Microsoft Doesn't Innovate?
A recent article in the Seattle PI (and countless other sites on the web) recently discussed innovation at Microsoft. We are often accused of not being "innovative."
One look at the research spending probably refutes that. Last year Microsoft did $54.1 billion in sales and then spent $7.5 billion on research. Enough said.
Let's say for a minute that all that money spent on research doesn't actually produce the coveted "innovation." Does that even matter? Clearly customers are buying what the company is shipping. Who says that a company has to innovate? What if our core competency is cherry picking great ideas from the community and building an entire solution around them while pushing them way beyond their original capabilities?
Had anyone ever made a code editor before the Visual Studio team got started? Sure. But look at VS now. It's easily one of the top two or three code writing tools in the business, and that's being modest. Was Windows the first graphical user interface? Nope. Did Microsoft take the idea and run with it? 90+% market share answers that.
I submit that it's not a bad thing if a company doesn't innovate. If every company ran around coming up with ideas, who would pick them up and carry them out? And does Microsoft actually innovate? Well we do something. And market says we are doing it well. That's enough for me.
PS. Rory has one of the classic posts about innovation.