I’m not normally a Microsoft basher. In fact, much of my livelihood is really due to Microsoft. But as I was doing some surfing today, I found myself at Microsoft’s new ‘Gadget’ site:
I’ve been running Yahoo! Widgets and even built a few with a colleague from work. Yahoo! didn’t invent ‘widgets’, either. They purchased ‘widgets’ from Konfabulator. You can find widgets at:
I believe that technology was ‘borrowed’ from OSX Dashboard Widgets:
http://www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/
Someone please take a look at the Microsoft site and tell me that it’s not simply a ripoff of Yahoo’s technology. The sites even have a similar look and feel! Gadgets, Widgets, and Dashboard Widgets are virtually the same exact thing.
C’mon Microsoft! Let’s get some ingenuity! I suppose ‘Gadgets’ fit in well with Microsoft’s Live strategy – grab some ideas from Google and Yahoo! and come out with your own On Demand application. This strategy is seen with .NET as well – which appears as thought Microsoft took the best ideas of Java, Javascript, PHP, etc – and put it into a great programming technology.
This is a bad sign for Microsoft. Microsoft was never a very creative company but they were good at finding some obscure technologies and taking them mainstream, making lots of money along the way. The ‘New’ Microsoft appears to be behind the curve, though. Live and Gadgets are just a couple of examples of Microsoft trying to catch up with Google and Yahoo!
The companies that make the largest gains are the ones that differentiate themselves from the competition, not the ones that copy the competition.
Afterthought…. and now Firefox get’s into the fray, with Firefoxits (beta):
Google is a little bit behind, pushing their API for the homepage:
