Microsoft's Creative Destruction

In the latest battles of innovation, e.g. Amazon Kindle vs Apple iPad, iPhone vs Blackberry, Facebook vs Twitter nobody seems to mention the name that was associated with bringing us the future for a long time - Microsoft. Consider these contradictions -

• A clumsy, uncompetitive company, tarnished image due to 1990s antitrust prosecution, and inept marketing
• A company with $100 billion in cumulative profits in last 10 years, largest and best corporate laboratories in the world, luxury of not one but three CTOs

What happened? Unlike other companies, Microsoft never developed a true system for innovation. In fact, some former senior employees think that the company routinely manages to frustrate the efforts of its visionary thinkers. Internal competition has been uncontrolled and destructive. "It has 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." Examples of suffered projects include MS-Office on Microsoft's Tablet PC in 2001, Potential of ClearType on any screen.

Finally, it is not an accident that almost all the top Microsoft executives in charge of their music, e-books, phone, online search and tablet PC efforts over the past decade have left the company.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/04/opinion/04brass.html?hp