Administration to Creation - Microsoft recovers its mojo

Back in 2006, Microsoft was on top of the world.  Then they released Vista and Apple released the iPhone.

A company with Microsoft’s scale can drift into faded grandeur over decades, like the last years of the Ottoman Empire, before finally vanishing beneath the weight of history.  An efficient and capable administration can keep the wheels spinning and replace worn-out cogs.  What it cannot do is invent new things that will delight, inspire and renew.  That is the province of leaders and visionaries.

“Despite having one of the largest and best corporate laboratories in the world ... the company routinely manages to frustrate the efforts of its visionary thinkers,” writes Dick Brass, who was Microsoft VP from 1997 to 2004, in a recent New York Times op-ed.

Brass describes, in humiliating detail, how different executives would routinely sabotage the initiatives of creative thinkers in the company.  Many of these great ideas left, along with the people who created them.

The future is increasingly wireless.  Mobile phones are now mini-computers.  Google, Apple, Blackberry and Palm have brought out compelling mobile operating systems and exciting ranges of smart phones.  Windows Mobile, by comparison, is clunky and old-fashioned.

In the last few years, Microsoft’s market share of mobile phone software dropped from almost 40% to just about 15%.  They’ve never quite had a grip on the Internet, and their software – while serviceable – has not delighted or driven fans into shopping frenzies.

Yet Microsoft Mobile still has a massive installed base of users, from the thousands of companies which create and support software running on the platform, to the hundreds of thousands of companies that have standardised on this format.

With every year, though, Mobile’s user-base is eroding.  Some 250 million smart phones will be sold in 2011.  Already more than 5 billion phones are in daily use for a world population of 6.7 billion.  The race is on to produce a really cheap smart phone for the emerging world.  Vodafone has released a cut-down version for US$15 and HTC has one out for US$20.

The companies that intend being part of this mobile and connected future need to be releasing products now.

Microsoft is responsible for the employment of hundreds of thousands of people, both directly and indirectly.  Bill Gates, its founder, is the most generous philanthropist of all time.  No one should want to see this behemoth shuffle arthritically into decrepitude.

So it is with some delight that analysts received news of the Windows Phone 7.  Microsoft has broken away from their old operating system entirely.  They will abandon their existing user base and concentrate on the new.  They’re also taking a risky bet that the consumer market is sufficiently flat that this release can wait till December 2010.  Perhaps they’re right.

But let us be clear, Microsoft has deliberately reinvented itself over the past 12 months.  The dedicated and exceptional administrators who have care-taken this company have held out long-enough until vision could be restored.

It is too early to say whether this vision will result in success, but it is wonderful to see that the competing titans of modern technology are not senescent zombies but virile athletes once more.