Ex Microsoft VP: How my team was sabotaged
By Sumir Singh

The New York Times is the largest metropolitan newspaper in America and its journalists are among the best writers and investigators in that country.  The New York Times website is among the top 5 news websites in the world. Not surprisingly, many executives use the New York Times platform to make their point.

The latest is Dick Brass who was a Vice President at Microsoft from 1997 to 2004.  Being a Vice President of Microsoft, he had a good idea of how the company operated.  Dick has just written an article in New York Times to explain how Microsoft’s lack of culture of innovation has meant that it never produced an Apple iPod or an Amazon Kindle. The article reads in part

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What happened? 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.

For example, early in my tenure, our group of very clever graphics experts invented a way to display text on screen called ClearType. It worked by using the color dots of liquid crystal displays to make type much more readable on the screen. Although we built it to help sell e-books, it gave Microsoft a huge potential advantage for every device with a screen. But it also annoyed other Microsoft groups that felt threatened by our success.

Engineers in the Windows group falsely claimed it made the display go haywire when certain colors were used. The head of Office products said it was fuzzy and gave him headaches. The vice president for pocket devices was blunter: he’d support ClearType and use it, but only if I transferred the program and the programmers to his control. As a result, even though it received much public praise, internal promotion and patents, a decade passed before a fully operational version of ClearType finally made it into Windows.
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Read the full article to understand how even a company like Microsoft with cash reserves of $30 billion and some of the brightest minds in the world sometimes loses out due to petty politics and turf fights.