Microsoft Innovation: Clumsy and Uncompetitive or Prudent and Wise?

Posted 02/04/2010 at 1:20pm | by Bart Salisbury

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It’s a Rashômon like moment. Today, former Microsoft vice president Dick Brass lays the wood to Microsoft in the New York Times for being a “clumsy, uncompetitive innovator.” Mere hours later, on the Official Microsoft Blog, vice president of Corporate Communications Frank X. Shaw responds with a ‘no we aren’t’ rebuttal. What’s interesting is that both make valid points, and, legitimately, both may be right.

Brass’s bone of contention is the way Microsoft handles competition. Despite allocating tons of resources, and employing hundreds of bright, creative engineers, innovation is often stifled, if not outright trampled because there is no centralized mechanism for governing competition and shepherding innovation. Rather, it’s one big cage match, where the entrenched technologies hold sway over the newly emergent, innovative ones. Competition at Microsoft, says Brass, “created a dysfunctional corporate culture in which the big established groups are allowed to prey upon emerging teams, belittle their efforts, compete unfairly against them for resources, and over time hector them out of existence.”

Not so fast, responds Shaw. Yes, it may be true that Microsoft may be slow to innovate, but that’s because so many people depend on Microsoft’s products. Getting in a bit of a dig at Apple, the shadow lurking in this background, Shaw says “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.” The delays in ClearType, an example offered by Brass, were due not to limitations on innovation, but were because Microsoft had to be sure it was a good idea before inflicting ClearType on the masses--that it was “innovation at scale.” (For the moment, let’s leave Vista out of this.)

There’s a tit-for-tat over Xbox, Zune, and tablet PCs that make both of these worth reading. In the end, it is possible to side with either Brass or Shaw, or with both. There’s no real dispute over the basic facts. But, like in Rashômon, each sees these facts as telling a different story about Microsoft's capacity to innovate.

Image Credit: Microsoft