Microsoft: Cool ideas are not enough for us

Software giant says innovative ideas are not enough, after stinging attack by former executive Microsoft has said it cannot survive on "cool ideas", just hours after a former executive accused the company of being a "clumsy" and "uncompetitive innovator". Dick Brass, who served for as a vice president at the company from 1997 to 2004, launched a broadside in Thursday's New York Times that accused the company of falling victim to in-fighting and petty political squabbles. In his attack, Brass detailed how innovative projects had been stifled and killed off at the company, handing an advantage to rivals like Apple and Google. "Microsoft, America's most famous and prosperous technology company, no longer brings us the future," he wrote. "Unlike other companies, Microsoft never developed a true system for innovation. Some of my former colleagues argue that it actually developed a system to thwart innovation. Despite having one of the largest and best corporate laboratories in the world, and the luxury of not one but three chief technology officers, the company routinely manages to frustrate the efforts of its visionary thinkers." Responding to his accusations on Thursday evening, however, Microsoft's head of corporate communications suggested that Brass's claims were off target. "At the highest level, we think about innovation in relation to its ability to have a positive impact on the world," wrote Frank Shaw. In a dig apparently aimed at Apple, which last week unveiled its iPad touchscreen computer for the first time , Shaw said that Microsoft did not quantify success simply by the number of exciting concepts that it developed. "For Microsoft, it is not sufficient to simply have a good idea, or a great idea, or even a cool idea. We measure our work by its broad impact," he wrote. Shaw's post admitted that the criticisms made by Brass stung, but said that some of the technologies that Brass had used as examples of failure - such as the ClearType display system - had, in fact, become important products for Microsoft. "For the record, ClearType now ships with every copy of Windows we make and is installed on around a billion PCs around the world," wrote Shaw.

See the original post here: 
Microsoft: Cool ideas are not enough for us