This is an interesting and insightful article, but I absolutely have to disagree that "too much innovation" is our problem. Unfocused and inconsistent innovation? Maybe. Too much? No such thing.
Searching for a root cause, however, I would point to the leadership. Lack of focus and and consistency is directly derived from poor leadership, which is only partly due to poor leaders. I'd say that the absolute root cause of our problems is antiquated value-systems in use by leadership.
In order to get a mass of talented people doing amazing things, you need leadership to provide one thing effectively: alignment. Not mandated directives; you need clarity of purpose. I think Sinofski has proved this works in how he lead the most customer-focused, high quality versions of Office (2007) and Windows (7) ever.
When you have two different teams arguing over whose brand gets to go on the product, such that you get Microsoft Diet Cherry Dr Pepper with Lime 2008 Edition, just to settle a turf war, that is a failure of alignment. Each team is looking out for themselves, but the people who are supposed to be looking out for Microsoft as a whole, aren't. They have 9 Profit and Loss charts and look at them separately. When the CEO sets prescient for micro-optimization, how can you expect anyone to be aligned for macro-optimization?
I'm sorry, but "I am proud to say that the end result was the world’s first operating system that is nearly 100% IPv6 compatible (with only a couple unavoidable exceptions), and able to run on a network that has absolutely no IPv4 service." is not exactly innovation. Yes, it is something that they did not have before, but is certainly not a new idea. But beating say BSD at thoroughness, I am not so sure.
And I would like to see citations for that being the first such effort--didn't Open BSD and possibly others have that way back?
But when you are deep within the belly of the beast it can be hard to get a perspective on what is truly happening elsewhere.
When I hear innovation, I think of the C compiler company that MS bought (lattice), the invention of C# after market pressure generated by the innovative invention of Java, buying their first OS, hiring Cutler to do NT after he had done three (and later paying $60 million USD to settle intellectual property issues), and in repeated scenarios being behind the pack on the Internet.
"Another of Microsoft’s chief vices is to over-engineer things. Engineers are always looking for ways to overhaul old sub-systems with monster functionality, and breath-taking designs. This is akin to building a rocket powered scooter with fuel cells when all a kid wants is a skateboard to get across the street."
...
"The details for why these failures occur are numerous, but the result is the same: a technology gets built that just collects dust but never gets removed, and still requires constant maintenance."
This doesn't sound like innovation to me -- it sounds more like my first few programming projects.
YAGNI and KISS are first principles in building excellent, long-lived software. The Microsoft portrayed in this article hasn't yet learned this, and is excitedly building the next great Rube Goldberg abstraction.
"Which software developer wants to adopt a technology that can only be used on the latest operating system?" may be Microsoft's Achilles heel. Microsoft wants to sell the latest version of Windows, but third-party Windows developers want their software to work on all versions of Windows, not just the latest one.
I wonder if more permissive licensing for libraries, allowing them to be redistributed more easily, would have an impact. (This is pure, uninformed speculation.)
MS tried making DirectX 10 a Vista exclusive in order to draw in gamers, but I AFAIK the response was lukewarm at best. I think they could've sped up the adoption with an XP version, but this might've been too difficult to backport.
I was working as a reviewer when DX10 was announced, and I was heavily into the gamer scene at a higher level (actually talking with some of the big indie developers, talking with some of the pro-gamers and such). From what I saw the response to DX10 as a Vista exclusive wasn't lukewarm, it was positively insulted.
The situation got even worse when Vista was released and it came out that Vista was actively stopping some games from working, removing the *.exe's as trojans.
IMO MS rushed DX10 onto Vista way too fast, it should have been released when the OS was actually stable for gaming. They didn't appease the hardcore gamers, developers and especially the pro-gamers (who earn their money from games and don't want them screwing up) with the giant fumble start for gaming.
Microsoft, when it's operating right, can be an explosive game player. Project Natal is the perfect example of this, they saw what the competition offered (Wii motion controller) and took a move potentially ten steps better. Sony saw the competition and took a move to mimic (playstation motion controller, AKA the Sony Nun-chuck clone), which is staying a step behind the game.
Microsoft's main problem, from what I can see, is that it rarely gets itself into the proper gear to actively compete. Perhaps with Project Natal, seeing a true threat helped, which is something they haven't seen in a long time in the OS market.
Microsoft bought Natal. It was developed by 3DV systems.
And personally, I'm unconvinced that they've grasped what has made the Wii successful.
Case in point: the Wii remote, custom designed to be non-threatening, modelled after the familiar tv remote, allowing you to control the Wii with a few simple gestures and an on screen pointer. Natal, a mysterious camera that allows you to page through onscreen lists using some kind of semaphore system.
Microsoft thinks (or at least talks) like it's out Nintendo'd Nintendo with Natal but it all looks like cargo cult style mimicry to me. No different from offering family friendly card games that you need to control with something designed for Halo, just on the other side of the spectrum. Like goldilocks' and the three bears' porridge you can have both too much, and too little controller. The Wii seems to have got it just right.
Actually, Natal's AI is believed to have come from Peter Molyneux's Dimitri Project, which then turned into the full Milo project. Its motion capture, facial recognition and voice recognition, not to mention the microphone array helps perform acoustic source localization and ambient noise suppression, all of which was developed in-house at microsoft.
3DV was bought out in March 2009, Natal was shown fully functional and shipped to developers at E3 in June (actually 2nd-4th). So you're telling us in the space of maybe 2-3 months work Microsoft managed to make a fully functional Natal. Not to mention the system is entirely different. ZCam's sensing was an 8-bit 1/4-VGA , where as Natal's uses an infrared projector, tied with a monochrome CMOS sensor to allow it to work under any lighting condition (including no lighting) and allows it to sense at different ranges.
The differences are so huge in design it is impossible it was bought and demonstrated in the space of a couple of months.
I'm sorry, I don't buy it that microsoft bought Natal, there was simply too much work required to say they only had access to the ZCam after March 2009 and allowed people to actually play with Natal's demonstrations at E3.
This is inaccurate and based on speculation. We bought them long after the Natal project was underway. I would assume to protect ourselves from patent lawsuits.
Compare Microsoft's grasping for the "big idea" critiqued above with Miguel de Icaza's [Gnome,Mono] 2000 OSL lecture: Let's Make Unix Not Suck (http://primates.ximian.com/~miguel/bongo-bong.html). Wherein Miguel in part wants more integration and consistency across the platform.
"Much of the hostility, and consternation, towards Microsoft results from the simple fact that it is difficult for outsiders to comprehend the truly Herculean problems the company faces with creating and maintaining the most widely used software products in the world."
No, trying to kill everybody in tech, intent to derail any initiative against their core business, using unethical and monopolist tactics, holding the web back, etc.
These are the real reasons we "outsiders" hate M$ to death, nothing to do with hercules, research, competition, too many employees or any other fallacy seeded in the minds of softies.
Searching for a root cause, however, I would point to the leadership. Lack of focus and and consistency is directly derived from poor leadership, which is only partly due to poor leaders. I'd say that the absolute root cause of our problems is antiquated value-systems in use by leadership.
In order to get a mass of talented people doing amazing things, you need leadership to provide one thing effectively: alignment. Not mandated directives; you need clarity of purpose. I think Sinofski has proved this works in how he lead the most customer-focused, high quality versions of Office (2007) and Windows (7) ever.
When you have two different teams arguing over whose brand gets to go on the product, such that you get Microsoft Diet Cherry Dr Pepper with Lime 2008 Edition, just to settle a turf war, that is a failure of alignment. Each team is looking out for themselves, but the people who are supposed to be looking out for Microsoft as a whole, aren't. They have 9 Profit and Loss charts and look at them separately. When the CEO sets prescient for micro-optimization, how can you expect anyone to be aligned for macro-optimization?