Seeing Microsoft From An Insider's View

I must concede ignorance about the fact that I have never heard of Dick Brass who was VP at Microsoft for close to seven years starting from 1997. However, he is a person that I will follow more closely now for he has given a very interesting view on why Microsoft has struggled in innovation in an industry in which it was the major player for a long time. This opinion article in the NYT shows that Microsoft has faced little competition in its main business area as evidenced by the dominance of the Windows operating system and the Microsoft Office suite. As a former engineer with the firm, Dick suggests that Microsoft had such a strong lead in this area that it could afford to apply the brakes to innovation beyond these two areas.

While I am alive to the fact that this is a former employee of Microsoft, the relative seniority of his formal position at the firm leads me to think that his analysis is instructive. He concedes readily that the firm has maintained large profits and enviable reserves but that it ignored the possibility of employing its employees to develop other hardware and software products. Most painfully, he mentions that Microsoft never developed a true system for innovation and that internal corporate rivalries led to the stifling of devices that could have changed the landscape in its favor. One of the victims of this internal fights for dominance is that a new technology named ClearType with clear commercial applications was not fully developed due to internal fears of its potential for success.

I find this assertion interesting because while there was no guarantee that the new technology would be profitable, it suggests that the internal work dynamics at Microsoft were far from perfect. At the same time, one must offer credit to the reluctance to develop hardware products when the corporation's orientation was to develop a winning suite of software for PC use. Dick is certainly right when one considers that the antitrust problems that this corporation had probably affected its focus on product development much more than is realized. In all, the entire story is far from comprehensive for such a large firm but it shows how a great corporation refused to take the chance to develop new products while it had an unassailable position. One decade later, one cannot maintain that it is the predominant technology firm.