How Google is able to innovate…and why Microsoft can't keep up
Remember the pivotal dialogue in the 2001 movie "Antitrust" about how actor Tim Robbins was worried about smaller startups in garages overthrowing the marketplace dominance of Fortune 50 companies - an archetypal paranoia based on a few well-known tech industry heavyweights? Indeed, fact is stranger than fiction.
Author
Clayton Christensen theorized that market leaders will often contract an
"innovator's dilemma" - that no matter how well-managed a business is, it can be displaced by newer, cheaper technologies, despite their best efforts to maintain their lead. Illustrating this concept, I don't think Microsoft in this day and age would ever be able to pull off painting the broad strokes Google is now, in terms of developing, executing and ultimately achieving its vision for product development and competitive positioning. Nor would IBM, Sun, Intel, or Cisco - they're all just too damn big.
Market constituencies won't allow such grandiose and rapid innovation by a single player already having firm industry footing. Such immediate and bold jumps in maneuvering wouldn't be permitted to allow companies to become even more leading than they already are. Lawsuits to prematurely ward off implied anti-competition would be filed; shareholders may not approve of such tactics for fear of catastrophic failure and subsequent PR nightmareand stock price decline; existing strategies and current allocation of corporate resources might not permit it; mounting pressure from intense regulatory scrutiny, and the media would be all over them - tapping their inside sources and invoking leaks against such a company's better wishes to keep grand schemes and their most guarded corporate secrets behind closed doors.
No such restrictive concerns face Google, which is being motivated by unprecedented stock popularity, positive support from mass media, the nod from the developer community and virulent mainstream marketing push in the community at large. Christensen's premise suggests that perhaps there's an even simpler reason: the new supplanting the old in a practical exhibition of commercial Darwinism.
Or possibly it's inaccurate and unfair to measure Google by conventional means - they're trying to achieve something on a scale and scope never before attempted in American business. In other words, they quite literally are becoming the next Microsoft…only to be exceeded by another younger, faster, leaner player sometime in the future.