/ig

Paul K · 03-08-2005, 08:30

start.com was beta launched months ago too, dunno which came first to be honest though.
(Just looked and start.com launched in it's basic form in March.)

philip.j.fry · 03-08-2005, 09:02

Hasn't Yahoo had something similar for many years? In fact I can't see the difference between these and any other portal pages.

Paul K · 03-08-2005, 09:49

Quote:

Originally Posted by philip.j.fry

Hasn't Yahoo had something similar for many years? In fact I can't see the difference between these and any other portal pages.

They all copy each other lol. Most likely someone had their own personal homepage that acted as a portal for certain things and someone from Yahoo/Google/Microsoft saw it and thought it looked useful.

Richard M · 03-08-2005, 09:51

One of the guys behind it has responded with this:

Quote:

I work on start.com and am one of the 3 folks on the team, and wow, I thought for sure we would have been slashdotted before this

This is my first post on slashdot, though I have been reading for several years now. I just wanted to make a few replies to the comments I've been seeing.

I've been seeing a ton of posts about how we copied google. Man you guys are tough! I'm surprised most people think this since they released their page not too long ago and we released our first version back in March. It was March 6th to be exact. I remember the date. It was my birthday

Here's a basic timeline which I also saw posted in another slashdot post somewhere:
- March 6th, http://start.com/1 [start.com]
- April 6th, http://start.com/2 [start.com]
- May 20th(?), google's personalized page
- June 6th, http://start.com/3 [start.com]

We did notice when google shipped their page in May and I have to admit we were like "darn, they have drag/drop before we do" and "man they have a gmail module, we need to get ours working". But honestly in this space we are both sooooo just scratching the surface here and there are a TON of things that can be done. I have 2 whiteboards full of stuff, like our massive todo list and crazy feature ideas. I bet their whiteboards are full too

Seriously, the fun is just beginning.

There is a video of me and one of the other 3 members of the team at http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=9022 9 [msdn.com]. We talk a little bit about the history of start and some of the development. The video is really long, but it's a good glimpse of our culture, how we started, and how we do things on the team.

Now that I look back I remember that we had shipped live to the web in late February, two weeks before we got discovered. The whole effort started back in November. We were doing a series of prototypes to show how the web can actually be fast again. I mean seriously, we have these huge pipes and fast connections and so many people are on broadband, why are we stuck downloading all this unnecessary crap like flash images, unnecessary UI that I'm not interested in, more ad content than content, just to read 3 pages of an article? So we tried some prototypes, showed it to our boss, then found an old unused domain called start.com that MSN owned and thought it would be cool to just put the code out on the web to show our friends. We put it on http://start.com/1 [start.com] to make it not totally obvious, then waited to see how long it would take for someone to stumble across it. It took 2 weeks. I remember the day (remember, it was my birthday!) and coming in to work to find a ton of blog posts all over the blogosphere about it. It was pretty cool. Some guy even made a screencast of it a few days later (the site seems to be down now) in the same style that Jon Udell had done with google maps.

Anyway, sorry about the servers running slow. We're an incubation site and we just migrated onto shiny new hardware a few weeks back and we're still working out the kinks. Tonight Slashdot sent us about 15x the traffic we normally get and we've been having fun watching the servers keep up with the load. Seriously, if you got burned tonight, try it again tomorrow.

I noticed one of the posts mention that we use a cookie. Yeah we do, we use it to index your settings on the back-end. The last thing we wanted to do was slap on a huge LOGIN TO PASSPORT page before you can even do anything since a) our target audience (you guys) would probably thing that was lame and wouldn't even try the site out and b) we use start.com too and *we* think that would be lame. We want people to check it out, kick the tires, give it a whirl, etc and a simple cookie works pretty well for now.

Oh yeah and we fixed the nbsp thing. Oops, duh! Sorry about that.

Over and out,
steve

So there we have it, comes across as a decent bloke.

Gareth · 03-08-2005, 10:03

Yep, he argues his point well, and doesn't end up mud-slinging.

Saying that, I've found that to be the case with pretty much all the MS employees I've dealt with personally. I have issues with some of the MS products and policies, but the people that work there seem to be OK.

Angua · 03-08-2005, 10:49

Ahhh but when will they put a patent application in?

Stuart · 03-08-2005, 11:13

Maybe I am being a little dense, but I really don't see the difference between something like start.com, and a standard, customisable, portal page. A technology that has been around since (IIRC) late 1997/early 1998. MSN.com was certainly customizable around that time (seems less so today actually).

Not saying Microsoft didn't nick the idea from somewhere (in fact going on past performance, I am sure they did), just saying it's hardly a new idea.

basa · 03-08-2005, 13:22

Talking of Microsoft, but a little

seems the new much hailed IE 7 might not be all IE afficionados are looking for: link

Quote:

Microsoft blames backward-compatibility problems for the stalemate over true Web standards compatibility. Put succinctly, the company has gone its own way for so long and now has to support so many developers who use nonstandard Web technologies that it will be impossible to make IE Web-standards-compliant without breaking half the commercial Web sites on the planet. Furthermore, by halting all IE development for several years before reconstituting the IE team to create IE 7.0, Microsoft has set back Web development by an immeasurable amount of time.

My advice is simple: Boycott IE. It's a cancer on the Web that must be stopped. IE isn't secure and isn't standards-compliant, which makes it unworkable both for end users and Web content creators.

Bifta · 03-08-2005, 13:30

Quote:

Originally Posted by basa

Talking of Microsoft, but a little

seems the new much hailed IE 7 might not be all IE afficionados are looking for: link

Off topic and already in another thread

I love threads like these, "Microsoft did this that and the other .. oh, no they didn't"