I like to talk a lot about the "next great thing", the coolest new toys, and the best new ideas brought on by the advent of the technology age. It hit me recently that the absence of innovation is something worth talking about as well so I made a mental note to write about it next time I run across it. Its worth discussing because the absence of innovation acts as a teaching tool about what NOT to do and what mistakes to avoid. A good competitor will probably copy when you innovate and run like the wind when you don't.
The first example of the lack of innovation wasn't hard to find unfortunately. I read a wide variety of daily posts and periodicals. I found a good example this week when I read the admonitions of some Gartner analysts to Microsoft regarding Vista. According to the analysts, Microsoft's mid and long-term future is in danger due to the poor adoption of Vista. The Vista numbers tell the story. At the end of 2007, a Gartner survey showed that only 6.3% of enterprise computer users that they surveyed were using Vista. Describing Windows as "collapsing", Gartner said that Microsoft needs to rethink Windows as it exists today including the license platform, the size of the code, and its flexibility to handle ever-evolving devices in the near future.
Now little of this is new news. Microsoft has looked like the Titanic sailing in the frozen North Atlantic for a long long time. Vista is one of the first strong indicators that they may have hit some ice. Business analysts, consultants, professors, coders, web junkies, MacHeads and the like can go on and on about what is the real story with Microsoft. I choose to boil it down to the absence of innovation. When Microsoft brought consistency to the marketplace with Windows, it triggered a long awaited avalanche of personal computing and office computing use and for years thereafter Windows brought value through consistency. But as Windows released new versions from Win95 to Win2000 to XP to Vista (and numerous other versions), the cold hard truth is that little changed in Windows. While the web emerged and organically developed at light-speed, Microsoft was busy repackaging the same software. The lack of innovation is deadly to a company and Microsoft unfortunately has been guilty of it for some time in the Windows market. Is Clippy (that annoying little paper clip that popped up on your desktop at odd moments) the best that Microsoft can come up with? Microsoft is important to the American economy and the tech industry. I want to see them heed the warnings from Gartner and not be the poster-child for the absence of innovation.
A long time friend of mine and I were talking one day about the retail market and he observed that in the back in the 70's, Sears could not be touched and then Wal-Mart came along and ate their lunch. In the 90's Microsoft couldn't be touched. Is an innovative Google and other web companies in 2008, Microsoft's Wal-Mart?
