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In a New York Times opinion piece titled "," the recovering Redmondite dissects why a company like to huzzahs, while Microsoft's efforts to create a over the years have earned it nothing but guffaws. He writes:
Microsoft has become a clumsy, uncompetitive innovator. Its products are lampooned, often unfairly but sometimes with good reason. Its image has never recovered from the antitrust prosecution of the 1990s. Its marketing has been inept for years; remember the 2008 ad in which Bill Gates was somehow persuaded to literally wiggle his behind at the camera?
While Apple continues to gain market share in many products, Microsoft has lost share in Web browsers, high-end laptops and smartphones. Despite billions in investment, its Xbox line is still at best an equal contender in the game console business. It first ignored and then stumbled in personal music players until that business was locked up by Apple....Perhaps worst of all, Microsoft is no longer considered the cool or cutting-edge place to work. There has been a steady exit of its best and brightest.
The biggest enemies to innovation? The internecine political struggles between different groups at Microsoft, who'd poison the work of another group just to maintain an advantage. Sure, the company has clocked hundreds of billions in profits, so it must be doing something right, but in Brass's analogy, Microsoft is GM, and and are SUVs: hugely profitable in their day, but dinosaurs sinking into the tar pits soon after (a pretty good analogy, methinks).
Needless to say, , via its Flack du Flacks, Frank Shaw:
At the highest level, we think about innovation in relation to its ability to have a positive impact in the world. For Microsoft, it is not sufficient to simply have a good idea, or a great idea, or even a cool idea. We measure our work by its broad impact.... for a company whose products touch vast numbers of people, what matters is innovation at scale, not just innovation at speed.
In other words: What really matters is that a billion people use your products, even if they mostly suck. Which means that, despite getting beaten like a pair of bongos in every new market it has entered over the last decade, Microsoft still hasn't woken up and smelled the Starbucks.
It's not surprising. I remember sitting in a conference room with a couple of bright Micro-geeks more than 10 years ago. This was around the time during one of Microsoft's various antitrust trials, and when companies as conservative as Compaq were volunteering information about how from its line of Presario PCs.
I asked them what they thought of these things.
Yes, one of them admitted, "We have a perception problem."
You don't have a perception problem, I said. You have a reality problem. And the reality is that, despite whatever people living inside the Microsoft bubble might think, the rest of the world thinks you're a bully. And nobody likes bullies.
Another of Microsoft's big reality gaps is its insistence that it's one of the great tech innovators. Sure, Microsoft Research can go head to head with the best labs in the world; it's done some amazing things. But Microsoft's success is built on imitation, not innovation. Nearly everything it does, somebody else did first and usually better -- from graphical interfaces to music players, personal finance software, search engines, Web portals, virtualization software, phones, and PDAs, you name it.
A third reality disconnect: The notion that Microsoft has made computing easy and ubiquitous for the masses. Sure, it's preferable to master one set of file commands rather than a different batch for every program; I, for one, do not miss the Lotus 1-2-3 backslash. But Microsoft designs software under the assumption that everyone who uses it is either a gibbering simpleton or an engineer -- so it vacillates between condescending and pointless dialog boxes and incomprehensible error messages, with few stops in between.
The only real consumer success Microsoft has had is with the Xbox. That's because the in the late 1990s -- allowing it to avoid much of the internal politics that Brass describes in his editorial.
I've long felt the worst possible thing that happened to Microsoft was when a federal appeals court overturned Judge Thomas Jackson's decree to . Actually, it probably should have been split into four or five parts. Imagine a world where Office development could continue unencumbered from Windows, where Microsoft's Internet division could be as nimble as a Web startup, or its consumer electronics as appealing as anything coming from Sony or -- dare I say it? -- Apple.
Maybe that's overstating it. But being enormous didn't help the dinosaurs in the end, and it's not helping Microsoft now.
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