Thursday, Jul 24, 2008
Let's Get This Straight: By Scott Rosenberg. For Microsoft, "innovate or die" becomes "innovate or buy" as the company's PR machine revs up.
Apr 15, 1998 | The clock is ticking down, the lawyers are huddling, and any day now, we will be hearing what -- if anything -- the Justice Department plans to do about Microsoft. Windows 98 is set for a June 25 release, requiring that it be shipped to computer manufacturers mid-May. For federal and state antitrust lawyers contemplating a move to rein in Microsoft's operating-system-based power, it's now or never.
That explains the extraordinary PR barrage that began last week. On Thursday, Microsoft took out ads in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and other publications defending its position in the long-running dispute with the government. In the grand tradition of Mobil Oil's op-ed page punditry, Microsoft's ad took the form of a lofty unsigned editorial explaining why regulating the company would not be so much bad for Microsoft as bad for America.
The reason? Innovation. Innovation has become Microsoft's watchword in its struggle to win the public's loyalty -- always a difficult task for a gigantic corporation that owns 90 percent of its market. If people would just understand that the practices the Justice Department considers anti-competitive are instead innovations, maybe Microsoft would stop looking like such a bully. "At Microsoft," the ad concludes, "the freedom to innovate for our customers is more than a goal, it is a principle worth standing up for."
But what is innovation, anyway? To most of us, innovation in business is a matter of introducing new products or new, better ways of doing things. Somebody else may come along and figure out how to get those new products and practices into wide use. But this second person isn't so much an "innovator" as a consolidator -- or a marketer.
Microsoft's ad puts its own spin on the definition of innovation: It's "the ability to integrate a vast array of seemingly unrelated capabilities." That word "integrate" doesn't appear by chance. At the heart of Microsoft's quarrel with the government lies its determination to roll more and more new functions -- like Web browsing -- into the Windows operating system.
Maybe such an approach serves public convenience, as Microsoft maintains; maybe it inhibits the competitive marketplace, as the antitrust lawyers argue. But who in his right mind would call this "integration" an innovation? Inventing a Web browser is innovative; shoving its code into an operating system -- even elegantly weaving its code into an operating system -- is hardly a creative act of the same order.
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