On Microsoft
by JS
This editorial on Microsoft in today’s NYTimes is interesting on many levels. Part elegy, part exposition, even the choice to run an editorial of this sort is in many ways a bit of a puzzle to me. I suppose I’m too far down the Ubuntu rabbit hole to remember how common Microsoft is for most people. In the eternal war between Coke and Pepsi, I’m drinking RC cola in the corner like some kind of deviant.
I don’t really disagree with anything in the editorial, but there is one sin of omission that is worth noting. Microsoft had (and may still have) a reputation among entrepreneurs as a place startups go to die the brutal death of being copied into obscurity instead of acquired. This led to a situation where people running startups would accept invitations to speak at Microsoft and end up giving comically (and purposely) misleading presentations about the various ideas they were trying to develop. (Compare this with the kind of talks given at Google, who’ve shown a real willingness to spend some serious money in pursuit of good ideas.)
This attitude and reputation extended Microsoft’s own internal problems with innovation out into the community at large. Microsoft was for a key period of time a cash rich but thrifty intellectual property aggressor. Change meant a threat to market dominance in the same way that internal innovation created threats to the working order of various company power silos. That’s probably why when web 2.0 became viable, Microsoft had such a small part in it. It’s also probably why Apple has such an easy time hitting out of the park on a regular basis. Microsoft’s business model created such a rut that just getting out of it was enough to guarantee intellectual capture among technological elites.
Unfortunately, I don’t see how Microsoft can change. They make a lot of money bringing poor user experiences to people on a daily basis, yet their mindshare among process oriented business people remains high. They’ve been doing anti-competition so long they’ve forgotten what real competition looks like (say, for example, that between Apple and Google).
