Is Microsoft really an Innovator

"oops! so many viruses in my computer"

"damn! my PC is so slow" "oh my god another deadly virus has gotta place in my hard drive" "should i get my hard disk formatted" and i don't know how many... but really people have to face these kinds of problem everyday and one person who is to blame for that is the billion dollar software company giant(oops did i mention bill gates) who just revolutionized the operating system and made it so handy that a 2-3 year old child can handle such a big machine(as it was thought to be in the early 70s) in a very easy manner. Really hats off to the genius(but is that so actually). Across the web i came to know that he is known to be an excellent businessman who really has his empire built by the acquisitions of smaller IT companies which after years of work, come up with a really great idea and sell their intellectual property for some million dollars. Some of the facts i am mentioning below (really hurting for a fan of Microsoft)

Courtesy: http://www.dwheeler.com/innovation/microsoft.html

1. BASIC: This was the original Microsoft product, a simple programming language. Microsoft’s BASIC was released in 1975, but BASIC itself had been invented back in 1964, and it was only one of many programming languages available even then.
2. MS-DOS: In 1981, Microsoft published MS-DOS. MS-DOS was Microsoft’s new name for QDOS, the “Quick and Dirty Operating System” written by Tim Paterson of Seattle Computer Products in 6 weeks not long before Paterson developed QDOS by buying a CP/M manual and using the manual as the basis for his own program, so QDOS itself wasn’t innovative. When IBM approached Microsoft looking for software for its to-be-announced PC, Microsoft quickly bought QDOS and renamed it so it could make a deal with IBM. Of course, the notion of an operating system was old even by 1981, so MS-DOS was in no way innovative either. Later on, Microsoft did add features such as directories to MS-DOS, but these were intentionally copied from another operating system (Unix).
3. Windows: In 1983 Microsoft announced that it would be developing Windows. Windows 1.0 was finally delivered November 1985 (two years late), but it performed poorly and had little in the way of applications. It wasn’t until May 22, 1990, when Windows 3.0 was released, that the system gained widespread third-party support. Windows was clearly inspired by Apple’s Macintosh (which, in turn, had been inspired by Xerox PARC, which had been inspired by the original 1968 inventions of Doulas Engelbart for a GUI with a mouse). Since Windows was essentially a copy of the Macintosh, which was based on earlier work, Windows cannot be considered fundamentally innovative.
4. Windows NT/2000: Microsoft’s Windows NT finally provided (limited) multi-user capability and protected memory in a server operating system, but it did this by liberally borrowing ideas from the pre-existing VAX VMS and Unix systems (which were not the first such operating systems either).
5. Word: This is simply another word processor, which Microsoft began in 1983. Lexitron and Linolex developed the first screen-oriented word processing system before Microsoft existed (in 1972), and WordStar preceded Microsoft’s efforts as well (1979).
6. Excel: A spreadsheet, implemented long after the original VisiCalc (1978) and Lotus 1-2-3.
7. Access: Yet another database system. Since it’s relational, the primary innovation it embodies are Codd’s models, which were developed in 1970 (before Microsoft even existed).
8. Internet Explorer (IE): Internet Explorer wasn’t originally developed by Microsoft; it is an extension of the older NCSA Mosaic web browser. On at least Internet Explorer 5.5, selecting “Help About” shows that it is “Based on NCSA Mosaic. NCSA Mosaic(TM) was developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Distributed under a licensing agreement with Spyglass, Inc.” Again, web browsers (and IE) are not a Microsoft innovation.
9. Active Directory: Active Directory is basically a re-implementation of the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP), with Microsoft’s proprietary variant of MIT’s Kerberos often being used for identity authentication. LDAP is in turn a subset of X.500’s Directory Access Protocol (DAP). That goes back to the late 1980s, long before “Active Directory” existed. Again, no serious innovation here.
10. Their SQL Server was just a deal with Sybase software.

These were some of the facts which i have collected from the web which shows that those products for which Microsoft boasts of their innovation are merely just repackaging of the previous built softwares.
Considering even today's scenario Microsoft Vista (really a dream project of bill gates) was just have most of the aero and glassy features just inspired by Apple new Mac OS X x10.4 Tiger (http://www.tradeyourmac.com/mac-pc.html) & (http://thegrahambaileyblog.wordpress.com/2007/11/11/did-microsoft-really-copy-apple/)
Their new work on the photosynth & seadragon(both are new ground breaking technologies in area of visual media) are also just mergers and collaborations with other companies.
If we look at the graph of microsoft innovativity we will find that it is going down day by day. We hardly see any new innovative product coming in market from the microsoft labs. So what can we say about the future of Microsoft (a software giant) who is getting real challenge from its oppositions Google, Apple, RedHat, Sony etc to name a few.