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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."
Competition does produce excellence when all competitors are engaged in positive activities, like building competing products the best they can to see who's is better.
Competition falls apart when the competitors resort to sabotage, instead of simply doing their best in a fair competition.
I'm actually shocked that I'm about to do this, but I'm going to bring up a sports analogy: people like to watch sports games, which are competitions between two (or more sometimes) teams or people. Audiences like fair competitions. But if the competitors start cheating (like with steroids) or using sabotage (like Nancy Kerrigan), audiences don't like that, and if it happens too much, the sport starts losing audiences and falling apart (like baseball). Along these lines, no one's going to watch a sports game that only involves cooperation, instead of competition. Of course, there is one exception to this rule: hockey. Sabotage is perfectly acceptable there: teams frequently get a disposable "bully" player to pick a fight with one of the opposing team's best players to take him out of action for a while.
The problem with competition inside companies, even if it didn't involve sabotage, is that it consumes a lot of extra resources which could be spent on more profitable activity, such as producing more products for sale. Decently-run companies typically already have all the competition they want, and more, from their competitor companies, and wouldn't dream of creating even more unnecessary competition within. Only a truly stupidly-run company would do this. Unfortunately, some companies have giant unstoppable cash cows that let them waste tons of resources on this kind of idiocy.
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.
I worked at Telus (Canadian based Telco) for a while and I can safely say that they foster creativity and innovation. It's actually in their motto type creedo thing, which they bash you over the head with during training. Anyways, every 2 weeks during a regular team meeting they would constantly ask for criticism or feedback of the system, any improvements to be made or new ideas to be tested. Even my short summer as a 411 operator showed that they took suggestions and applied them regularily. For example, when looking through directories that deal with Taxi Agencies, sometimes a number will pop up that isn't the actual line for the taxi cabs, but actually the corporate office. Since you don't want to give them the wrong number listings will sometimes have notes attached. Seemingly ridiculous in hindsight, the notes are only ever surrounded in !!'s or **'s and have no other differentiation. One of my co-workers suggest we use a different font colour for notes. This suggestion was taken up and implemented within the month, much to everyone's delight.
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
Large institutions hamper creativity, innovation...
The same thing was going on at Apple before the Return of Jobs. The road to OSX was bumpy.
[quote]Meanwhile, Apple was facing commercial difficulties of its own. The decade-old Mac OS had reached the limits of its single-user, co-operative multitasking architecture, and its once-innovative user interface was looking increasingly dated. A massive development effort to replace it, known as Copland, was started in 1994, but was generally perceived outside of Apple to be a hopeless case due to political infighting. By 1996, Copland was nowhere near ready for release, and the project was eventually cancelled. Some elements of Copland were incorporated into Mac OS 8, released on July 26, 1997.
After considering the purchase of BeOS -- a multimedia-enabled, multi-tasking OS designed for hardware similar to Apple's -- the company decided instead to acquire NeXT and use OPENSTEP as the basis for their new OS. Avie Tevanian took over OS development, and Steve Jobs was brought on as a consultant. At first, the plan was to develop a new operating system based almost entirely on an updated version of OPENSTEP, with an emulator -- known as the Blue Box -- for running "classic" Macintosh applications. The result was known by the code name Rhapsody, slated for release in late 1998.
Apple expected that developers would port their software to the considerably more powerful OPENSTEP libraries once they learned of its power and flexibility. Instead, several major developers such as Adobe told Apple that this would never occur, and that they would rather leave the platform entirely. This "rejection" of Apple's plan was largely the result of a string of previous broken promises from Apple; after watching one "next OS" after another disappear and Apple's market share dwindle, developers were not interested in doing much work on the platform at all, let alone a re-write.
Apple's financial losses continued and the board of directors lost confidence in CEO Gil Amelio. The board of directors asked him to resign. The board convinced Steve Jobs to lead the company on an interim basis. Jobs was, in essence, given carte blanche by Apple's board of directors to make changes in order to return the company to profitability. When Jobs announced at the World Wide Developer's Conference that what developers really wanted was a modern version of the Mac OS, and Apple was going to deliver it[citation needed], he was met with thunderous applause. [/quote]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Mac_OS_X
TFA's description of the infighting within Microsoft matches the details behind what I pasted above.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Of course people care about their own goals. But most people's goals are not 'others must lose so I can win.' Recent economic research shows that people seem to be more motivated by notions of fairness and reciprocity than selfish gain.
Enemies aren't the best push to work harder. Friends that you don't want to let down are a better, more reliable motivator, IMHO.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
In plain terms, the isolated Tablet was little more than a crippled laptop, and the isolated Pocket PC was almost completely useless. Attach them to a network, though, and they become something magical. Something none of us working on them was wise enough to foresee.
--Greg
There's a kind of poetic justice here, with Microsoft's tactics of stifling competitors (rather than out-performing them) being used internally.
... 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.
Actually, it's more like this...
1. Profit!
2. Try to exterminate competition
3. Realize it doesn't work against Google
4. Throw chairs
5. Litigate
6. Realize other products like Firefox are eating your market share, DESPITES your efforts to monopolize the market
7. Patent troll
8. Realize people aren't buying your FUD
9. Realize you have to GPL some of your products because they found out you plagiarized some code
10. Throw more chairs
11. Realize how the media are turning against you
12. Get back in the bandwagon
13. Fire Ballmer
14. Buy chairproof shields for your buildings
15. Innovate
or...
13b. Invest more in the XBOX dept.
16. Profit!
http://blogs.technet.com/microsoft_blog/archive/2010/02/04/measuring-our-work-by-its-broad-impact.aspx
It sort of worked out for her though, as she is now the Queen of Blades, leading an almighty Zerg armada across Terran space.
cmd-q.co.uk - some sort of stupid fucking internet bullshit
Bullcrap!
Let's look at companies like Mercedes, Nintendo, Research in Motion, Volkswagen, Walmart, and 3M. These companies are in fact very large and very innovative. The list goes on... Microsoft is a dysfunctional company, point blank! What is killing Microsoft is what the guy in the article said it was.
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
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.
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.