EightBlack.

This is from Hugh MacLeod at Gaping Void, a blog you should definitely bookmark.

The poster says it all. It represents a lot of what we all think (at least I do anyway) and feel about Microsoft. He writes:

The headline works on a lot of different levels:

Microsoft telling its potential customers to change the world or go home.
Microsoft telling its employees to change the world or go home.
Microsoft employees telling their colleagues to change the world or go home.
Everybody else telling Microsoft to change the world or go home.
Everyone else telling their colleagues to change the world or go home.
And so forth.

Microsoft has forty seven thousand-odd employees, a huge percentage them very determined to change the world, and often suceeding. And millions of customers with the same idea.

Basically, Microsoft is in the world-changing business. If they ever lose that, they might as well all go home.

To me, Microsoft is old, slow and tired. A lot has been written about their future. And it’s public knowledge that Bill Gates loses a lot of sleep over Google’s rise to world domination.

Further to that, a lot of people smarter than me have written about breaking up Microsoft into smaller, more nimble operating units. The concept of actually doing this is not new. But I agree with it. For a start, the Microsoft search business should be spun off and sent out to conquer the world.

I’m going to take the same sort of approach with my 6 year old son. After he finishes year 12 (or whatever the hell they’ll be brainwashing our kids with in 12 years time), I’m going to give him a hug (if he lets me), hand him a round the world plane ticket and a small, finite amount of money and say to him “see you in 12 months - go out and discover yourself”. I’ll probably threaten to amputate any part of his anatomy that he gets tattooed and if he gets a girl pregnant, he can call his mother, not me.

But if Microsoft is to get anywhere in search, then it has to start acting like a start up again.

Steve Ballmer should (forget Gates, he’s too busy now being a philanthropist) call his search team together, give them a bunch of money and absolutely free licence to go hire, steal, and poach the worlds best talent, give them the very best tools to work with and get the fuck out of the way.

We’re a week away from doing a very important project for Australia Post. The project sponsor is one of their senior execs called Allan Robinson. He’s a relative newcomer to “Post” as he’s only been there 6 years. Some, would you believe, have been there 40!

We took the project on because Allan’s approach intrigues me. His mantra to his entire team is that they must deploy ONE new idea or concept each month. Thats the task. He even has some very bright innovation consultants on site working with them.

I love the approach and its proof that big organisations can innovate and act quickly. After all, if Australia Post is doing this, anyone should be able to.

I hope Microsoft embrace Hugh MacLeod’s poster concept.

And I hope you do too.

Subscribe to more posts like this

Related Posts:

Add to | | | View blog reactions

This entry was posted on Friday, November 10th, 2006 at 7:04 am and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.