Innovation at large software companies
July 3rd, 2008HP has recently released an unprecedented slew of products (more than 50 changes or updates), which impresses the heck out of me in terms of sheer project management and roll-out power. There’s a story there in terms of ability to innovate, which I won’t be telling but would love to read, and a sad footnote: the entire HP roll-out made less of a splash than the new Iphone debut; or even than Asus’ launch of the Eee PC mini-notebook.
There is a story I do want to tell in there though, and it has to do with HP updating the TouchSmart PC. The update echoes Bill Gates’ psychic pronouncement that the future will belong to touch interfaces - which I think someone at Apple said 15 years ago and went on to spec out the Touchpad.
HP’s TouchSmart, is, well, a very large Iphone that’s not as fun as an Iphone. (Yes, here I go again with the Iphone). What’s interesting here is not so much how well the TouchSmart stacks up among the successful touch interfaces available today; but HP’s continual efforts over the years to put a wrapper around Windows. The implication being: Windows sucks on its own, and we’d rather spend a bunch of money making more intuitive interfaces that remedy Windows failures so our customers can use our PCs more intuitively - and also for us to control what they do and what add-ons they buy.
I disagree with the opinion that Microsoft never innovates. MS realized a few years ago that it wouldn’t be able to play the NetScape gambit again. It hasn’t worked with Yahoo, Google, or even Firefox at this point. MS has been forced to innovate, and in fact, there are some wild projects underway at their Seattle campus. One of them being the amazing SeaDragon software - admittedly an outside project that was brought in. The real issue being whether these projects will make it quickly into mainstream products.
I’ve been using Office 2007 and Vista for a while. I’m unhappy with both: they’re over-engineered, porky pieces of bloat that perform sluggishly at best and confuse the user more often than not. What sense does this make? Are we going to need petaflop chips, a gazillion gigs of RAM, and a half-hour each morning just to start a word processor?
That’s the real story, and I don’t believe it’s Microsoft’s alone. It seems to me most large software companies end up painting themselves into a corner, driven by their internal logic. It’s a bit like inbreeding, and long-term it may very well fail. Look at the Bourbon dynasty. Perhaps a solution to this innovation problem lies in opening the works up to outsiders: congregating around standards, seeking interoperability, and brainstorming about new ways to do things better and faster.
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