Oh Yeah? I'll Show You How To Insult Microsoft!

Vanity Fair has an article by Kurt Eichenwald on Microsoft's poor performance over the last decade, since current CEO Steve Ballmer took over.  It's interesting, and offers a peek into the problems of managing a technology company.  But I thought it missed a few important concepts.  I could write this in the comments section at the Vanity Fair web site, but why, when I have my own virtual Speakers' Corner here?

Oh, and if you're not willing to read the article, I can summarise it quickly.  Microsoft's problems of the last Ten Years are due to:

• Management's myopic fixation on the core products, Windows and Office
• An inflexible employee evaluation system that discouraged cooperation
• The lack of a soaring stock price that took away employees' interest in the good of the company

First, he seems to equate Microsoft's success with "cool."  The fact is, Microsoft was only cool for a few years in the late seventies or early eighties.  Even a late-thirties techie like myself is too young to remember it.  I'm not saying this to insult the mighty MS, I'm just trying to pinpoint it's place in tech culture.  The truth is that for most of its existence, Microsoft has been technology's Wal-Mart: No one - with the possible exception of your Aunt Phyllis - thinks they're cool, but everyone thinks of them as accessible and reliable, so they're wildly successful.

But worse, Eichenwald - like so many mainstream reporters over the years - really misunderstands Microsoft's strengths.  So often their success has been attributed to "innovation."  The truth is that Microsoft has rarely been innovative, at least in the sense of inventing new products or concepts.  Their real secret has been their adaptability, taking any new concept bouncing around the technology world and bringing a usable version of it the mass market quickly.  They're the Madonna of software.

Along similar lines, he perpetuates an idea that's been a long-time pet peeve of mine in the mainstream media:  that any technological empire is always one unexpected innovation from irrelevance.  That is, some college kid could invent something tomorrow that would take down Google or Apple, and the big company would have no defence against it. 

It's certainly true in technology there are a lot of paradigm shifts.  (And yes, I felt dirty using that phrase.)  If you think of the auto industry, the American Car companies had to survive two shifts: one was to mass production, and the other the rising price of oil and the simultaneous arrival of foreign competition.  That's two paradigm shifts in a century.  And in the second case, it took about fifty years to go from hubris to collapse.  In technology, you face those shifts every few years, and you can disappear just as quickly.

In his zeal to portray Microsoft non-investor Warren Buffet as the Daedalus to Bill Gates's Icarus, Eichenwald perpetuates this misconception.  But the idea that a tech giant is powerless to deal with those changes in the market is simplistic.  There's plenty of strategies - of varying levels of morality - that the established company can take to defend itself.  Once again that's Microsoft's traditional strength: their remarkable ability to adapt to the changing market.

Really, Microsoft managed to successfully survive two big paradigm shifts: command-line operating systems to graphical user interfaces, then stand-alone computers to the Internet.  Along the way they also handled several smaller shifts (like the rise of multi-media software or using databases on PCs.)  Eichenwald misses that it's this lack of flexibility, not the lack of innovation, that is the big problem.  For instance, he makes a big deal of Microsoft burying an ahead-of-its-time e-reader.  You can understand how that is frustrating from an intellectual standpoint, but the fact is that the underwhelming Zune music player and it's inability to dent the iPod's market share was a better example of how Microsoft has gotten away from doing what Microsoft does best.

And one last thing: I'd lose my geek credentials if I didn't point out the article's many technological missteps.  It's clear Eichenwald doesn't know a lot about computer technology, and has misunderstood much of what he learned for this article.  It's not a major problem: the technology isn't the focus of the article.  But surely someone at Vanity Fair knows someone who knows computers who could have proof-read this.  I mean, the magazine does have a website after all.