Microsoft and Innovation
A recent wire story headline "Ballmer touts Microsoft's innovation despite Longhorn snafu" sounds like a bad joke. Microsoft, even though it gives an annual "Microsoft Innovation Award" is a company based on the opposite of innovation. The company is masterful at controlling costs and marketing, but it has hardly innovated, ever. Given its near-monopoly position it doesn't have to and it certainly isn't built to.
This online editorial says it all:
The Microsoft Steps:
1. Let someone else develop a new product.
2. Let someone else establish a commercial market.
3. Give away a free often inferior product.
4. Use your access to the operating system to enhance the product.
5. Incorporate the product into the operating system and include it in the distribution.
6. Eliminate the competition and control the standard.
(from John Kostura, 7/29/2000, website named The Edge)
The list of Microsoft "innovations" involves a set of programs that are based on other people's developments. For example:
- Microsoft Basic based on DEC Basic
- MS-DOS based on CP/M
- Windows based on Mac OS
- Microsoft Word, based on Word Perfect
- PowerPoint (bought the company that developed it)
- Excel based on Lotus 1-2-3
- J+++ based on Java
- MSN based on Yahoo
- Internet Explorer based on Netscape Navigator
- Windows Media Player based on RealOne Player
- Microsoft TaxSaver based on Turbo Tax
- Windows CE based on PalmOS
Microsoft is now working now on an iTunes killer as well, "borrowing" the proven idea from Apple's site and planning to market the hell out of it. The company is very skilled at avoiding copyright infringement suits (it smartly dodged the Apple suit). Most of its internal moves have been small improvements; the big ideas come from elsewhere. It has repeatedly been sued for stealing code from other companies.
But the big story is Microsoft's attempt to stifle innovation. Just by its size and ruthlessness, it scares of potential competitors. Over the years, the company has built a habit of buying up potential competitors, driving the out of business, or allowing them to function at a weakened level to give the appearance of competition. Microsoft is so dedicated to maintaining its position in the market that it has hardly enhanced its Windows operating system in years, and each new version, with only mild changes, becomes more and more difficult to produce. It spends most of its time now trying to fix the security bugs that spring up like holes in an rotting roof in a hurricane.
Microsoft, in its near monopoly position, acts like the dog in the manger. (For those unfamiliar with expression, that barking canine scares off the livestock from their feed, feed which it can't eat itself.) The reality is now that we have a competitive hardware market, which has given us unimaginable speed, storage capacity, and connectivity, and we are slowed down in the software side by software that is still prone to failure, insecure, and, in many ways, unchanged for the last five to ten years. Aftre all, major changes aren't in Microsoft's interest.
