Ex-VP calls Microsoft ‘a clumsy, uncompetitive innovator’

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A former vice president of Microsoft has laid into his past employer for exhibiting a lack on innovation.

Dick Brass, vice president at the software giant from 1997 to 2004, has written an opinion column for the New York Times expressing his dismay at the company’s reliance on age old products and its seeming inability to bring out game-changing goods.

“Why [is it] Microsoft, America’s most famous and prosperous technology company, no longer brings us the future, whether it’s tablet computers like the iPad, e-books like Amazon’s Kindle… [or] popular web services like Facebook and Twitter?” he wrote.

“Microsoft has become a clumsy, uncompetitive innovator. Its products are lampooned, often unfairly but sometimes with good reason. Its image has never recovered from the antitrust prosecution of the 1990s. Its marketing has been inept for years.”

He pointed out that the company has continued to lose market share in browsers, high-end laptops and smartphones. While its X-Box console is managing equal footing, that's despite billions of investment.

“Microsoft’s huge profits — $6.7 billion for the past quarter — come almost entirely from Windows and Office programs first developed decades ago. Like GM [General Motors] with its trucks and SUVs, Microsoft can’t count on these venerable products to sustain it forever.”

Brass gave examples of tablet computer innovation being stifled back in the early 2000s as well as ClearType screen technology that was held back from adoption for many more years than necessary.

“At Microsoft [internal competition] has created a dysfunctional corporate culture in which the big established groups are allowed to prey upon emerging teams, belittle their efforts, compete unfairly against them for resources, and over time hector them out of existence,” he added.

“It’s not an accident that almost all the executives in charge of Microsoft’s music, e-books, phone, online, search and tablet efforts over the past decade have left.”

Brass finished his article by claiming the company must find that innovative streak to continue to be a big player in the technology world or else its future could look very bleak.

“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 concluded.

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