Microsoft's Failure to Innovate

Why couldn’t Microsoft make the iPad, iPod, BlackBerry or Kindle? After all, it's America's most famous and profitable technology company, the company that made PCs ubiquitous and affordable, the company that used to bring us the future. According to former Microsoft Vice President Dick Brass's editorial in The New York Times, Microsoft "never developed a true system for innovation," but instead fosters destructive competition. He cited two examples: his team invented ClearType, a sort of graphic display that made type more readable. The critically acclaimed innovation, made to help sell Ebooks, didn't make it into Windows products for a decade because various other Microsoft groups felt "threatened by our success," and falsely tore it down—one vice president even said he wouldn't support the system unless Brass handed control of the programmers and program over to him. Similarly, after Brass' team developed a tablet computer, the vice president of the Office group decided he didn't like the concept and refused to make compatible Office applications for it. In other words, as Brass put it, Microsoft's "dysfunctional corporate culture" allowed "the big established groups" to "prey upon emerging teams, belittle their efforts, compete unfairly against them for resources, and over time hector them out of existence."