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Pilotbob, I did not say "The only creativity MS has shown in the last 15 years or so has been to "creatively" wait for Apple to innovate something and then poorly copy it into Windows." That was cmdahler. Please respond to the right person.
Second, the Xbox itself certainly wasn't innovative. It was and is a game console, an evolutionary step in a process going back to the Magnavox Odyssey. The closest to innovation we've seen in the console area has been the Wii, and even that, not much.
Even it probably isn't the first, but Blizzard's battle.net launched 5 years before Xbox Live. It certainly had the social aspect and the gamertags. I'd have to dig further to find the prior art on achievements, but I don't doubt that it's out there somewhere. I can think of an example from a MMO of the late 90's that had an early and primitive kind of achievements. The Xbox example is, in fact, a perfect case in point: Microsoft didn't create the concepts behind Xbox Live; they just promoted it as though they had, and people believed them. It's "innovation" that other companies did five years earlier.
As for Ajax ... Microsoft created an ActiveX control that allowed asynchronous data loading. While that may have contributed to the formulation of Ajax, it wasn't Ajax, and in fact Microsoft was for a long time hostile to Ajax because it worked cross-platform, whereas Microsoft primarily supports technology limited to platforms under its control, in this case IE. Only when other companies (Google in particular) created Ajax itself and took off running with it did Microsoft reluctantly clamber onto the bandwagon. Nor was the whole idea (even of Ajax itself) very creative. People were already doing the same thing with Java; Ajax is just an easier and more widely-supported way of doing the job than building Java applets.
Sorry, but neither of the technologies you cited is an example of Microsoft creativity. Neither is creative; they're just incremental improvements on an existing model. Nor was either created by Microsoft.
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