14 DAY TRIAL // A former vice president at Microsoft is extremely vocal on how the company behind the Windows operating system is thwarting innovation. Disputes between the groups of engineers inside the company are seemingly preventing Microsoft from moving forward to deliver great products, in what can be seen as an inevitable comparison between it and Apple.
Dick Brass asks, “Why Microsoft, America’s most famous and prosperous technology company, no longer brings us the future, whether it’s tablet computers like the iPad, e-books like Amazon’s Kindle, smartphones like the BlackBerry and iPhone, search engines like Google, digital music systems like iPod and iTunes or popular Web services like Facebook and Twitter.”
Brass is also quick to provide readers with an answer. “For example, early in my tenure, our group of very clever graphics experts invented a way to display text on screen called ClearType,” Dick Brass writes. “It worked by using the color dots of liquid crystal displays to make type much more readable on the screen. Although we built it to help sell e-books, it gave Microsoft a huge potential advantage for every device with a screen. But it also annoyed other Microsoft groups that felt threatened by our success.”
He continues, “Engineers in the Windows group falsely claimed it made the display go haywire when certain colors were used. The head of Office products said it was fuzzy and gave him headaches. The vice president for pocket devices was blunter: he’d support ClearType and use it, but only if I transferred the program and the programmers to his control. As a result, even though it received much public praise, internal promotion and patents, a decade passed before a fully operational version of ClearType finally made it into Windows.”
Brass seems to have many such stories to tell, but focuses on the ones that make up the best examples. A relevant one is also the time when he and his fellow colleagues were building a tablet PC back in 2001. He reveals that, at the time, the vice president in charge of Office didn’t like the concept. Why?
“The tablet required a stylus, and he much preferred keyboards to pens and thought our efforts doomed,” Brass explains. “To guarantee they were, he refused to modify the popular Office applications to work properly with the tablet. So if you wanted to enter a number into a spreadsheet or correct a word in an e-mail message, you had to write it in a special pop-up box, which then transferred the information to Office. Annoying, clumsy and slow. So once again, even though our tablet had the enthusiastic support of top management and had cost hundreds of millions to develop, it was essentially allowed to be sabotaged,” he concludes.