And if you think Excel was innovative, you should see this old program called Lotus 123!

Yep... M$ is an innovative bunch. Nobody ever talks much about how MacWrite is what became Word either.

Undo send is all marketing and nothing of substance. It just holds your mail in your Outbox. What a great feature.

How do you figure Excel was innovation? It was just a ripoff of Lotus 1-2-3. The real "innovation" was the devs embedding a flight sim in a "business" application. Microsoft *never* innovates, they just embrace, extend, and absorb innovations by others. Sometimes they even pay for the ideas.

Guess that's the reason Microsoft took a big step BACKWARD with the introduction of Vista.

Excel was innovative? It was a rework of Lotus and released for Mac 2 years before it hit the PC.

Multiplan was innovative, not excel.

Undo Send - doesn't work in their email apps either.

Vista is good now.

Lotus 1-2-3 was innovative but a real bear to use. If you weren't a quant to begin with, forget it. Excel was the first product on the market that actual human beings could use.

Before Excel, there was a program by Borland known as Quattro Pro. Quattro was based on an even earlier work by a developer from the S.F. Bay area. His program was the first of it's kind, to offer more than one open work sheet in the same program instance. It worked in DOS. Unfortunately, I can not recall the name of the program, or the developers name.

Lotus 1-2-3 was the grandfather of all spreadsheets. Every one else after that was just capitalizing on the works of Lotus developers.

humans and microsoft? do they even know how to spell user interface design? and am I just way old or does anyone remember Visicalc that preceded both lotus and excel?

as for undo, which is what the conversation started with, why would any one want it, we're all perfect right?

Steve Balmer is far removed from the average consumer, and he has taken MS to another galaxy. They are rapidly losing customers like me. I'm moving away from all MS software. OpenOffice.org is far superior to the MS Office Suite, and it's free as open source. Like many consumers, I don't like being a slave to a master, and MS loves to control.

Microsoft is the leader of absolute control, and the consumer is always going to pay for submitting to Microsoft. That is true of operating systems, software, subscription services and Internet infrastructure.

If you give Microsoft the keys to the castle, you will pay forever to live in the Kingdom, to own property, for the right to grow and sell crops, to irrigate your fields, to plant red roses (premium fees will apply if you want other colors), and if you want to actually tour the castle, you will pay in gold (secured by the lives of your grandchildren).

Excel IS innovative!!! Lotus 1-2-3 and similar offerings failed miserably at giving malware a direct shot to your system.....

Lately I think Ballmer is simply befuddled in general.

Excel innovative? I always thought it was (literally) a cheap ripoff of Lotus 1-2-3. I could never afford Lotus, but Excel was affordable and was all I needed at the time (gee - when was that - 1988?)

All in all I'm not a big fan of excel though - thanks to its features and relative ease of use, people abuse it and use it where it is not appropriate. In my scientific work I often stuff information into databases (especially since there are excellent free ones available these days) while colleagues persist with using Excel to import 'csv' files they create. The same colleagues generally create their plots with Excel as well, which I find amusing because plotting is the one thing Excel does an awful job of. We scientists who use 'gnuplot' and similar programs to produce our graphs for publication never have enough bad things to say about the excel plots. Innovative? Hardly. Useful? Definitely. Appropriate for every task? Definitely not.

Anyway, that's off topic. I wouldn't say Baldmer is entirely wrong. I've tried a few google features and I don't like them. My google mail currently causes no end of stress because it simply doesn't work unless I remember to click on the 'return to older version'. I'm seriously looking into means of dumping Google altogether and simply using their search engine only. My boss is fanatical about 'igoogle' but I find it intrusive and cluttered.

Lotus was a clone of the earlier Visicalc program! As for Microsoft, they do seem to be having trouble with operating systems and software (pretty much for the reasons Balmer suggested were calcifying Google) but with .net they are producing high quality and innovative developer tools and platforms.

Lotus 123 was a failure of a product, and the reason Microsoft excelled (pun intended) is because it provided a solid platform that answered the call of business needs. Microsoft is the leader that it is today because it can identify those needs, and invest in improvements like no others can.

Gates was a brilliant and brutal business person. I can't figure out what Balmer provides. Vista and Office 2007 are easy targets for complaint, but what is startling is the lack of any other real substance. The only cool thing I recall from microsoft since 2000 was the Surface technology.

at what point do the shareholders realize that ballmer is failing to do anything with microsoft?

Microsoft's innovation was in their ability to strategically position their products. Call it ripoff, call it embrace & enhance or put a hat on it and call it "Joe" if you like. All the MS bashing aside, it can be argued ad infinitum how much or how little MS "stole" from others, but they are what they are because they know what they are doing with it comes to positioning.
If Lotus was so good, then how did a 2-bit "ripoff" like Excel boot their butts right to Mars? Same with Wordperfect and a host of other wannabes and also-rans.
No, I'm not championing MS, just admitting that they have done an admirable (or at least undeniably effective) job at positioning their products.
And the lame comment about OpenOffice being "far superior" to MS Office? That's just inane beyond the point of even being laughable!
I am NOT a big fan of MS as a company for a number of reasons, but when it comes to getting my work (and play) done, I use their products because they work, and the competing products usually simply don't, at least not to the degree that I can be as productive. Believe me, I have tried just about every program that promises me I can break away from MS. Many come close, but none measure all the way up. If that means I am "controlled", fine. The paychecks are fat and I'm happy.

Visicalc was the first spreadsheet program. I remember running it on an Apple II somewhere in the early 80s.It was originally developed by a man named Dan Bricklin..who unfortunately didn't patent it. There is very little innovation these days at Microsoft...they hire smart people with no imaginations or creative spirit.Google is slowly stealing their business away with/to the cloud. Balmer doesn't have a prayer unless they hire some innovative/nutty thinkers.

I think, and some just might agree, that one of the best innovations that MS can come up with today is to remove balmer from the company!

Hows that for free and open source information!

Oh wait, i own a TOM TOM are you going to sue me to?

I have not touched 1 piece of MS software on any of my 3 home personal computers since balmbastic said no more XP and now swallow our next pill Vista weather you like it or not.

I run a operating system that has nothing to do with MS. 3 years later, i have forgotten what that blue screen of balmer was and o yeh, i have never had to call the NTSB for (any) crashes.

I'm very PROUD to say i run LINUX. Let me say that again balmer, I'm very PROUD to say i run LINUX and Ubuntu at that.

Free your company from its bondage and do the right thing, give your company a bail-out and step down.

Excel is just brilliant. No doubt to me there. Cheers for great comments.

The gist of what he was was saying was that they can make dramatic changes and jump in various different directions in leaps and bounds instead of moving in slow, purposeful steps, Like Google has to.

He's correct, and you back him up by saying they're making minor changes and minor tweaks. Ballmer was saying they have room to move, whereas Google does not.

Also, Google's main page, (at google.com) hasn't changed in the six years I've been using it; neither, really, has their search results page which is simplistic and functional. (The only change has been adding links to the main google page, so I do suppose that is a change, of a sort.) They've made an effort to keep things the same so that they don't tick off their current user base, (as Ballmer said.)