The New York Times has a fascinating op-ed today written by Dick Brass, the guy who tried to make tablet PCs and e-readers take off at Microsoft around the time of the dotcom bubble. It looks at why Microsoft is being out-innovated by companies like Apple and Google.
In it he says the reason lots of cool ideas were either delayed or never made it to the outside world at Microsoft while he was there was internal politics. Stakeholders in one part of the business weren't always happy when an innovation in another part of the business was getting all the attention.
The reason this is topical is that, once more, Apple seems to have succeeded in an area where Microsoft tried and failed for years - the tablet. He documents opposition from the VP for Office when he was developing the tablet, who refused to properly modify Office apps to work with the tablet format.
While he also points to a cautious corporate culture brought about by the anti-trust action of the late 90s, and we don't know what kind of axe Brass might have to grind, it's still a great insight into how even the most apparently omnipotent companies can drop the ball.
Some interesting context is provided by this piece, written almost ten years ago when Brass was in the middle of pushing the tablet concept as Microsoft.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
They just don't seem to be able to get the basics right before they move on to the dubious "bells & whistles". They keep letting everyone down.
ReplyDeleteI'm hearing and have witnessed an incompatibility in file sharing between Win7 and XP-bases computers; you can't mount an XP volume as a file server and there are tens of thousands of posts about it on the web.
How can you release an OS that can't talk to XP???
That does seem like a school-boy error.
ReplyDeleteThere's a lot of pressure on Microsoft to deliver something special at MWC. I'll be there and I'll try to stick something on this blog when I find out what.