Good advice for Microsoft

As it struggles to compete for mindshare and marketshare with Google and Linux, Microsoft would do well to take this anonymous minimsft poster's advice:

Microsoft is way too focused on building the next billion-dollar business; there is no way for a team to start something that will be a great 50 million dollar business even with great profit margins. Why not create 100 teams like that? Some of them (with no way to predict which) WILL turn into billion dollar businesses. But if you don't let them start they never will.

Read the whole thing.

There's actually a plethora of insightful comments (and the expected sour grapes) on the anonymous-MS-employee minimsft blog.

I actually interned for Microsoft in the Windows product group in Summer 2001 (working up to the XP release). The top-down direction criticized by the poster was very much in evidence. It baffles me why an organization which prides itself on hiring amazingly smart people would put a management structure into place that actively discourages small, exciting projects. Instead, the review-goals-uber-alles mindset means that if you're not polishing a spec for a dialog box or oiling a cog in a compatibility database, you're hurting yourself professionally.

At Google, it appears, a great idea can go from a glimmer in an employee's eye to a beta system used by millions in a matter of weeks. There's no reason Microsoft couldn't have the equivalent of Google Labs. If they don't start encouraging individual innovation, they're going to see those most interested in innovation go elsewhere.