14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft owns an immense intellectual property portfolio made up of in excess of 10,000 patents in the US alone, a volume which places it in a very select club. At the same time, the Redmond company founds its research and development group with enough financial resources to fuel the economy of a small country, no less than $9 billion in 2009. And yet, earlier this week, the software giant came under fire from a former vice president for its self-destruction. Dick Brass, a vice president at Microsoft from 1997 to 2004, pointed a finger at the company calling it uncompetitive, finding it lacking in innovation.
Brass underlined that he believed Microsoft had never created a true system to produce innovation. However, his position is not shared by former Microsoft employees, some going as far as to say that Microsoft is, in fact, working to kill innovation.
“Microsoft has become a clumsy, uncompetitive innovator. Its products are lampooned, often unfairly but sometimes with good reason. Its image has never recovered from the antitrust prosecution of the 1990s. Its marketing has been inept for years,” Brass stated in an opinion piece for The New York Times.
“While Apple continues to gain market share in many products, Microsoft has lost share in Web browsers, high-end laptops and smartphones. Despite billions in investment, its Xbox line is still at best an equal contender in the game console business. It first ignored and then stumbled in personal music players until that business was locked up by Apple,” he added.
Brass accused Microsoft that its corporate culture encouraged teams from the company to work against one another instead of collaborating. He said Windows and Office continued to be the main cash cows for the software giant, with no other innovative products growing to a size capable of sustaining the company. In addition, Brass argued that Microsoft executives worked against its most visionary thinkers.
Frank X. Shaw, corporate vice president, Corporate Communications, in a response to Brass, denied the fact that Microsoft was killing innovation. Instead, he argued that for Microsoft, innovation meant producing technology that would have the broadest impact, rather than shuffling products at speed out the door.
“At the highest level, we think about innovation in relation to its ability to have a positive impact in the world. For Microsoft, it is not sufficient to simply have a good idea, or a great idea, or even a cool idea. We measure our work by its broad impact,” Shaw said.
The Microsoft VP of Corporate Communications emphasized that ClearType shipped into every copy of Windows. Brass had accused Microsoft of taking more than a decade to incorporate the ClearType technology into products, since it was created by his group in the past century.
“Now, you could argue that this should have happened faster. And sometimes it does. But for a company whose products touch vast numbers of people, what matters is innovation at scale, not just innovation at speed,” Shaw stated.