Microsoft's Real Problem: No Innovation

Testo tratto da www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,2559857,00.html (Ziff Davis Network)

Tuesday May 02 12:30 PM EDT 
Microsoft's Real Problem: No Innovation
By John C. Dvorak, PC Magazine

Dvorak says the company's scorched-earth policy is dooming it.


In the past, I've suggested that Microsoft be broken up into small
pieces, nationalized, turned into a sandlot pickup game (Two
Microsofts: Better Than One), and I also recently opined that Bill
Gates should retire as part of the settlement. He never listens,
though. A few years ago I advised him to buy the New York Yankees,
but he didn't. 

I'm bored. I'm thinking that everything that needs to be written
about Microsoft has already been written. Apologists for the
company ignore all its flaws, bad practices, and false promises
and heap praise upon it as if Microsoft were completely without
sin. OK, fine, but I'm sick of reading it. Who cares? Besides,
praising Microsoft is the job of its four (that I know of) PR
agencies, which crank out pro-company propaganda, forum postings,
and letters to the editor. I'm baffled by writers who parrot the
Microsoft corporate litany as spewed by the PR agencies. Can't
these people think for themselves? Apparently not, as I see the
dreaded word "innovation" creep into articles and columns as if
Microsoft actually were an innovative company. I seem to be the
only one who cares about the never-ending propagandistic use of
this word by Microsoft. 

And I'm sure that as I complain, my columns pass by Bill Gates and
Steve Ballmer, and they point and laugh and slap their knees and
say, "What a goof!" They may be right. But at this point in time,
I think it's all over anyway. It's Microsoft's complete lack of
vision and innovation that is killing the company. Most of its
technology is bought from others and tweaked. The Microsoft
marketing machine then kills off the competition, which is where
the innovations came from in the first place. It's almost a
reverse Catch-22. Instead of acting like Cisco Systems, buying
innovators left and right and keeping them intact, Microsoft gets
a hold of a technology and then lets the company that created it
die. Ask Microsoft how many people are left from the Hotmail team,
for example. Go ahead, ask! 

Cisco Systems has quickly surpassed Microsoft in market valuation
(by $100 billion as of today!) because it does nothing to
discourage competition. If Cisco can buy the competition, it does.
It's easy! This encourages newcomers to play in the Cisco space
knowing that Cisco will eventually buy them. Nortel and Lucent
follow suit. It's a hot market. In Microsoft's sphere of
influence, it's different. You hear the same thing over and over.
"Gee, we can't even get funding if it looks like we might possibly
be in the Microsoft space." Microsoft and its desire to crush the
competition as it did with Borland and other serious competitors
has left a scorched earth. So now what does it do? 

In the past, Microsoft could always steal ideas from Apple, but
Apple's "innovation" is almost purely design. They make a
cool-looking box. Microsoft can't copy that. Meanwhile,
Microsoft's reputation is preceding it in the embedded markets and
in WAP phones and elsewhere. Companies clear out of the way,
hoping Microsoft won't see them. That's just the opposite of the
way companies work around Cisco. In that arena, they hope to be
noticed. 

So now how much innovation are we getting in Microsoft's world?
Nada. Zip. Zilch. Bupkis. Microsoft Word will put a squiggly line
under a misspelled word, but that "innovation" took about five
years to develop. 

Here's the thing: Microsoft has a war chest of some $20 billion
dollars that it can use to go out and buy companies left and
right, but there are no companies left to buy! All the real
innovators have gone into other markets. And if Microsoft tried to
buy into a new market such as CAD/CAM or embedded systems, its own
executives would ruin the acquisitions. It's a lose-lose
situation. 

A breakup of Microsoft into two entities is a blessing. Put all
the dead wood in one company, and with the other half build a
bigger better Microsoft full of people who really do care about
computing and software. Is there anyone left at Microsoft who
maintains those ideals? Even the Chief Software Architect, Bill
Gates himself, still seems more interested in crushing the
competition and saving his own skin than in innovating.