SAN JOSE, Calif. — The knock on Microsoft used to be that for all its success, it wasn’t really innovative. Instead, the company was known for being excellent at copying and capitalizing on others’ innovations.
Windows wasn’t the first graphical PC user interface, Internet Explorer wasn’t the first Web browser and Word wasn’t the first word-processing program. But thanks to Microsoft’s resources, persistence, business acumen, hard-nosed tactics and entrenched position in PCs, each of those copycat products eventually became hits with consumers and dominated their markets.
But an interesting thing has happened in the past 10 years: Microsoft has become a much more innovative company. Yet ironically, it now seems unable to turn those innovations into mass-market, profitable products.
Take tablet computers. In 2000, Microsoft’s then-CEO Bill Gates unveiled tablet PCs based on pen-computing technology the company had been working on for 10 years. The new PCs were widely seen as the future of computing.
But the effort basically went nowhere. Tablet PCs caught on in a few niche industries but never became a mass-market product. They didn’t hit the mainstream until Apple, Microsoft’s old rival, introduced the iPad. Apple made its tablet more accessible by making it slimmer, lighter and faster, and by allowing consumers to interact with it via their fingertips rather than a stylus.
You see the same pattern repeated with other technologies. Microsoft was one of the early players in smart phones, but other companies — most notably Apple, Google and Research In Motion — turned those devices into consumer products with broad appeal and sales. Microsoft developed an innovative tabletop computing platform called Surface, but has found few buyers outside of casinos and high-end hotels.
Even the success of the Xbox game console, Microsoft’s best recent example of turning home-grown innovations into a popular product, comes with a stack full of…