Kirk, saying microsoft popularized a form of hardware is silly. Microsoft generally waits for a particular kind of hardware to catch on in the specialty market before they decide to bet on it. This is especial true with mice and keyboards, where most features found on a microsoft version can be found on a logiteck a year earlier. In the case of your scroll wheel, those were invented by Mouse Systems Inc. Microsoft does have a patent on the use of a single scroll wheel for both horizontal and vertical scrolling, but the original idea came from else where.
Microsoft cashes in when something becomes popular, and then they refine (which is something they are excessively good at). This seems fundamentally different from popularizing, in that somebody else already breached the market.
All I can argue is my own experience. I know Logitech has had decent market penetration, and I'll take your word for it that MS trailed 'em in product release, but the first I remember seeing scrollwheels and curvy "righthanded" mice was from Microsoft, ditto for the split keyboards.
I think Microsoft, possibly through sheer marketing muscle, possibly through making decent products (I'd say that most of their products were pretty well constructed), turned these products from niche things into the mainstream. (though the split keyboard has kind of gone back). It's not pure innovation, but I don't think the other company "breaching the market" means that the other company "popularized" it.
"Life sucks..." Very true. And as an adjucnt to "It'll HURT", I once heard, "Don't commit suicide - it'll ruin your sex life."
I'm a fan of the IBM scrollpoint mice which use a TrackPoint strain sensor instead of the scrollwheel. Push instead of roll.
That's the little nub/pencil eraser thingy you find in the middle of their laptops? Interesting.
I find scrollwhelles much more usable when I set the default to be a pageful rather than 3 lines of scrolling.
Yeah, but the ones on the mice are larger, kinda like a jelly bean.
interesting.
It might be fun to make a game that was a combination of Centipede (for the movement) and Robotron (in terms of firing in any direction) using that as a controller.