How Microsoft lost its mojo: thoughts from an insider

Microsoft isn't like Google or Facebook or Amazon because their most important customer base is business - and business values predictability not the latest feature. If Windows Live gets a new interface overnight, the boss says "shit" not "cool" because six of his ten employees are spending time navigating the change rather than being productive - and ten of ten are bitching about it. Try to find Google's roadmap for the next year - never mind the next three. Imagine trying to organize a large business based on Facebook's terms of use, how long would that last? Sure I'll grant that Amazon's cloud service is likely to be stable, but that's the exception - Amazon isn't rolling out lots of beta's like Google or rewriting its TOS every week like Facebook. No, Amazon is dull and boring and focused on providing stability, just like Microsoft.

(I posted this on the site, but I thought I'd say it again here)

Some of us are definitely working on #1, check out:

http://blogs.technet.com/b/next/archive/2011/01/20/dirty-wor...

tl;dr; summary - we've started a group in MS where folks can work on side projects that are totally unrelated to their job (or related, not a requirement), and we organize Hackathons to get folks working together and show off their projects to the company at events called "Science Fairs". We're also working with legal to get some of these projects released to the public.

It's definitely a struggle though, turning the battleship is not a quick or easy process.

I think Microsoft's biggest problem is that it is beholden to stock holders who expect it to continue to return insane profits on billion dollar businesses segments. If an idea can't generate Billions next year they don't appear interested.