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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."
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.
... using sabotage (like Nancy Kerrigan) . . .
Not to distract from your overall point, which is well taken, but in the interest of fairness and accuracy, I feel I must point out that it was Tonya Harding who sabotaged Nancy Kerrigan.
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).
What are you talking about ?
Go! Computer.
Read Startup: A Silicon Valley Adventure.
Granted, it's a touch biased because the author was the founder/CEO of Go!, but it still shows how MS sabotaged competitors.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
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
Subpixel rendering was invited by IBM in 1988. Windows just brought it to public attention. Furthermore, Mac OS X had subpixel rendering. OS X Server 1.0 was released in 1999, and Mac OS 10.0 "cheetah" was released in March 2001. Windows XP was released in October 2001.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subpixel_rendering
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_XP
You've been corrected with a citation. Please stop spreading bullcrap. Thank you.
And it's pretty hard to argue against the fact that Microsoft was the one who shipped a GUI to the most people
You misspelled "Apple, Atari, and Commodore" there. Windows wasn't really usable before the '90s... the Mac, Amiga, and ST had seven good years "delivering the future" before Windows 3.1 shipped. And while the Mac cost more than the PC it was Commodore and Atari who were the lowest bidders back then.
MS-DOS? Not remotely innovative. The well-known story is that Gates snuck in under the radar to grab the contract for the IBM PC's operating system from Digital Research (developers of the then-dominant CP/M OS, and probable favourites for the job). Of course, Gates didn't actually have an OS, and then had to go out and buy one from a small software company [wikipedia.org]. Which was basically just an unremarkable workalike/blatant-ripoff (delete according to opinion) of CP/M anyway. That became PC-DOS/MS-DOS 1, of course, but you'll note that the interest here is in how Gates grabbed the contract, not in that totally unremarkable and uninnovative (rip)off-the-shelf OS.
This is not entirely correct, although it is close. Bill Gates has successfully sold IBM's PC division on a couple of compilers for their new PC, but IBM didn't yet have an OS. They went to the CEO of Digital Research, but he was put off by IBM's boilerplate nondisclosure agreement (it may have been more than just an NDA, I don't remember exactly). There are a couple of different stories about how he responded to IBM's overture, but the end result was that the IBM guys felt like he didn't want to do business with them.
Now IBM had decided to use a new chip from Intel at the core of their PC. There was no OS yet written to work on it. At the same time, a small company in Seattle was developing machines that used this new Intel chip. They needed an OS for it. One of their employees wrote a quick and dirty OS (QDOS) that would do for them to get their machine out the door and working. The plan being that if someone developed a better OS for the chip later they would buy it and start using it. I forget how Bill Gates learned of this OS, but he promptly went to this company and bought the rights to distribute it. QDOS was not a rip off of CP/M, but it had enough similarities that when Digital Research made DR-DOS, Microsoft couldn't stop them. I'm sure there are others on here are more familiar with the details.
However, your main point is correct MS has never been an innovator (except maybe a bit with their compilers in the early days).
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
That wasn't due to innovation. That was plain old software piracy: they hired David Cutler from DEC, one of the authors of VMS, and stole its internals like a pirate robbing Spanish galleons. The resulting lawsuits are one of the reasons NT ran so well on Alphas: its internals had frankly been writen for Alphas originally by Cutler and the personal he hired away from DEC. Sadly, DEC thought they could take a lump settlement and continue to out-innovate Microsoft with their Alpha hardware and its upgrades, but Intel stole core technologies of the Alpha to make the Pentium.
The result was the fundamentally crippled, by comparison, NT on Pentium. But it was so much cheaper and accessible for consumer grade products, and worked so much better with Microsoft's core office suite, that the results left DEC's "continuing innovation" on the scrap heap.
I'm also an ex-Microsoftie, and I got there by acquisition. To say the least, it was not at all my cup of tea.
TFA is pretty accurate that it has a culture problem. The culture there is really pathological in so many ways. A former co-worker of mine who immigrated to the United States from the USSR said the propaganda level was strikingly similar to living in a communist country. I completely agreed with him, having lived in one myself for a while.
When my former employer was acquired by Microsoft (we were in the security area) and we started benchmarking our product against Microsoft's own and were blowing theirs away despite the fact that we were using data we'd never seen before or trained on, did they say "Wow, you guys rock!!" - um, no. They questioned our methodology, our stats, everything. It was incomprehensible to them that we could be that much better, right from the gate, against a product they'd been working on for years. It took months before they gave up and grudgingly admitted we were right. "Not Invented Here" runs deep in Redmond. Really, really deep. Despite the fact that they have indeed bought our copied for almost everything in their product line. Go figure.
As far as the culture of acquired companies goes, the MSFT approach is to exterminate it. That part is quick and brutal. Resistance truly is futile and you will be assimilated. Or you'll quit. I chose the latter.
As TFA says, there are thousands of really smart people at Microsoft, and it's not just the engineers, either. HR people, admin assistants, everywhere you look, people are really sharp. Even the receptionists are the best I've run across, and they have great things like at least one IT desk in every building where you can go if you're having problems with your computer. Kind of like an internal Apple Genius Bar. That's a tremendous idea.
The problem is, Microsoft has these armies of really, really smart, innovative people but the whole that is produced from all this intelligence and innovativeness is way, way less than the sum of the parts. IMO most of those supersmart people ought to be at Apple rather than MSFT, or at Google (neither of which is my current employer). They could really shine there and get a lot more of there best ideas out there and make a difference. Sounds like Dick Brass should have worked at Apple or Google, too, really.
My present employer is another big company whose name is a household word, and in pretty much every way it's better than Microsoft. I got there by acquisition too, and I love it. It's a great place to work.
Culturally, not only has the culture of my acquired employer not been extinguished, we have actually had some success at spreading it to our broader business unit while at the same time absorbing the best of the new culture. IMO there is no way that could happen at MSFT.
This doesn't mean I think Microsoft can be written off as a competitor. They remain hypercompetitive are very good at exploiting their market dominance to drive out other solutions and push mixed shops to go all MSFT. I can't imagine why on earth a shop would want to convert from anything else to Exchange, but I see it happen all the time. Rarely do I hear of anyplace dumping Exchange for something else, even when something else would be a better solution.
But an innovator? Nah, Microsoft just ain't that. They never were, really.