Is Microsoft Creatively Dead?
A former Microsoft exec opined in a New York Times editorial that the company has lost its ability to innovate and in the process created a dysfunctional culture that means the beginning of the end of its dominance of the computer world.
As is so often the case, The WEEK magazine offers a nicely balanced set of takes on the subject including a quite rare take from Microsoft's own official blog. My take is that this is all pretty much irrelevant. Microsoft is so huge and has such amazing momentum that if it were to begin an immediate and precipitous decline today, it would still be a measurable force in our industry in five years.
I'm sure that somewhere there is a study of some sort done by some bright Ph.D. candidate proving that the larger a company gets, the less it can innovate as it becomes a slave to its installed base of existing products and technologies. Thus the pace of innovation inevitably slows. One reason Apple is so much more innovative is its relatively small size. It has less to lose by breaking with the past as evidenced by the revolutionary evolution of its operating system in the past few years. Meanwhile, remnants of DOS remain in Windows because the perceived cost to users of changing those pieces would be too great.
