Creative working for hi-tech future
- Source: Global Times
- [05:38 February 09 2010]
- Comments
By Peng Kuang
Microsoft must be in the dumps these days.
A former vice president at Microsoft, Dick Brass, wrote an op-ed article in the New York Times criticizing his former employer as no longer being a host of creation. After Windows and Office, for a long time there has been no new products provided to customers, Brass said.
This vice president must be thinking of his own experience. The company, Apple, with the recent return of Steve Jobs, has just launched iPad, a full-featured touch-pad tablet with Apple-style production. But Dick Brass has participated in the development of the Wintel-style tablet PC in Microsoft since 2001.
That project failed due to Microsoft's internal problems.
This is ironical. Microsoft has been an icon of innovation for a long time. The launch of any new software or any new version was regarded as important for the progress of our "hi-tech" life. As the platform that is most used in the world, we are depending on Microsoft's moves to create possibilities for our future.
However, that situation is changing. Microsoft seems to have disappeared from the scene of any big innovation since the beginning of this century.
In emerging fields such as smartphone, search engine, music player, and popular Web services like Facebook, Microsoft is not even seen as a follower.
For China as a country, which is at a vital stage of industrial upgrading, the story of Microsoft is a warning. The importance of innovation to China cannot be overemphasized, because innovation will decide what China's future looks like. The new creations of today will be part of our future daily life.
But Microsoft's experience tells us that we can never expect to create innovations for the future by Monday's successes.
In Dick Brass's article, he gave the example of how a creative project, like ClearType, failed in Microsoft because it was a threat to other production groups in the company.
In Microsoft, Windows and Office make the most profit. Part of the problem is a preference for developing (highly profitable) software without undertaking (highly risky) hardware, the vice president said.
This might be the key to the secret of innovation. The biggest obstacle may not be the bad environment and lack of resources, but our current situations.
Last month, the Chinese Academy of Sciences published "Report on China's Modernization – 2010", which shows that China's innovation ranking is 23rd in the world. This explains our current situation of lack of innovation, and that there is lot of room for improvement.
Based on our own experience, we should pay more attention to avoid what happened to Microsoft from happening to us.
China has developed at a high-speed for 30 years. Some new, good mechanisms have been built in China. But, there is a lot of residue still existing from the past.
We need to treat these with care to make sure that none of them will become obstacles to innovation. That is what we need to do for our future.
