Paul Thurrott asked the question “How Can Microsoft Fix Microsoft?” - here is my take.
I believe that one of the things that makes Microsoft less 'interesting' than other tech companies is the reliance on being predictable for businesses. Large organizations simply can’t tolerate constant churn in its core technologies – they have a hard enough time simply keeping up with the plodding pace of change as it exists today. I think that Microsoft can take a lesson from open source projects and offer frequent innovations while maintaining the predictability that large organizations need.
The key is to offer frequent updates, say every six months but only offer long term support on a subset of those releases - every four releases for example. This would allow Microsoft to try more experimental features and observe how well they are received in a community that is more forgiving of constant churn while maintaining predictability for its largest customer base.
This approach would avoid forcing Microsoft into splitting its products into separate governance models for different product lines (one of the things that I think slow down development cycles on products like Live Essentials and Windows Phone) and hopefully speed up the rollout of interesting technology for those of us that are enthusiasts.
