I have been meaning to write this for a while now - almost since I got back from Seattle in January this year when I was at Microsoft for Search Champs. I am writing it now motivated by some of the discussions that have been going on around the blogosphere about the Zune, Windows Vista, and the company as a whole. The fact is Microsoft (which grew in me a considerable lot during Search Champs) has an enormous problem - mass. Mass in people, in complexity of the solutions they use and in the software they develop.

Joel Spolsky read my mind 5 days ago when he wrote about the Windows Vista start menu and the seven choices to shutdown, hibernate, sleep, restart, switch user, log off and lock a computer. If you are as tired reading that list as I got tired of typing it, you know what’s wrong - choice, complexity, cruft.

Now you may think that the problem is simple, and the solution simpler - remove choices. But it isn’t - the problem is how Microsoft works as a whole, the “design” of their development process. Moishe Lettvin, who was in charge of the “start menu feature” described above, chimes in on that, and reading his post takes you on an excruciating journey about developing Vista modules (chunks of code, if you want to call it that).

Fixing Microsoft through lean development

Can Microsoft be fixed? Is there a way to turn back the years and years of complexification of processes? There might. One of Microsoft’s greatest assets is people - individual persons that inside their huge organization deliver exceptional value. Microsoft’s current culture doesn’t seem to (always keep in mind that this is my outside view, here) incite their people to have exceptional ideas - and that’s what should change.

Genius design, or allowing one person to assemble a lean team to build something remarkable, is perhaps Microsoft’s only way out. Efforts like the Zune, or the Xbox 360 need to happen more often. Projects where less of the “massive” Microsoft bleed into the product. I’m still using my iPod, and I got no Zune (yet?), but I definitely understand - and applaud - the team behind it.

The think tank

Think tank companies are paving the way for the future of technology. It is arguably hard to mutate a company like Microsoft into a place where individual genius could make a dent in the overall practice. It would take massive lay offs, or years and years of removing layers to the top (Microsoft has over one hundred Vice-presidents, and that’s only an example).

Unfortunately I provide no solutions but a sentence: Microsoft needs to pay attention to its own people. How many of the guys working over at Redmond have fantastic ideas that could create new markets, boost Microsoft’s reputation or generate tremendous revenues a day? Is the company listening? I highly doubt it, but it should.

Disclosure: I currently have no involvement with Microsoft. I do have many good friends working over there, and ever since I was over in January I’ve been rooting for some of them to rebel and try to take the company on its shoulders. There’s amazing value in some of the people working over there - value that’s being lost daily, by only allowing ideas from top to bottom and almost never the other way around.