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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.
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