This is an interesting and insightful article, but I absolutely have to disagree that "too much innovation" is our problem. Unfocused and inconsistent innovation? Maybe. Too much? No such thing.
Searching for a root cause, however, I would point to the leadership. Lack of focus and and consistency is directly derived from poor leadership, which is only partly due to poor leaders. I'd say that the absolute root cause of our problems is antiquated value-systems in use by leadership.
In order to get a mass of talented people doing amazing things, you need leadership to provide one thing effectively: alignment. Not mandated directives; you need clarity of purpose. I think Sinofski has proved this works in how he lead the most customer-focused, high quality versions of Office (2007) and Windows (7) ever.
When you have two different teams arguing over whose brand gets to go on the product, such that you get Microsoft Diet Cherry Dr Pepper with Lime 2008 Edition, just to settle a turf war, that is a failure of alignment. Each team is looking out for themselves, but the people who are supposed to be looking out for Microsoft as a whole, aren't. They have 9 Profit and Loss charts and look at them separately. When the CEO sets prescient for micro-optimization, how can you expect anyone to be aligned for macro-optimization?
Searching for a root cause, however, I would point to the leadership. Lack of focus and and consistency is directly derived from poor leadership, which is only partly due to poor leaders. I'd say that the absolute root cause of our problems is antiquated value-systems in use by leadership.
In order to get a mass of talented people doing amazing things, you need leadership to provide one thing effectively: alignment. Not mandated directives; you need clarity of purpose. I think Sinofski has proved this works in how he lead the most customer-focused, high quality versions of Office (2007) and Windows (7) ever.
When you have two different teams arguing over whose brand gets to go on the product, such that you get Microsoft Diet Cherry Dr Pepper with Lime 2008 Edition, just to settle a turf war, that is a failure of alignment. Each team is looking out for themselves, but the people who are supposed to be looking out for Microsoft as a whole, aren't. They have 9 Profit and Loss charts and look at them separately. When the CEO sets prescient for micro-optimization, how can you expect anyone to be aligned for macro-optimization?