News 

Dick Brass, who worked on Microsoft’s type rendering, Tablet PC and ebook projects, says the company which made computers both ubiquitous and affordable is now at serious risk of failure, despite continuing to reap huge profits from its Windows and Office businesses.

“Like [General Motors] with its trucks and SUVs, Microsoft can’t count on these venerable products to sustain it forever,” Brass writes in the New York Times.

“While Apple continues to gain market share in many products, Microsoft has lost share in Web browsers, high-end laptops and smartphones. It first ignored and then stumbled in personal music players until that business was locked up by Apple.”

The problem, he says, has not been not a lack of talent — “It employs thousands of the smartest, most capable engineers in the world,” he says — but an internal structure that sets division against division, with each pursuing their own agenda.

He cites two examples. The first is ClearType, a type rendering technology that makes text more readable.

“It gave Microsoft a huge potential advantage for every device with a screen. But it also annoyed other Microsoft groups that felt threatened by our success,” he says.

“Engineers in the Windows group falsely claimed it made the display go haywire when certain colours were used. The head of Office products said it was fuzzy and gave him headaches. The vice president for pocket devices was blunter: he’d support ClearType and use it, but only if I transferred

ADVERTISEMENT

the program and the programmers to his control.”

As ar result a decade passed before ClearType made it into Windows.

Brass’s second example is the way Office was implemented on Tablet PCs. The head of Office took a dislike to the tablet and its use of sty;us for input as he preferred a keyboard. So he refused to modify Word, Excel and Powerpoint to work on the new devices.

“So if you wanted to enter a number into a spreadsheet or correct a word in an email message, you had to write it in a special pop-up box, which then transferred the information to Office. Annoying, clumsy and slow.”

Contrast that with Apple, which has completely rewritten its iWork apps to make use of the touchscreen on its new iPad.

Brass says that the result of this is that all the best people are leaving and Microsoft is no longer considered a cool or cutting-edge place to work. He says that nearly all the heads of Microsoft’s music, ebooks, phone, online, search and tablet efforts over the past decade have left.

“As a result, while the company has had a truly amazing past and an enviably prosperous present, unless it regains its creative spark, it’s an open question whether it has much of a future,” he says.

Microsoft disagrees. In a blog post, Frank Shaw, vice president of Corporate Communications, says innovation can only be measured by its impact and that ClearType is an example of how Microsoft works well.

“For the record, ClearType now ships with every copy of Windows we make, and is installed on around a billion PCs around the world. This is a great example of innovation with impact: innovation at scale.

“Now, you could argue that this should have happened faster. And sometimes it does. But for a company whose products touch vast numbers of people, what matters is innovation at scale, not just innovation at speed.”