I was reading my Quora stream and read a comment by a smart guy that I follow, Scott Berkun, author of three excellent books, Making Things Happen, The Myths of Innovation, and Confessions of a Public Speaker..
Scott answers the question “Why has Microsoft seemingly stopped innovating” is his usual, very insightful, no-BS way:
I was at MSFT ’94-’03 – worked mostly on IE in the early days v1-5)
The word innovation is a red herring. Apple did not invent digital musical players, the GUI, the cell phone, or the tablet. But they made the best versions of these things, and after the fact they are labelled as innovative. The word is mostly useless as its too common for us to confuse making a great product with developing the early ideas for the concept of the product. The people who develop the early ideas rarely succeed in business, and rarely get recongnized as innovators. I write books about Innovation, yet in practice I try to use the word as little as possible. It’s often about as useless a word as ‘cool’.
Microsoft (Post Win95) has almost always failed to manage its perception among the cultural elites, both in and outside the tech-sector. There is a reasonable history of Microsoft being first to try new things – Bob, Clippy, CD-ROMS (Encarta), Expedia, Citysearch, XBOX, Tablet PC and on it goes, but Microsoft has always had extremely conservative marketing and brand advertising, allowing it’s geeky, IT, conservative perception to dominate how even its new products and ambitious risks are perceived. Bob was a big risk and had some interesting ideas, but was a PR disaster both in how it was presented and who it was presented too. But since no one ever did the talk on “What we learned from Bob” the same mistakes have been repeated many times. My favorite tragedy about nearly everything at Microsoft is how poorly lessons from the big disasters at Microsoft were shared across the company – so they’ve been repeated many times.
The real tragedy is it takes great products to be labeled an innovator by the mass media and consumer culture. Edison did not invent the lightbulb, but he made one that worked well enough to be used by most people, that’s why he gets all the credit. Same for Ford. Microsoft has never been led as a products company – It’s a technology and platforms company. With that kind of strategy middle-management and design-by-committee dominates, making the kind of design vision and clarity of focus required to make a great product (or a great user experience) very difficult culturally. The result is products that are often mediocre to experience, but have secondary value that enterprise and corporate customers respond to. This doesn’t work as well for consumers, and consumer drive the perception of who is innovative and cool and who isn’t.
Lastly you have all of the Innovator’s dilemma criteria in full effect. Christensen’s book (The Innovator’s Dilemma, http://www.amazon.com/Innovators…) was everywhere at the company in 95/96, but when I left no one was reading it anymore. It’s a big and fat company. There are lots of wealthy middle-managers who have checked out, or were simply not very useful in the first place despite how long they’ve been at Microsoft. It’s fairly hard to get fired at MSFT and this is a kind of corporate death when dead weight accumulates at the middle layers. The age and lack of understanding among many for how to develop new ideas into good products means the first move to solve any competitive problem will be to rely on the strategies of the past trying to extract every last ounce of value from them, making it harder and harder for someone to take the risks necessary to lead.
