NIHilism and other innovation poison

NIHilism and other innovation poison | MS Tech News

NIHilism and other innovation poison | MS Tech News — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 20:32:08 GMT

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re: NIHilism and other innovation poison

Brad Dodson — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 02:02:48 GMT

Excellent! I've been thinking about exactly these things since I started at MS about 3 months ago.

The wheel has been reinvented too many times to count in some cases.

Perhaps a good point to make is that besides using existing work from places like codebox, more groups should look to turn features of their project that are reusable into something they can share on codebox.

I'm sure there are excellent pieces in some libraries at microsoft to do all sort of interesting things, but they're all buried in applications, or products we don't want to take dependencies on (which is fine from a product scheduling argument, but not when the answer becomes "let's make our own").

Very few groups (or developers) have incentive to give back code that could help some distant part of the company, and I think we pay dearly for that.

re: NIHilism and other innovation poison

JAvier Luraschi — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 02:15:42 GMT

I think you have a good point that MSFT needs to improve collaboration and component reuse. However, it’s also VERY important to NOT underestimate the individualism/vision/leadership/cowboy-erism in the innovation process which sometimes means creating from scratch. Specially, in the early steps of innovation (prototyping), developing from scratch can work as a catalyst to the process, the issue is, that sometimes we move the prototypes into shippable products without considering rebuilding them ground-up with the correct architecture. I agree completely that the iPod, or Google where build reusing existing knowledge, BUT it was not just continuing the existing trend; in both cases, great innovators were needed to build the story together. I can’t imagine an iPod being built and marketed without the vision of Steve Jobs and neither the creation of Google with the innovation through the individualism of Larry and Page, just as I can't imagine the evolution of the PC without the leadership of Microsoft visionaries. Sure, we've all used math, computer theory and preexisting hardware to shape our products, but cowboys have followed their own crazy own ideas as in page-rank or our computer in every desktop early vision.

I believe we can’t talk of being only a do-it-yourself-start-from-scratch cowboy and neither a reuse-everything-follow-the-trend person, there is a balance between the two and is a good skill to be able to leverage the best of both worlds.

If we believe that the iPhone, hybrid cars and Facebook were already-almost there in some form, why would the innovators get all the credit from their innovation? Under this framework this sounds unfair. They just happen to be the ones to put the next step in the puzzle, building on top of the communal knowledge, right? I believe this is wrong. Some people, do take bigger risks, do put their all their commitment to their work, do become cowboys and do shape the world in incredible ways; and therefore, they must be rewarded proportionally to their contributions. The action of being a lonely cowboy is not wrong per se, it’s inconvenient if we are not comfortable with the risk we are taking or really inefficient if we don’t reuse what others have already build, BUT, as long as we understand this tradeoffs, I’m really glad and I support the cowboys we have in MSFT =)

I believe if we follow this post can literarily, it might reduce our motivation to take calculated risks on our own. Why? Well, we could translate the iPhone, hybrid cars and Facebook example, into, hey! The Office 12 Ribbon, the new Windows 7 look and feel, the new video on demand XBOX features, etc… were already there, we were just building on the existent knowledge, which is true, but incomplete. I’ve seen people giving all their passion to shape technologies like those, therefore I find we are underestimating a bit their work and the individual contributor as well. To those crazy-passionate-intelligent cowboys we have around MSFT, I give them BIG kudos!

re: NIHilism and other innovation poison

ericgu — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 21:04:31 GMT

I've certainly seen a lot of this around at MS, and at other companies.

Some groups have a very insular culture, and I've been surprised at the lack of knowledge about competition and/or common approaches for doing something. If you don't know what a wheel is, you can't know if you're reinventing it.

I think that is *by far* the biggest problem, and I've seen it from individual contributors all the way up to VPs.

Our reward system awards reinventing the wheel. I've seen a number of times where the "lone hero" gets a considerable reward for creating the new wheel from scratch.

re: NIHilism and other innovation poison

asymtote — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 22:35:34 GMT

I'm glad to see somebody else thinks the Xbox 360 is a good example of an end-to-end system that provides a superior customer experience (I made a similar comment on Adam Barr's blog a month ago).

In the beginning the primary driver of user experience improvement was from the hardware (mainframes, early PCs), then it started coming from software (MS-DOS, Windows 3.1/NT/XP) but these days it's coming from people who think about the system as a whole (iPod+iTunes, iPhone+3G/2G network, Xbox 360+Live).

Delivering a compelling seamless system means that there is no room for lone heroes. It also means that engineering is only one of several decision makers on the team responsible for shipping the system (others include marketing, UI design, system engineers and overall project management).

Change is always hard however and culture eats strategy for breakfast. It doesn't matter what edicts come down from upon high the mindset of engineers and their technical leads must change. Implementing that change must necessarily be organizationally specific but salary based rewards are one tool. While money is generally regarded as a hygiene factor rather than a primary motivator for engineers it can be used to reinforce a culture change. Stop rewarding the lone heroes but instead reward entire teams that deliver winning systems.

re: NIHilism and other innovation poison

eff Five — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 00:05:33 GMT

If you are ever looking for an illustrative example of innovation while depending on the work of others its worthwhile to check out “The Speaking Telephone, Talking Phonograph, and Other Novelties C 1878” by George Bartlett

http://books.google.com/books?id=ANw3AAAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=The+Speaking+telephone+Talking+phonograph

In this book there is the full text of 1877 presentation (including slides) by Alexander Gram Bell to the Society of Telegraph Engineers. He takes his audience through his attempts on determining the natural pitch of vowels, to the remote playing of a piano, to attempts at increasing telegraph throughput via parallelization, to finally the telephone. He references at least a half a dozen works of others that played a part in his research. This includes stuff I never heard of prior like C.G. Page's Production of Galvanic Music, Helmholtz' Theory Of Tone, and Leon Scott's ponautograph.

re: NIHilism and other innovation poison

gmv — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 06:45:31 GMT

Well this article seems to be about not wasting time reinventing ideas or work thats already out there. I think everybody understands that.

However in some situations it is easy and less expensive to redo parts of another product rather than indulge in lengthy, processy and bureaucratic cross group collaboration trying to integrate or build on them.

Its always a tradeoff.

re: NIHilism and other innovation poison

Brad Eleven — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 23:13:18 GMT

Very, very interesting. Refreshing.

I'm struck by the stark, yin v. yang contrast to the <a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_Documents>Halloween Documents</a>.

re: NIHilism and other innovation poison

Todd Bandrowsky — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 23:31:11 GMT

This is the sort of praise of group think that lead to the ruin of GM and its acceptance bodes well for the ruin of Microsoft. Individuals and heros made Microsoft into a dominant force in the software industry. Committees are turning it into another blob.

re: NIHilism and other innovation poison

Thomas Aqua — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 03:36:30 GMT

I worked at MS for 5.5 years. In the end I was forced out for various reasons. I was blessed by my multiple connections to many different groups at MS. I could see a lot of people that already had the solutions we needed, or could make work for our needs. I was cursed because of the NIH mentality within the last group I was in.

In the end I was struggling against the paradox of you have to find create the best solution for the best price where ever it was, as long as you only use our solutions/dev/ops teams. Of course the solutions wouldn't support our business needs, the dev's were already booked solid, as was the ops team didn't want to work with stuff outside of our team. Getting consensus from people who didn't know about or even care about our stuff was way too much fun. People don't like it when you rock the boat too much.

It won't stop me from trying to come back, but it is something I will have to work around if I ever do get back.

re: NIHilism and other innovation poison

Andrew — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 04:02:30 GMT

Interesting speech about Microsoft and how innovation is in fact borrowing, however I point your attention to BlueJ ( http://www.bluej.org/mrt/?p=21 ) and how Microsoft implemented "object bench" into Visual Studio 2005, a complete rip off of BlueJ, however this doesn't matter, what matters is the fact that after copying it, Microsoft patented (now retracted after the outcry) this feature.

If Microsoft stopped at "borrowed" I don't think anyone would have a problem, but it seems that "borrowed" and "claim as your own" go hand in hand at the corporation.

It also doesn't help that the sales pitch calls everything "innovative" even if competitors have had similar products for years.

re: NIHilism and other innovation poison

Henry Wertz — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 19:40:45 GMT

Well said! I'm not a big Microsoft fan (I run Ubuntu and Gentoo), BUT if they did take this to heart, they could certainly still be in the running. I've CERTAINLY noticed signs of this duplication in every version of Windows I've used for sure -- like "Huh, I've seen this dialog box through this other menu too, but it looks a little different" (due to 2 teams reimplementing the exact same dialog rather than collaborating enough to have them both work on and share one). Reusing code (as long as it's not horribly written...) is essentially a force multiplier for programmers I think. If they can already use existing code for some functionality rather than writing it from scratch, they can then spend time working on the new features, or improving the code they borrowed from (debugging, or optimizing the code.)

mplayer and mencoder for instance, it's a VERY complicated piece of software (decoding from almost any video format to almost any format, or playing it on almost any video and audio output, editing, speeding up and slowing down, filters, etc. etc.) But since it incorporates other projects to do the heavy work, they get automatic bug fixes for a lot of stuff, and it's been getting faster almost every release. In the past when I had a K62-450, I put off replacing it for over a year, it'd be too slow to play some video, I'd update mplayer, and bam! It's fast enough again. I'm having the same experience now with HD videos -- My Athlon XP 2200+ was too slow, now it's not. If Windows, .NET, etc. sped up the way mplayer did... that'd be an incredible coup.

re: NIHilism and other innovation poison

Brian Herdeg — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 23:23:49 GMT

The Microsoft environment is awesome - brilliant, inspired people, who are driven to accomplish their current assignment. Unfortunately, this often results in a hunker down, do it yourself, mentality, that is like a drug to most software developers. In theory, technical PM's and Dev Leads should look around, seek work to build upon, and drive the innovation. It did not work that way when I was there...

Let me share my own experience. While at Microsoft, I discovered the work of others and tried to evangelize it across divisions. My management cancelled the project and told me to drop it (not in our groups charter!). I refused - and it cost me my career at Microsoft. The technology I refused to drop saved Microsoft millions on Vista, and now is being promoted in Visual Studio 10 and at PDC08 in Win7. Reading between the lines above, my experience was not unique.

I believe that the Windows re-org, this post and others like it, will go along way to improving things... but there is still much to be done. Great post Eric!

re: NIHilism and other innovation poison

Joe — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 13:07:48 GMT

"We value independence, passion, and boldness over compliance and conformity"

Wow. I was shocked by this. From my point of view (as an MS customer) I would say the opposite is true. I do not see MS as valuing independence, passion nor boldness at all. For me MS is all about compliance, conformity and dullness... There is a huge disconnect between how you guys view yourself and how I (and I believe many others) view you.

What is independent/passionate/bold about anything MS has done? I can't wrap my mind around this.

re: NIHilism and other innovation poison

Rick Keeney — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 03:06:34 GMT

One of the things I observe that makes innovators "innovate", is that they are constantly cramming their heads full of the history, current state of the art, competitive situaiton, and anything and everything related to their product and field of knowledge and expertise. From there, they combine the appropriate prior work and build the "innovativations".

That process requires getting out of your cube (at least your mind, if not your body) and interacting with people in other groups, other buildings, other companies, other industries.

It absolutely involves interacting with actual end users and customers of our products. Because many of the things we make are so widely used, thats pretty darned easy for most of us. Just ask people you know what they think of the product you work on, and you are likely to get at least one new piece of information to add to your product knowledge expertise.

Another thought: One of the secrets of what many will call "innovative" products is actually pretty mundane - they are also often high quality products. Nobody is going to put up with quality or reliability problems just to use the innovation. All of the boring, non-innovative things have to work right to even be in the game.

Finally, the innovation doesn't have to be in the actual end product. The innovation can be in the process and tools used to create the product. Being fairly new to Microsoft, one of the biggest opportunities I see right away here is to do a little less NIH and a lot more standardization and leveraging of our processes and tools amngst the groups. Then, task the team that builds and supports those standardized tools with making them great so all our products can benefit.