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Comment by astrodust | Hacker News Reader

If you think Microsoft "is doing great" with Windows 7 then it's people like you that are dragging Microsoft down to an unprecedented level of irrelevancy.

It's not about magic, it's not about glitter, it's not even about wild P/E. It's about using their massive base of resources to do something other than crank out derivative products for existing markets and rest on their own laurels.

Today's Microsoft has no idea how to innovate. Yesterday's Microsoft was aggressive, produced new products that were competitive, and never shied away from a fight no matter how bloody. They were the Lance Armstrong of their day, always winning yet having people suspicious of their methods.

If they're not careful, Computer Associates will beat them at their own game.

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They did Kinect - that's not innovation for you? They took very different approach to Win Phone 7 - that's not innovation? And innovation doesn't have to involve stupidity - there is no real reason to, for example, throw away Windows and start over. At least not yet. And besides, that is not what makes Microsoft tick - it's hard core engineering and execution that makes them tick.

The problem is, innovation doesn't have a formula. The fascination with "disruptive innovation" is admirable but building something no one has built before, doing things better and different than anyone else has before, creating new markets - these things are rare occurrences whose success depends on lot of things - timing, market needs, technical advances, some visionary having the right flash of vision that then is executed flawlessly etc. Point is it's far from easy and I don't think you can count anyone out because they haven't been disruptive for some time.

Innovation does have a formula though: create very small passionate teams with autonomy and proper incentives.

And then the trick is to resist the temptation to tamper with the team once it's successful (e.g. don't do what they did here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1870408)

The Lance Armstrong metaphor is painfully accurate - using unethical methods to win. To me this is the essence of what is wrong with a perspective that prizes results and disregards moral imperatives. We see it in the celebration of Zuckerberg's Facebook despite the well-established fact that Zuckerberg did things like break into journalist emails and call his users "dumb fucks" for trusting him. Celebrating the era when Microsoft was dedicated to crushing competition by leveraging its market power and OS monopoly to lock everyone else out is to celebrate something which should be condemned.

Perhaps I missed some reading somewhere, but I have never thought of Microsoft as a leader in Innovation. Execution, yes, but they have not been known as an innovator.

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