What’s Innovative about Microsoft
There’s an interesting thread going on inside Microsoft about what are the cool and innovative things we have done as a company over the last decade. I think about this quite a bit as well. Working inside Microsoft you see both sides of this discussion. On the one hand, you can look around inside Microsoft and see absolutely phenomenal innovation taking place in virtually every group across the company. On the other hand, you see how rarely that gets recognized outside of the company. I personally think that is partly because we sometimes make the mistake of focusing on technology rather than the core problem and so non-technophiles don’t get what’s so cool about we have delivered. But we are also getting much better at what I call sub derma innovation. That is innovation that lies below the surface. Put another way, we innovate by making really complex problems look easy. And in that light, it’s easy again for non-technophiles to miss the great work that has happened and think “What’s so innovative about X? It’s just this simple thing…”.
But I do believe we have done some remarkable things that most folks would realize as innovative whether you like the product or not and even if you may not know all the hard problems under the cover that had to be solved to make it a reality. Some of my favorites are:
- OneNote – I don’t know how I lived without this before. It transforms ordinary conversations or thoughts into action
- PowerShell – Pure light and goodness :-) It makes me yearn to be a programmer again
- Xbox – Yeah, you could look at this and say it was just another gaming console with different hardware, but that misses what Xbox Live brought to the table as well. No one has come close to duplicating this online experience.
- Windows 7 – I’m cheating since it is only in Beta, but even at Beta, it is the best OS I have ever used.
- OCS – clearly I am biased and time will tell if I’m way off base. Not everyone will use the product in the same way that I do, but I have finally gotten rid of my business phone
What would be on your list?
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About Sean Olson
Sean Olson is the Group Program Manager for the Office Communications Server product at Microsoft. His team is responsible for all engineering aspects of conferencing, instant messaging, presence, and voice within the server product. He has over 10 years experience in the area of real time communications and voice over IP and is an industry expert in the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) standardized by the IETF. Since joining Microsoft in 2002, he has delivered five releases of the Office Communications Server product line working on everything from protocols, to security, to performance.
