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How Infighting Hampers Innovation At Microsoft
Garabito writes "Dick Brass, former vice-president at Microsoft, published an op-ed in The New York Times, where he states that 'Microsoft has become a clumsy, uncompetitive innovator' and how 'it has lost share in Web browsers, high-end laptops and smartphones.' He attributes this situation to the lack of a true system for innovation at Microsoft. Some former employees argue that Microsoft has a system to thwart innovation. He tells how promising and innovative technologies like ClearType and the original TabletPC concept become crippled and sabotaged internally, by groups and divisions that felt threatened by them."
Large institutions hamper creativity, innovation...
-I'm just sayin'
"no longer"?
When was Microsoft any different?
OK, they had a good compiler and toolchain in the '70s, but actual innovation has never been their forte. Microsoft Research has been doing interesting stuff in the past decade or so, but that's more a sign of *increasing* innovation at Microsoft, if anything.
And cooperation would make Microsoft more competitive? This is a clear example of how competition doesn't produce excellence, cooperation does. If competition really DID produce excellence, then all companies would be organized with multiply redundant, competing internal departments. Obviously, that's not the case: internally, companies function cooperatively, and those that foster too much internal competition ultimately fail.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
The goal at any large corporation is to leverage their market position, which in technical terms is "fuck-ton huge." They're way past the innovation stage, except there they have to be Zune is a good example. They came up with a solid product pretty quickly when they put their minds to it. Sure, they're getting their asses kicked, but it's a good product.
1. profit 2. ??? 3. innovation
Tablet PC might have become a great product, over the long term, but when it was released NT was far too heavy-weight a product to base it on. Unfortunately the Tablet PC had management's ear, and the more practical (for the time) Pocket PC and Handheld PC lines based on their existing mobile operating system got largely squashed and forced into a secondary role. They could have had something more like the iPad, based on Windows CE, for a more affordable price... with applications targeted for the handheld environment. Instead they got the overpriced Tablet PC.
Why didn't management just let both products proceed as best they could? Because they were trying to PREVENT internal competition.
The tablet required a stylus, and he much preferred keyboards to pens and thought our efforts doomed. To guarantee they were, he refused to modify the popular Office applications to work properly with the tablet. So if you wanted to enter a number into a spreadsheet or correct a word in an e-mail message, you had to write it in a special pop-up box, which then transferred the information to Office. Annoying, clumsy and slow.
The pop-up box thing doesn't seem to me a that bad idea, given that your hand-written letters will be much bigger those already on the screen. (But of course I haven't seen it, so I can't be sure.)
When you can wait for others to do so and then copy what works.
ClearType had plenty of prior art, so I don't think it counts as significant innovation.
TabletPC wasn't just a "me too" project, Microsoft actually actively sabotaged their competitors to drive them out of the market and then tried to grab the market for themselves (and failed).
So, if these are the kinds of "promising innovative technologies" that fail at Microsoft, let's just all say "good riddance".
I haven't RTFA but I dont feel microsoft is losing market share in high end laptops... Linux on laptop is mainly provided on netbooks which I won't call high end laptop.
>> "Microsoft has become a clumsy, uncompetitive innovator"
I'd agree with clumsy and uncompetitve, but innovator? lol. Sorry no.
Microsoft hasn't innovated anything truly new in decades, except maybe the marketing dept changing a few colour schemes or finding new ways to screw customers.
In fact can anyone think of anything technically innovative that Microsoft ever put their name on, that wasn't originally bought, copied, 'embraced', assimilated, or blatantly stolen from some other company? I can't.
I work at MS now. It's a great job for solid steady employment, but it's definitely not the place to go for innovation. Every department is run by high rolling MBA types, most of who were liberal arts majors in college, who go out on extravagant "off site" meetings where they wave around marketing studies to each other to determine the minimum amount of features and quality assurance to put into our products to maximize profit, as if running technology business were the same as running a 50's era factory. Making the product "better" or producing something you have pride in comes secondary, and no consideration is given to the second and third order effects their decisions have on the overall health of the company or its products.
Microsoft has become the Company they scorned in the 90's... IBM. I wonder how many IBM'ers are laughing at Microsoft now that the shoe is on the other foot?
I was at Microsoft at the same time Dick Brass was (and even reported into his organization for a while), so I'm going to beat up on him a little. (He won't mind.) We really wanted Tablet PC to be viable without a keyboard because it made such a difference in weight and size. There are a number of problems with operating such a device that way, but simply logging into it was a bear. Virtual keyboard and handwriting recognition solutions were both miserable, so we looked at biometrics. Now for a Tablet PC, the obvious biometric is signature verification, but one powerful individual in Dick Brass's organization had such a passion for fingerprint verification, that he effectively stopped us from even evaluating signature verification systems. Never mind that the fingerprint systems were extra hardware, stuck out the side, were easy to break off, etc. -- this individual was impervious to reason. Dick could have broken the logjam, but wouldn't get involved. Ultimately, we did nothing, and no serious keyboardless Tablet PCs were ever made (that I know of). This wasn't the only reason, but it was enough by itself.
This pair of problems -- the non-technical guy who kills ideas and can't be reasoned with plus upper management that can't get involved -- seems to have become depressingly common across the whole company. Bright people get discouraged and leave. People who thrive on stifling other people stay.
Where I do disagree with Dick is that I think a VP still has enough autonomy to make his/her own org successful. Microsoft's top management could still fix this problem if it consistently focused on getting and keeping the right VPs and eliminating the bad ones. I think the problem and the solution start and end in the same place.
--Greg
The OpEd basically says that people inside the company screw each other over.
That's always the way they seemed to me from the outside -- there was this sort of thug culture there in the 90's, when they'd threaten to cut some company's air supply if they didn't buckle under, etc. I mean, they just came across as obnoxious bullies. And it turns out that's what it's like on the inside.
If they would just start dealing with everyone in good faith, it would do them a lot of good. Gates is a close friend of Warren Buffet, and Buffet knows the value of straight shooting as well as any business leader in the US. Microsoft should emulate Buffet on that point. You really can do well by doing good.
But just to take a recent example, that business with selling patents off to a troll company that would use them to harass Linux users leaves a bad taste in people's mouths. It makes you want to use someone else's products if there's anyway you can.
It must be a pretty depressing place to work.
Is it too much effort to spell properly even in the damn summary? Surely the story has "threatened" spelled correctly? I'm noticing more and more that spelling nowadays is like food seasoning - you just need to sprinkle some of it around, doesn't matter where it falls.
(Wasn't there a story earlier this week about declining standards?)
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
And this notion suprises anyone? It's not unlike any large family where one kid stuffs a sock in anothers mouth, someone taddles on Johnny, or another dumps their sister from the wagon. Turf wars exist everywhere; the challenge is to minimize them. But... How do you do that when competition is king? Where wining the battle is put before what is good, just, or honorable? Just asking?
I'm not so sure you're right that they should have put a lot of effort into something WinCE based for a tablet.
Witness the response even the vaunted Apple received to its iPad. It's being widely criticized as being an over-sized iPod Touch. Will it be a huge success? If it were from any other company than Apple, I'd say no way. Even coming from Apple though, even if it succeeds, there's clearly a significant number of people out there looking for a full computer experience that's usable with touch or pen input.
I actually got one not too long after they first came out, and it was a decent computer. It wasn't being hampered by processing power, running XP, but rather just the general quality of their tablet interactions, like the guy said. It really did feel like Office support was shoehorned in, which at the time I couldn't understand, but now makes more sense.
His criticism actually strikes me as very apt, looking at Microsoft's often dysfunctionally bad product launches.
Is there even an argument as to why their much-neglected Windows Home Server line should not be integrated with Windows Media Center? You've already got a box with a gigaton of storage in a box that's supposed to be left on at all times. And you're supposed to get a second PC to run Windows Media Center to DVR television programs? How many servers does Microsoft think each family wants in their house? Hint, the answer is that even one is pushing it. They control all elements of the software chain, yet the integration between WHS and Windows clients still leaves a ton to be desired. It feels like something that a 3rd party hacked together and released, not at all like Apple's all cylinders firing together smoothness.
Or in another area, where is the total lack of integration between their Xbox division and all other divisions? People have been clamoring for some type of connectivity between Windows Mobile and their Xbox for ages, and they're just now getting around to doing it.
His criticisms sound pretty plausible to me. For a company with its mitts in as many related fields as Microsoft is, the lack of cohesiveness between product divisions is striking.
'nuf said
Wherever You Go, There You Are
From TFA:
Internal competition is common at great companies. It can be wisely encouraged to force ideas to compete. The problem comes when the competition becomes uncontrolled and destructive. At Microsoft, it has created a dysfunctional corporate culture in which the big established groups are allowed to prey upon emerging teams, belittle their efforts, compete unfairly against them for resources, and over time hector them out of existence.
Looks like they have the same predatorial culture internally than what we see when MS is dealing with theirs "partners".
Microsoft doesn't innovate. I can't think of a single Microsoft product that was invented at Microsoft. They copy the inventions of other companies, and use cross-subsidization and OS lock-ins to push thir product to the top.
I think Microsoft achieved their goals. Their main emphasis has always seemed to be leveraging their current monopoly to create other monopolies. The only innovation I remember them making was to invent the office suite, which put their better-but-single-property competitors heads in vices. (And leveraged their insider knowledge from their first monopoly.)
Sure, Microsoft has a lot of very smart people working for them, and no doubt they have very interesting things in their laboratories. BUT the corporate goal has always been something akin to "Windows everywhere" and the entire company has worked towards that end. MS Tablets did not stumble because of political infighting, they stumbled because they ran MS's desktop property, using their desktop metaphor.
They may have failed to be considered an innovative company. They may have carried their external turf war mentality turn inwards. They may have stumbled on small devices because they wanted Windows Everywhere. But they certainly succeeded where they wanted to: OS monopoly, browser monopoly, office suite monopoly. (Jobs') Apple has a different goal and seems to be succeeding -- or at least threatening to succeed -- rather admirably.
I would guess it goes something like this:
Programmer: "Oh Hi, Mr. Balmer! Hey, I thought you might like this cool innovation we're working on for the next Windows!"
Balmer: "rrRrRRRRAAARRRRRRR!" (throws chair)
It is my understanding that it is common belief and practice to motivate employees by creating a competitive environment. But a lot of companies take this to mean "within the company". Well, if you create a win lose situation, there will always be losers, and if it is all happening inside the company, you're forcing everyone to concentrate on fighting with one another, and inflicting harm to other parts of the company. In biology, this would be a disease.
And in any great competition, you will always have your dirty players, your cheaters, and those who thrive at politics and manipulating the minds of those around them. This is a lot of wasted energy that otherwise could be put towards improving something or creating value within the business. Not to mention, true craftsmen thrive on isolation and focus, and are easily slain with swords. That is why you should never pit your sales department (soldiers) with your dev department (architects), because if you've hired the right people your sales department will always win.
At the end of the day, it is up to the "parent" to know what they are doing, and to put up the walls that help channel energy in all the right directions. Soldiers go outside the company to fight their wars. Developers just sit back and fight deadlines.
If you do compete, compete with your competitors. If you do have internal competitions, make sure no one loses. You can make it a win-win, or just a single win, situation, like rewards for certain targets. But never leave room for open politics or cat fighting within departments or between employees. Just create a total dictatorship where there is one leader who knows what they are doing, and is responsible for everyone else. Democracies may allow everyone to stand equally, but they are the worst at getting anything done. And no one needs to be equal in the workplace.
Whence cometh Brittany Spears...
I once knew a guy who worked at Microsoft, and after his stock made him enough money to no longer have to worry about bills, he left so he could focus on what he enjoyed. One thing he told me that many people don't understand about Microsoft is that the company *wants* its teams to treat each other as competitive threats, because it allows a sort of "software Darwinism" - his words not mine - to take place. As a result, he said that teams don't tend to work each each other unless there is a clear net benefit for them, because their jobs - and thus their ability to feed their families, etc - is on the line otherwise. That also means they tend to want to work on "safe" products.
http://blogs.technet.com/microsoft_blog/archive/2010/02/04/measuring-our-work-by-its-broad-impact.aspx
Guys dont forget the effect of Moore's law. 10 years is 6 * 18 months ago. Computers were 1/(2^6) as powerful as they are today. 2^6=64, Hence the computers had just 1.5% of the computing power of today's computer. To do signature or handwriting analysis, you simply did not have the power. Facebook could not have existed in a dial up AOL connectivity era. Just have some historical perspective. The tablet PC dreamt up by Dick Brass would have just sucked. Or he could claim he was ahead of the time. Anyway think about it.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
If they'd just agreed to modify the Office applications so they understood handwriting.
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marketing studies to each other to determine the minimum amount of features and quality assurance to put into our products to maximize profit, as if running technology business were the same as running a 50's era factory.
Clearly you could run Microsoft better. More profit, bigger margins, larger market share etc etc etc.
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Microsoft has consistently released shoddy product and has done so since long before it employed any fabled "liberal arts major MBAs".
This happens a lot with any large company where revenue is dependent on keeping a few cash cow products generating income. First, you don't want to do anything to upset what's making you money, so you start really playing it safe. Vista was a horrible flop, but Microsoft spent a ton of time and money polishing it up and rolling out Windows 7. But imagine Microsoft throwing out all the 20 years of Windows backward compatibility and totally starting over. It won't happen until the product absolutely cannot be supported anymore. Windows 7 including "XP mode" is a really good example - they desparately want to avoid angering enterprise customers who are still running custom software that relies on Windows 98's quirks 12 years later. Heck, there's still a couple of places I know running the core of their business using a 16-bit screen scraper app and an equally-old terminal emulator!
Second, you have the organizational problem. Microsoft is huge, so huge that enterprise customers need a Technical Account Manager just to handle their support calls and make sure they can find resources. I know they have a Research arm, but I can't see how an individual developer's idea might possibly make it high enough up the food chain to make much difference. To make things worse, the management structure is probably so deep within product lines that multiple product VPs are clamoring for Ballmer's attention. These guys are fighting for their jobs, so I imagine there's tons of poltics involved. I would bet that early-90's Microsoft was a lot more collaborative.
I definitely see Microsoft progressing towards IBM and Oracle territory as far as products go. They'll deliver nice safe products for business, but the consumer will be left out. XBox is another story...but just look at the mess that is Zune!
I've actually worked for large organizations, both IT and non-IT. (I haven't worked for a software company.) I can tell you that smaller organizations are better, up to a point. Once you get too small, say in the medium business category, you have to deal personally with a potentially psychopathic owner or CEO. If they're benevolent, it's great, but most entrepreneur-y types are nuts to begin with, and tend to treat employees like "the help." But once you grow too big, such that communication becomes a problem and politics start entering into every decision, the situation can be just as bad.
But yeah, I can't see Microsoft creating another "category-killer" product with their current structure. My dealings with them as a Premier Support customer have been interesting....it takes them several days to admit that a problem exists, log it, and "officially" tell me that they're working on a hotfix.
I got to see this first-hand in my last job. The place started off like a startup, got big, and all of a sudden people were doing the CYA thing that I've seen all over the large-business world. Everyone was way too panicked about getting chewed out by our crazy CIO to be focused on doing good work.
if left alone, employee's (especially smart ones like the type working at MS) will try feather their own nests. this is what leads to the infighting to begin with. this is where a good manager will say no to things, and keep the ship heading in the right direction.
I've seen it at a place i worked where a manager literally mis managed a department into the ground. he hired duds, failed to get rid of them during probation, then promoted more useless people. he didn't standup to people on his team when they were causing problems. it was all because he tried to find the path of least resistence rather then making the hard choices.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
This idea that some groups at MSFT sabotage others? Looks to me like we can see it happening to the XBox 360 right now.
The main culprits are Zune and (maybe) Silverlight.
All of the video stuff on the XB360, movie rentals and such, just got changed from a "built into the firmware" thing to a separate app. A separate app that requires registration, isn't as convenient to use, won't let you queue up video downloads from over the web anymore, and has Zune branding. Does anyone think the initiative behind that started by thinking about how to make the box better for consumers? Really? Come on.
And as I understand it, there's been a beefed up Silverlight engine deployed recently, with the result that there are now full video advertisements in "blades" (or whatever they're called now) all over the recent "no it's not the Sony XMB" NXE user interface.
Look at what's going on. It looks like Someone who's not from within the successful XBox team has decided to Tamper With Things. And things are getting worse. Right at the time when Sony is getting better.
It's not all gone yet, but I don't like the direction it's heading. And the clues seem to indicate that the author of the linked-to article has put their finger on the core problem.
Could this be why media player still doesn't let me control subtitles and alternate audio tracks, when free players have for ages?
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
It's all about top down. If you have people at the top that inspire and care, then it shows below.
Granted, Jobs is a dick. But he does have vision and does appreciate thinking out of the box. Gates and Ballmer totally lack this - they 100% lack vision. They're business dudes in and out and software (from Gates' early days of the Homebrew club) was always a means to get them money. Not a means to create something great or useful or transformative. Microsoft never changed the music biz or cell phone biz, etc. When money is secondary, then great things can be accomplished. When the biz dudes run the show, forget it.
While I do not like MS products at all (not well designed, buggy, 'me-too' syndrome), I thought they, for once, nailed it with the Courier. A UI that made sense for what it was and a completely different way of working. Of course it will never see the light of day. Too bad because I think a lot of people would have bought it and it would be a serious challenger to the iPad.
Rolling Stone had an interview with Jobs where he basically said that the goal wasn't to be the richest man in the cemetery. Couldn't agree more. In my mind, nothing innovating or original comes out of MS and ever makes it to product. Probably never will either.
First, lets establish that Microsoft (I am a former Microsoft employee myself) couldn't give a crap about innovating, its an exercise best left to those unconcerned about profits. Those of us who succeeded at Microsoft understood that our job was how to create/copy/simulate/obfuscate in the name of market leadership.
Its so tiring to see so many still willing to attach these lofty goals like 'innovation' to what is a really simple business challenge. Nobody (well a few, but they always leave to write these crappy articles) takes their Microsoft check to the bank feeling guilty and with less self-esteem because their high-marketshare product line isnt innovating the fuck out of technology.
Remember the line about the bear: "I dont have to outrun the bear, I just have to outrun you"?
That is how it is at Microsoft. I worked in the Exchange group, and later Visual Studio. Our job was NOT to come up with mind-blowing shit that glowed in the dark, it was to build products that give people reason to buy ours instead of THEIR's. Exchange never had to be slick, it just had to be better than Lotus Notes. SIMPLE.
Was Exchange innovative? Fuck no. Was it better than NOTES? Fuck yes.
That is the software business. We were never about design awards, and "oh we are so forward thinking", and all that shit.
Microsoft is, was, and always will be about profit for shareholders, bitches. Nothing more, nothing less.
Hehe... dick-brass.
"The name's Brass. Dick Brass." -- Brass, Dick
6.7 Billion in profits in the last quarter.
M80, C80 and L80 were the gold standard on CP/M!
The article's author is suffering from a major case of self-justification. I've been in this industry for a long time and Microsoft's been known for a lot of things, but innovation was never one of them. Good developer relations? Check. Finding a way acquire/copy good ideas and spread them widely? Check. Aggressive business practices? Check But I remember in the 80's and 90's that all the innovation that was added to Microsoft products was from acquisitions or feature copying from competitors. It was an interesting story about why the MS-tablet didn't take off, but my guess is that the hardware and wireless access hadn't matured yet, not that he got in a spat with the Office VP, who was probably correct in his assessment. Give Apple credit, yes they copied the Macintosh interface idea from Xerox, but they've put in some real innovative human factors improvements since then. MS picks and chooses which innovations to buy from smaller companies, rather than risk their own capital.
-- Everything is wonderful until you know something about it.
About a year ago I had my Telus account switched to electronic billing. I tend to do my electronic banking in the wee hours. Half of my attempts to access my Telus account electronically resulted in text like this:
Unfortunately, we were unable to process your request. Our site is currently experiencing technical difficulties. Please try again later or contact a TELUS Customer Service Representative at 666-6666. We apologize for any inconvenience.
This was annoying, as the email notification does not include the balance owing. What I wanted was the email to contain an encrypted PDF of my paper statement so I never have to log onto their crappy web site. Nope, that's not possible.
Finally I call up my innovation-loving Telus rep. to complain about these recurrent electronic account service outages. I refrained from pointing out that the telephone industry *invented* uptime in the first place and that their billing computers seem not to take a holiday in the wee hours every other night.
I said if you can't send my billing details through email, then send me the paper bill as well until you figure out how to keep your electronic service online. To which the answer was "I can do that, but I'll first have to cancel your electronic billing".
What? Logically incompatible? Or a return visit of my old Bell Canada nightmare?
When Bell Canada first brought in DTMF dialing, they charged a low price for rotary dial phones, a higher price for DTMF phones, and the highest price of all for phones with keypads that dialed by clicking. Not for the phone itself, but for your monthly service, depending on the type of phone you chose to own. From their side, their equipment couldn't really tell the rotary dial clicks from the simulated clicks of a keypad phone, so this fee only applied if you were dumb enough to tell someone at Bell Canada that you owned the contraband device.
The logic looked something like this: tone dialing is new and sexy, so we have to charge more for it. However, it costs us more to support the old analog dialing equipment, and we *want* the customers to move to the new technology, so we have to charge *even more* to customers who by sneaky means obtain the convenience of keypad dialing, while sticking it to us for charging more to access a system that actually costs us less to deliver.
If Telus gave me combination billing (both paper and electronic) then as the customer, I'd have the best of both worlds: an electronic copy of my records when their system is working, and a paper backup when it isn't. This would cost Telus more and might encourage them to keep their electronic records system online more than a few dark hours a month so I eventually call back and cancel the paper.
She asked me at the end of the call if her support had been helpful (clearly a mandatory call phase). I replied, "you've personally been very nice, but clearly your organization has created Byzantine rules that prevent you from offering me the sensible solution I requested". She hung up sounding sour as if my response had not been polite.
Since then I've purchased an OCR scanner and I'm probably going back to paper billing. I can have searchable records of numbers called without the hassle of navigating the arbitrary rules of the world according to Telus.
And arbitrarily they are, unless you group them under "clever ways to drill a hole in your pocket".
From CRTC orders TELUS to rebate customers
In November 2007, TELUS began charging close to half a million customers in Alberta and British Columbia a monthly network-access fee of $2.95. These customers had not signed up for a long-distance plan, either with TELUS or another company, and the charge applied even if they did not make long-distance calls or if they made long-distance calls using only dial-around long-distance services.
The CRTC had to step in and bust their
"...when the competition becomes uncontrolled and destructive." --TFA
TFA gives examples such as the head of the Office team expressing his dislike of tablet computers by refusing to integrate Office with the tablet UI, or the fellow who would support ClearType, but only if the personnel who developed it were put under his management.
I find this insight highly ironic. Hey, they were only emulating MS's behavior with respect to its competition, right?
It's always hard to find incentives that makes everybody pull in the right direction. For example, it's not that US companies don't want to think long term. But when employees think short term because they want to pass their performance evaluations, middle managers think short term of their quarterly bonus and executives think short term on the stock price and their stock options, then the result is that the company acts like short term is all that matters right up until it collapses in bankruptcy.
The same is true for departments, people only act in the company's best interest if it's better to cooperate than to compete. Unprofitable units and business lines are cut all the times, you're safer as a moneymaker in a tanking company than a mediocre department in a booming company. You can still get axed or outsourced because they need to focus their business or increase their margins but nobody wants to put their head on the chopping block and hope they'll be spared for setting a good example. An indispensable worker is a liability, somehow the same rules don't apply for departments.
Finally, it's not just different business units competing but even competing functions, like say the classic of the salesman who'll happily sell an overpromised and underestimated solution because his bonus depends on sales and not if it's actually a good deal for the company. But in defense of marketing, I've seen equally as bad examples where it seems engineering and QA has only cared about being on schedule and on budget and left the support function to pick up the tab. And even support departments that act more like anti-support departments to minimize support queues and rather kill sales because people are unhappy.
With all due respect to software developers I've found that writing software is easy because you tell the computer and it just does. Granted, it'll crash or hang if you instruct it wrong and has no intelligence of its own, but it's nothing like all the ways people circumvent your intentions and exploit your incentives. Sometimes I wonder if great leadership is just keeping people from doing all the things they shouldn't be doing. Not that by using the word "just" I mean that it's easy, quite the opposite really. I think everyone here knows the output one man can have if he's motivated, challenged and reasonably pushed so he's neither stressed nor slacking. If you could keep ten thousand people in that state you'd be worth every cent of your CEO salary.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I actually like your image of micro-society inside companies (and salesmen as soldiers)
But the point of the article was to find a way to foster innovation in a big company ...
- Total dictatorship : very bad for fostering ideas, as the dictator will most likely kill any idea it doesn't understand ... but, sure, the best way to go fast somewhere (at least until its fundamental flaw, lack of liberty, is not acted upon by its citizens ... and that dictator's ideas don't bankrupt society for lack of technical inventiveness)
- Democracy : as seen in present time, this system is inherently unstable, for those who are allowed to vote have no pre-requisite of knowledge (and hence will choose a project based on irrelevant characteristics)
- Anarchy : ideal for fostering ideas, but produces no definite direction that the salesmen can act upon (since the ressources are not infinite, doomed to fail because of exhaustion of said ressources)
- Tribal elders : kind of anarchy with a direction ... but unpractical for large enough societies/companies use
Well, since all those systems have inherent flaws, why not try an hybrid approach : ... well ... sounds like a workable company ?
- Anarchy for the bubbling of ideas
- Technician's democracy for the selection of ideas (those that select ideas ought to understand their merits)
- Dictatorship rule for the practical results it provides (ressource allocation & side-departments coordination)
- Tribal elders for the feedback mechanisms & actual project production (when a project's going bust, one ought to correct it)
The guy in charge of Microsoft's research and strategy thinks everybody on the Internet should have a license and this asshat thinks their problem is infighting? That company is seriously more f'd up than even I thought possible, and I'm damn good at thinking Microsoft is f'd up.
I don't recall their compilers and tools ever being more than mediocre.
Microsoft BASIC was hands down the best BASIC to program a PC with in the early 1980s. It had real string arrays, and important string functions like left, mid, and right, that other Basic implementations simply lacked.
Yes, TurboPascal and TurboC definitely stole the lead in tools from them, but the original TurboPascal has no linker and TurboC would be eclipsed with Visual C++, and after that the Visual Studio chain would gain a lead and remain the best all around IDE. Even now, the combination of Resharper + Visual C# is the best general purpose development story out there.
I will say though, that Microsoft's obsession with C# does open them up. The Linux C++ story is getting to be pretty darned good. I'm having a rather dandy time with Eclipse on Ubuntu 9, and Linux has always had the lead for 64 bit C++ programming, and always will have it simply because they have a better mix of integer, long and pointer sizes than Windows, and the calling convention is faster.
This is my sig.
'Microsoft has become a clumsy, uncompetitive innovator' and how 'it has lost share in Web browsers, high-end laptops and smartphones.
What is a "high end" laptop?
More importantly, what is the value of the high-end laptop to Microsoft?
To the user?
Microsoft sells the OS not the hardware.
The decision whether the high-end is worth entering is for the manufactuer and the retailer.
The most expensive laptop at Walmart.com is an $1800 HP - an i7 with 6 GB DDR3 RAM and Radeon 4830 video. Laser-etched Magnesium case. 64 bit Win 7 Home Premium.
That strikes me as a perfectly plausible alternative to the MacBook Pro.
IE8 is competitive.
But the browser wars may no longer matter.
H.264 has Mozilla tied up in knots.
Meanwhile, hardware-accelerated H.264 video is in the Flash 10.1 Beta 2 player for Windows. Silverlight 4 will support protected H.264 content and Chrome.
Users don't give a damn about standards - or ideology. They simply download the player and watch the movie.
So...
But the much more important question is why Microsoft, America’s most famous and prosperous technology company, no longer brings us the future
Microsoft never really innovated per se; they mostly marketed and promoted lesser-known technologies (CP/M as DOS, OS/2 as Windows) and tweaked them heavily to make them business-friendly. Gates, Ballmer and crew got ridiculously lucky too, but that's another story (which predates me anyway).
Good riddance if it fails.
Not quite. Imagine if Apple came to the forefront. We'd all have to be running THEIR hardware and be completely subservient to their business model, which is secretive and limiting at best. Perhaps Apple would be even more draconian with competition out of the picture. At least I can install Windows on any PC and expect it to work; can't say the same for OS X (and don't count Hackintoshes either; they aren't supported!).
It employs thousands of the smartest, most capable engineers in the world. More than any other firm, it made using computers both ubiquitous and affordable...Microsoft has become a clumsy, uncompetitive innovator. Its products are lampooned, often unfairly but sometimes with good reason.
Same story for IBM, Intel et al. They each have a market which they completely dominate in (IBM in the mainframe and support space; Intel in the microprocessor space). At that point, they don't need to innovate unless they really want to...and if times get really tough and enough loopholes exist, those companies can buy out their competition (Microsoft/IBM) or steamroll them (Intel vs AMD).
While Apple continues to gain market share in many products, Microsoft has lost share in Web browsers, high-end laptops and smartphones.
But the key thing to keep in mind is that Microsoft's bread and butter isn't in the consumer space. Like IBM, Microsoft stays afloat by marketing mostly to the business sector, who not only has (much) more money to give, but is also much more resistant to change. In fact, Microsoft spends TONS and TONS of money figuring out how to best cater their business customers by running all sorts of research, field tests and such. (A good example of this is the Ribbon interface in Office 2007, which was the result of an academic study looking to figure out how people doing work interface with GUIs best.)
Special attention should also be placed on Apple's main consumers. Where is one more likely to see iPhones and Macbooks: at a posh cafe in New York City or in a farm in Tulsa, OK? I'll make the postulation that the core of Apple's audience is young folk who want something simple, svelte and integral to their lifestyles. While there are certainly diehards and fanboys, many of those folks will jump to the "next big thing" just like they did from PCs to Macs (or regular smartphones to iPhones or whatever) just because it's big and happening. Sure, there are lots of youths in the US, but their buying power is unmatched to even a few of the top (or middle) companies on the Fortune 100.
The article is an interesting read, but I think the author misses the business motive behind today's Microsoft. Back when Microsoft started (which, again, predates me), computers were constantly innovating. I'd even argue that computers were still innovations at that point, since Microsoft gained popularity at a time when computers were just starting to move from the mainframe room to the security's desk. I think the biggest mistake that Microsoft made was not paying enough attention to the importance of the Internet over the last few years. Sure, they'll be coming out with Office 2010 and Office web apps, and they already came out with Bing, but they are still playing catch up when they could've taken this space by storm years ago...
I would make the argument that its not cooperation or competition in a large company, but just autonomy that matters most. General Motors for years sought to tie all of its disparate car divisions that it acquired in the 1920s and 1930s into a single cohesive whole. By the time it was successful, they had created so many layers and bureacracies within the company, that the whole system was mired with inefficiency and red tape. Like, how long were many cars denied better engines, because Corvette "had to be" the fastest car.
Eliminating functional overlap in multiple divisions seems more like a disaster that it is worth. Sure, GM might have had cost overlap with in its different car divisions, but, if each could sink or swim on its own, it would have been easier to drop one or grow one over the years, rather be locked into unrealistic production goals across the entire company in order to make all the red tape pay for itself. Even now, I don't know that bankrupt GM even gets this.
Ah well.
And now we have the same sort of crap at Microsoft. Exhibit A [for today], is LINQ vs other ORM efforts that Microsoft is working on in C#. LINQ is what, wildly popular, and it is also killed, largely because LINQ didn't come from the Visual Studio group, but from the SQL Server group. But there's others as well. I suspect that the continual and ongoing story of communications frameworks like WCF largely stems from intradepartmental rivalries and not really customer demand, and this goes all the way back.. like the whole COM fiasco the notion that everything must be COM within Windows (when obviously calling a DLL works pretty well for everything in Linux), came from the Office group and not from the Windows group, and there was infighting there.
I bet that many of the new features that we see really are targetted for a handful of corporate customers and are less for the far more numerous but smaller shops... Visual Studio is becoming much less of a personal craft tool and more of a stop on an assembly line of shitty code.
But on the other hand, MS can still put it together on key stuff. Windows 7 is a really good product. I like it.
This is my sig.
I used to work at Microsoft. I spent over 3 years there as a vendor and then 18 months as a full-time employee. I heard lots of rumors while a vendor about the backstabbing amongst team members and the unwillingness of separate teams to come together to deliver on new innovation. During my 18 months as an employee I saw 10x the number of instances of everything aforementioned. It was a terrible place to work for me as I am the type that just wants to get stuff done, and wants to make the company money. Unfortunately, everything outlined in this op-ed is spot on correct. Can Microsoft recover from this? Sure, but they won't without some serious changes in the compensation packages and other incentives, and without cleaning a lot of the current employees out. In my humble opinion, they better do it quick.
As an ex-Microsoftie, I can say that Microsoft is more of a rapid copier than an innovator. It's culture is also foster acquisitions, not creation.
If you look at its products, where is the of the transformative new idea? Sure there's lots of incremental improvements but where are the sparks?
Office suite -- basic ideas came from others (WordPerfect, Lotus, etc)
PowerPoint -- a purchase
Windows NT family -- DEC West's Prism project
Basic -- Gates copied language grammar from a DEC manual
IE -- checked the copyrights to see its origin
Microsoft was a growth company under Gates due to his hyper-competitiveness. Under Ballmer, it is just milking its cash cows.
Microsoft grew when it could grab ideas but after it killed its competition, it couldn't generate ideas by itself. The company's culture is to ship, not to invent.
With tech companies in particular, the leadership is crucial. The people at the top need to have a love of the product, a point of view, and a passion to change the world. Look at the influence Jobs had after returning to Apple: He shut down the 80% of projects that weren't going anywhere, and instilled some vision and focus into the efforts of his company. A leader can only do this if they have a personal love of technology. It doesn't come from a business school textbook, it's got to be in your blood. People who want to change the world don't have time for infighting.
Balmer is an ok guy, and he's probably pretty good as CEOs go, but he's a businessman through and through, not a good CEO of a tech company. He has no idea what he's trying to do with the technology, other than make money.
Microsoft hasn't been innovative for decades. They are a monopoly. They don't need to nor want to innovate. A monopoly wants to preserve the status quo as much as possible. And are people at Microsoft surprised by this? I thought they hired smart people.
You compare the business of striving for productivity in manufacturing to that of the business of getting an audience. Also, sports that involve only cooperation are watched all the time, only they are called other names, like performances, ballets, the circus, exhibitions, the outdoor channel, etc.
Yeah, my God, WalMart is hugely innovative! Its employees are always seeking new ways of wearing jeans badly so their ass cheeks hangs out or mangling the English language to a degree that I preferred Japanese! I had no idea that these innovations were driven by top down inspiration by the yellow smiley face...I thought he just whistled and hip-checked price tags. Wait a moment! His whistle IS hypnotizing!
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
Telus is the land line company that offers voice, internet, television. Telus MOBILE are the cell phone creeps. I'm not even on their network and had to fight $600 in failed data charges. Yes, Telus MOBILE sucks, but the land line telco seems okay!
I doubt that. I would credit Commodore far more; they brought computing to the masses. MS's only real semi-claim to fame is integrating the products in the Office suite for better info sharing. Whether sufficient integration would have happened without MS is hard to say.
Author is obviously not a slashdotter.
Same with me. Perhaps I could grow used to it, but it would take a while. Aliased (stair-stepped) fonts are ugly, but at least their edges are sharp. The slightly fuzzy rainbowy edges of ClearType can be hard on the eyes. It also makes copy-and-pasting of images across computers problematic. As a personal choice, fine; but many wouldn't miss it.
Table-ized A.I.
I've also been to parties where many of them attended. They didn't know each other because they were from different parts of the company. It's not hard to get them to argue with each other. It's often very entertaining.
Zune is a good example. They came up with a solid product pretty quickly when they put their minds to it.
Wouldn't a much more "solid" product have been a device that wasn't aimed right at a rapidly collapsing market and instead was ahead of the game?
A zPhone around the time the Zune came out, using XNA to program it - that might have been something. It could have leveraged stuff they had on hand very quickly to at least stave off the iPhone. Instead they have a tiny fraction of a shrinking standalone media player market, and years later no answer to the phone space, at all.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/printthread.php?threadid=184387
I'd like to buy homeland for our 10 million people. http://twitter.com/mahadiga
Look at the screenshots of Bluefish from 2004: http://web.archive.org/web/20040715074025/bluefish.openoffice.nl/screenshots.html
The bluefish editor has been using contextual tabs since 2000 or so. Ribbon is new for office, but contextual layout with a tabbing interface is not new at all.
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000072.html
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/TwoStories.html
http://www.inc.com/magazine/20080901/how-hard-could-it-be-how-i-learned-to-love-middle-managers.html?partner=fogcreek
I'd like to buy homeland for our 10 million people. http://twitter.com/mahadiga
For road transport there are not many small-vehicle options outside the 4-wheeled box, co complaining that a car is still a car is stupid. VW has volume car designs which use remarkably advanced technologies - small 4-cylinder engines with outputs on a par with US V6 models, and with vastly superior fuel consumption. They make the FSI engine which produces 170BHP from 1.4 liters, with high torque from little more than tickover. They make Diesels which produce 170BHP from 1.9 liters. VW are achieving "hybrid" efficiencies from conventional engines with no expensive nickel batteries. They have commercialised close-ratio 7 speed automatic boxes with dual clutches and no slushbox. And this has been done with genuine innovation rather than incremental improvements.
And no, I am not a VW driver. I prefer the products of another innovative German company based in Stuttgart.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Does Microsoft have a war room? And, is fighting allowed in there? Perhaps this is the reasons innovation is hampered there.
Similar to the upcoming US election results
The internal combustion engine is the future! It's like Science Fiction!
Something that has been in common use for more than half a decade isn't "the future".
I fear that what is overlooked here is microsoft's recent advancement (due to pressure from open source and others) in funding research. They buy and buy and buy good researchers, and it even brings results. (I'm not happy with that).
When you read lambda-the-ultimate.org (programming languages weblog) you see how many people in this area are employed by microsoft research.
And some years ago I heard a hacker telling the story that microsoft had begun to take security seriously, buying security experts and so on. Isn't there a guide for windows application developers how to write secure programs?
this might not be about the internals of the company, but about research in remote facilities. It's sad because it makes this fucking monopoly sustain.
Call it infighting, call it spending your time making sure you save your own ass, call it afraid to change with the times, when you hire new blood and don't back their ideas....I am sure there is plenty of creative people at M$, they just get held back or kept down a lot, because the bureaucracy over there is what is the most important, contrary to a place like Google, where they really push for you to come up with great new ideas, even if you don't have a engineering degree, they will listen and even ponder on your ideas.
I think if M$ had someone else running the show, they could really surpass Google,
to become top dog again, but not with the present project plan, or people in charge.
Lots of people have spouted the conventional wisdom that Microsoft never innovates, and it's true for every case but one: DirectX. The DirectX libraries were internally developed, they are tight, high performance code, and they were THE innovation that prevented Windows from fading.
A couple of people have pointed out that Microsoft really only cares about their corporate customers, because they have vastly more money than consumers, but they do have to care about consumers at least a little, and they are aware of that. They know that if individuals aren't using their products at home, they won't go to work knowing them. The more individuals use the office tools on their own time, the better their chances that they'll demand the same tools in the workplace.
But how many presentations are created at home? Not none, but the number isn't very high. So Microsoft needed something to keep Windows relevant at home, and DirectX was it. The DirectX team may be the only reason the PC remained viable at all. The open hardware of the PC platform was causing a proliferation of different devices, all of which had to have drivers, but none of which provided compatible drivers. DirectX defined the APIs that drivers had to provide, and then managed to use them so well that people could forget for a little while that Windows is slow. Most of Windows IS slow, but DirectX most definitely is not.
There's a reason why other divisions of Microsoft are trying to ride the XBox group's coattails. XBox is powered by DirectX, Microsoft's only real innovation.
Is that similar to being an "accidental rapist"?
So, where are the Microsoft laptops?
There are none, since the original question was "when did Microsoft start selling laptops" there was in fact no need to show that Microsoft manufactured them. The poster did not specify Microsoft branded or manufactured devices.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Microsoft [...] innovation
What.
This is such a skewed view of reality, I had to laugh -- it's something only an engineer working within Microsoft could write, completely ignoring (just to pick one predatory example) the kinds of lopsided contracts that Microsoft's business side was penning with all sorts of hardware manufacturers, prohibiting them from shipping computers with rival operating systems or web browsers...
There was very little "accidental" about these predatory moves, and the monopoly trial very clearly showed that this was a pattern of behavior.
Contrast with:
Gee, that sounds like the same kinds of behavior, just writ small. This strikes me as one of those "you reap what you sow" type of situations. Definitely, the offspring-eating behavior is well ingrained in the DNA of this particular organism...
The poetic justice is delicious. Pity that the author of TFA doesn't see it.