Is innovation the act of creating something new (as the dictionary claims) or is it building upon the work of others? To me this is a fundamental question that Microsoft as a company and as a culture has gotten horribly wrong. We deal with the consequences every day. It shakes our self-esteem and cripples our ability to innovate.
The right answer is that innovation is enhancing the work of others—nothing is new. Consider what people claim to be innovative—the iPhone, hybrid cars, and Facebook. Are those new? Are you kidding? Not only would those advances have been impossible without the foundational technologies behind them, but almost every aspect of those innovations had been created earlier in some form. The innovation was putting old technologies together into compelling new experiences and successfully marketing them to a broad audience.
This isn't an indictment of innovation or great advances like Facebook. Quite the opposite—this is a call to acknowledge that innovation is enhancing the work of others. Microsoft culture, in an act of misguided self-mutilation, has connected being innovative with creating something "new" on your own. This has directly led to three crippling consequences:
§ We doubt our innovative spirit as a company.
§ We create disconnected new features instead of compelling new experiences.
§ We reject work we didn't create ourselves as a company, team, or individual, which impairs our productivity, our intelligence, and, ironically, our ability to innovate (an advanced tragic case of Not Invented Here, also known as NIH).
We doubt our innovative spirit as a company because much of our work goes into enhancing existing products and services, which in turn were built upon ideas from a wide variety of sources. Microsoft haters out there claim this proves Microsoft isn't innovative, and we accept that guilt. It sickens me.
Is Apple not innovative because it “borrowed” from Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center)? Is Google not innovative because it enhanced Yahoo? Is Toyota not innovative because it built upon Henry Ford's ideas of the automobile and lean manufacturing? That's both stupid and insulting.
Being innovative is all about enhancing the work of others. We enhance our own great work and build upon the great ideas we find around the world in all fields. Yet our self-esteem is shaken, even while every new release is filled with innovation.
Perhaps the problem is that our innovation isn't as compelling as the iPhone. Why?
We are so eager to promote our own individual new, small ideas that we fail to create compelling new experiences. You can't market a plethora of disconnected features to a broad audience, so our individual innovations are left unnoticed.
That's beginning to change as groups realize that customer value comes from designing compelling end-to-end experiences. More and more Microsoft products and services have a consistent feel and a complete story. It started with Hardware and Office, crystallized in Xbox 360, and is making its way into Windows—Windows Vista, Windows Server, Windows Live, and Windows Mobile. We don't always get it all right, nor do any of our competitors, but each new release shows progress.
Tragically, our company's culture of individual innovation works against creating compelling end-to-end experiences. You can't assemble seamless scenarios without selflessly supporting the salient story. You have less unbridled innovation from the individual engineer, but the result is greater innovation from the customer's perspective.
As any artist knows, constraints often lead to tremendous creativity. However, individual engineers must first let go of their own preconceptions and embrace the constraints of the larger composition before they can innovate in concert like a symphony instead of a soloist.
Our greatest successes both monetarily and in emotional connection came from working together over several years to get the experience right for customers. Some of the ideas may have come overnight, but as Thomas Edison said, "Genius is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration." Those innovative engineers from groups like Office, Developer Tools, and SQL Server, with the patience to iterate, focus on the customer, and bring full experiences together, are the ones who receive the greatest rewards. Yet Microsoft engineers still cling to the notion that working independently from nothing is the secret to success.
Unfortunately, Microsoft internal mythos is all about the individual hero rewriting the kernel memory protection scheme over a sleepless weekend. We value independence, passion, and boldness over compliance and conformity. I love that about Microsoft, but it needs an update.
The problem is that independence, passion, and boldness somehow became "do it yourself." If you didn't invent it, it's not what you need. If your team didn't invent it, it will only cause trouble. If Microsoft didn't invent it, it's dubious at best. That NIH worldview is not only wrong and shortsighted, but it slows our success and paralyzes our progress.
You can be independent, passionate, and bold while responsibly meeting requirements and enhancing a desired customer experience. You can be independent, passionate, and bold from the advantageous platform of others' foundational work.
Conversely, if you choose to go it alone you suffer greatly:
§ Your productivity drops.
§ Your intelligence drops.
§ Your innovation drops.
When you reject work that was NIH, you lose the advantage of time, effort, bug-fixes, and knowledge that went into that work. Would you write an operating system from scratch to optimize a small application? Of course not. By using an existing operating system you save incredible effort.
The same is true of using existing libraries, services, tools, and methods. The key to gaining advantage instead of hardship from using the work of others is ensuring the things you depend upon are stable. Take a dependency on version n-1, be careful about using the latest and greatest. That goes for libraries, tools, and even techniques. Grief is avoidable.
Eric Aside
When using existing libraries, services, tools, and methods from outside Microsoft, we must be respectful of licenses, copyrights, and patents. Generally, you want to carefully research licenses and copyrights (your contact in Legal and Corporate Affairs can help), and never search, view, or speculate about patents. I was confused by this guidance till I wrote and reviewed one of my own patents. The legal claims section—the only section that counts—was indecipherable by anyone but a patent attorney. Ignorance is bliss and strongly recommended when it comes to patents.
Rejecting work NIH also leads to brain decay. At Microsoft, we hire the brightest engineers available. Are they still the brightest five years later? Well, that depends. Did they learn something new every year, or did they rebuild the same thing over and over again?
If you have to reinvent a build system every time you switch teams, are you smarter? If you have to reinvent a collection class, a threading framework, or a test harness every time you switch teams, are you smarter? If you have to reinvent project management techniques, spec templates, and bug field definitions every time you switch teams, are you smarter?
No, you’re not smarter. You are getting dumber. Congratulations. You don't get smarter by repeating yourself or by repeating others and their mistakes. You get smarter by building upon the knowledge of those before you.
Ignoring what others have learned and gained before you, both good and bad, puts you at an innovation disadvantage. As I already mentioned, there's the productivity disadvantage—going it alone is never as fast as building upon the progress of others. However, there's also a significant contextual disadvantage.
If you ignore past work, you're liable to make the same mistakes that people made in the past—avoidable mistakes that cost you time. Sure, you might want to revisit those challenges. Perhaps there's an opportunity for a breakthrough. But do so knowingly, not like a dolt.
If you ignore past work you're also liable to unknowingly duplicate what others have already achieved. You'll feel smart and proud right up to the point that you look like an idiot. Meanwhile, you've lost time and accomplished nothing new. NIH results in nihilism. Fitting, I suppose.
Microsoft is filled with smart, passionate, and innovative people. We are an innovative company, in spite of ourselves at times. We need to stop thinking of innovation as an individual effort that appears miraculously from the void, and start thinking of innovation as it really is—a culmination of effort focused on thrilling the customer.
Where do your individual ideas fit? They fit within the context of the larger desired customer experience, and build upon the learning we've gained as a group. The result is ground-breaking innovation that expands the state-of-art and excites the hearts and minds of our customers.
So when you're going to work on a new team, project, or great new idea, understand how it makes the customer experience we've set out more compelling; and learn what others have discovered about your work. Note that I said "what others have discovered" not "if others have discovered." There is nothing new. Someone out there has tried something similar and will have work or knowledge you can use. You can ignore that and be slower, dumber, and less accomplished. Or you can take it to the next level and create real innovation.
If you are looking to get ahead and build upon the great work of others, one of the best places is in the shared source community (internally at CodeBox and externally at CodePlex). By using personal branches, you can customize and enhance code and tools all you like, while still updating with the latest and greatest improvements from others. By submitting your changes to the main line, you advance the state-of-the-art and might even enhance your image too.