Is Microsoft Good for Innovation?
Ideas come to mind where they choose. We have all probably had an important idea come to us early in the morning when in bed, while in the shower, or perhaps while staring at a sedan that won’t get out of our lane. So should it be a surprise that somewhere out in the deep blue sea, while photographing a 16 foot tiger shark and her two slightly smaller companions, it would pop into my mind that Microsoft is actually good for hi-tech innovation for everyone? Bear in mind that I do not work for Microsoft. The only stake I have in Microsoft is a couple hundred shares of its stock. So why did this thought come to mind?
I realized that everything around me on that dive, including my own behavior, had been shaped by these tiger sharks, and more importantly, everything around me was healthier as a result. The sharks had eaten anything that was not healthy long ago. Just as sharks have shaped their underwater environment, there is no doubt that Microsoft has shaped the hi-tech world. It holds a dominant place in critical software markets, and the rest of the hi-tech world has found a way to be compatible with Microsoft, compete with Microsoft, or both. Any company not healthy enough to do so – remember Netscape, for example – has fundamentally died off if not been outright “eaten.” This result has not actually stifled competition, as some people would contend. Like all the other species that have evolved to succeed in a shark shaped ocean, it has actually required people to be highly innovative to thrive and survive in a Microsoft shaped world where consumers, to all of our benefit, can share their software produced data and creations across IT platforms more often than not.
What would happen if Microsoft went away, as many people I have talked to, from programmers to politicians, seem to wish would happen? Our tiger sharks offer an answer to that too. Whenever fishermen wipe out shark populations, an unfortunately all too frequent occurrence this decade in a rush to fill Asian soup bowls, fish populations have plummeted and other fisheries have collapsed. Without the top predators shaping the seas, chaos ensues, and the fish further down on the food chain eat their way into starvation and out of existence. The oceans become barren. Such would be the case with hi-tech innovation if Microsoft suddenly went away. Without this powerful influence of Microsoft to shape the IT markets, the legions of programmers set free to do as they wish would innovate themselves into a chaos of non-compatibility. True business-improving innovation would plummet, and an innovation desert would develop. This would be so even with Linux as an open alternative, because the whole foundation of how Linux exists as an open software platform is shaped by the presence of Microsoft. Without Microsoft, that foundation would fall apart.
So while you may individually rue the day that your enterprise finds itself at the business end of a competitive Microsoft effort, Microsoft’s presence is a natural and important part of the health of the IT space as a whole. Should Microsoft falter or be legislated out of its role some day, innovation in the IT space will experience chaos and decline until some other giant evolves to fill Microsoft’s necessary role. If you are not Microsoft, then your innovation, and the way you protect and market that innovation, will need to be healthy and creative enough to survive and thrive in the presence of Microsoft. The odds are that the innovation and the business model you create, provided you survive, will be stronger and healthier than it would be if no Microsoft was around to put you to the test.
