This one from the New York Times is getting killer press in tech circles.  We’re all always trying to understand why a company like Apple can consistently innovate while another one with more than ample resources cannot.

Case in point: Microsoft.  Every one of us has been somehow touched by Microsoft products, yet almost no one considers anything outside perhaps the first release of Windows or even Windows 95 as somehow innovative (and even those were also-rans to Apple technology since I brought them up).

Seventeen year Microsoft VP Dick Brass (he left in 2004) seems to have as good an angle as any into why innovation is absolutely counterintuitive to Microsoft culture:

Despite having one of the largest and best corporate laboratories in the world, and the luxury of not one but three chief technology officers, the company routinely manages to frustrate the efforts of its visionary thinkers.

• “…early in my tenure, our group of very clever graphics experts invented a way to display text on screen called ClearType. It worked by using the color dots of liquid crystal displays to make type much more readable on the screen. Although we built it to help sell e-books, it gave Microsoft a huge potential advantage for every device with a screen. But it also annoyed other Microsoft groups that felt threatened by our success.  Engineers in the Windows group falsely claimed it made the display go haywire when certain colors were used. The head of Office products said it was fuzzy and gave him headaches. The vice president for pocket devices was blunter: he’d support ClearType and use it, but only if I transferred the program and the programmers to his control. As a result, even though it received much public praise, internal promotion and patents, a decade passed before a fully operational version of ClearType finally made it into Windows.”

Several other reasons are cited, including risk and the antitrust issues of the late nineties, so you’ll want to click the link above and read the full article at NYT.

And you think your company has culture issues.