Click here to subscribe
On moving worlds
Robert Scoble once told me (in a Berkeley geek dinner he and Dave organized) that the problem with Microsoft was that moving the huge machine it has become is so hard that for many people seeing it from the outside, innovation in the company is close to none.
Recently we’ve been given the (amazing) chance to work with one of the market leaders in an extremely important sector of the worlds economy. We’ve seen the other side of their story, how they see themselves and how that compares to how the world sees them. Things are different from the other side of the glass - breaking it is the tricky part.
Changing anything that’s been around for so long, and who’s values and traditions seem to have grown with the spirit of the start-up and sillicon valley world is no easy task. But moving worlds, the capacity to work with people who set high standards and put a little of ourselves into that (huge) machine, is amazing.
Suffice to say this is one of those oportunities on which we get to show how much we love what we do. More on who we’re working with in a very near future.
I quite agree with you, microsoft is an easy target to get at, mostly due to their business practices & the problems of the broad implementation of their software, but from little glimpses I have occasinally seen from the company they do have many developers working on innovative ideas, even if probably most don’t come out, or will take a large amount of time. It’s much easier for a smaller company ( or required ) to innovate, because the product is new for it’s clients, than a monolithic company to change because it’s users will always resent much of it, also it’s easier for the scope of their vision to not be diluted since the size makes the focus easier to maintain.
I actually believe microsoft has entered a new stage in the way it develops software increasingly seeking to learn from it’s users, and develop a closer relation with them, indubitably resulting in better software. Office 2007 i believe is a good example of this attitude, & the machine behind it’s development is huge, wich makes it easy to imagine how easy it must be for ideas to become lost underneath the oiled powerful machine.
I also hope the new products will also make it easier for smaller companies to innovate on top of the new platforms microsoft develops, and wish they would adopt a different attitude on how they bundle their product swith the OS. But alas nothing is perfect!
Comment by abel santos — February 22, 2006 @ 11:32 pm