This was published 10 years ago
Microsoft lost its cool, says former company star Robert Scoble
By Ben Grubb
Tech giant Microsoft has a leadership and cultural problem that is preventing it from being as innovative as Apple and Google, according to former Microsoft evangelist Robert Scoble.
Mr Scoble, who is in Australia from the US to judge a tech start-up competition, agreed that the company had "lost its cool" in an interview with Fairfax Media.
He said the company suffered from an ingrained "consensus culture" built to "serve" the desktop PC. Because of it, Microsoft had not been able to catch up to a world in which smartphones, tablets and wearable devices were now the main ways of using computers.
"Since I've left [Microsoft], what have they done that's interesting?" he said. "Microsoft [Xbox] Kinect is the only thing I can think of and for a company that has 90,000 employees, to have only one product that you can point to that's innovative, that's pretty disappointing I think.
Robert Scoble is an active blogger from the United States and a former Microsoft employee.
"Compare that to Google, which is showing you self-driving cars, Google Glass and a phone that you can talk to, the Moto X, and on and on — automatic picture improvements on Google+ — It's a much more innovative company that is driving the future harder and faster."
This is not the first time Micorsoft has been criticised by a former employee for lacking vision. In February this year Joachim Kempin, an ex-Microsoft senior executive, said as much.
"The company has lost its coolness. I compare today with the launch of Windows 95, when people were lining up around the block at midnight," Mr Kempin said.
"This didn't happen with Windows 7 or Vista. It hardly even happened with Windows 8. But it happens every time when Apple launches a new product."
A prolific blogger who has amassed more than four million followers on Google+, and another 547,000 and 345,000 on Facebook and Twitter, Mr Scoble was credited with humanising Microsoft during his tenure and for helping change the views of its detractors.
He did this by blogging about his life and events inside and outside the company since joining in 2003. He later became known as the unofficial corporate voice for the technology giant.
Now working as start-up liaison officer for Rackspace, where his job involves pointing start-ups in the direction of cloud computing, he continues to blog to his large audience about technology.
But his positive view on Microsoft since leaving appears to have worn off. Back in 2006 when leaving, he said Microsoft was "the best big company in the world".
Now he says it's lagging and partly blames this on CEO Steve Ballmer's sales background.
"... I just don't believe Steve Ballmer really likes the future," Mr Scoble said.
"When I interviewed [him] he said innovation is something cool that makes a lot of money. And that's absolutely not true. [Google Glass] might never make a dollar but it's new, it's interesting [and] it causes conversations. If you're an innovator, you push the future ahead. You don't care whether it necessarily makes a dollar."
To become a leader in the technology space again, Microsoft needed to do similar things to Apple and Google, Mr Scoble said.
He pointed to one radical thing Google did — putting balloons in the sky to deliver wireless internet to people who can't afford access — as an example.
"I haven't seen that kind of forceful leadership out of the Microsoft leadership," he said.
"They have less than four per cent market share on mobile phones and they're not yet involved in this conversation about what is this new wearable thing. Apple has a watch under development. They're going to be involved. And Google has [Glass] and a watch [coming] and both of those companies we look to and say: 'Man, those are innovative companies that could come up with new things that could change the world'.
"And it's been a while since Microsoft has done that."