We opened this series knocking Microsoft for missing the Smart Phone revolution. Today, let’s plunge the knife a little deeper.

StevenBill

Microsoft has missed out on most of the major consumer technology innovations of the last 10 years, from Smart Phones to E-Readers to Tablets to Content Management software (i.e., music, movies, etc.). The only successful divergence for them has been Xbox.

However, while Microsoft missed out they did NOT miss seeing these innovations coming. Microsoft’s technology forecasts and trends analysis foresaw these developments with terrific accuracy…and in plenty of time to play a leading or disruptive role in their development.

In 2005, I was party to an extraordinary team-to-team benchmarking discussion with Microsoft’s Competitive Insights group. Peaking under the tent, Microsoft shared some of their trends work.

At the time they were publishing something called Crystal Ball Roadmaps: Detailed competitive technology forecasts that predicted when innovations would appear and who would bring them to market. The Roadmaps looked out 3 to 5 years, and in some cases, 7 to 10 years.

Believe me when I tell you these Roadmaps were astoundingly prescient.

So, how could an organization with such a clear bead on the future fail to seize the opportunities arrayed before them?

Some of the answer goes to another process Microsoft folks shared in that 2005 benchmarking session. It was called Market Opportunity Analysis … or as the Microsoft team liked to refer to it:  “MBA in a Box”.

By 2005, Microsoft had long since completed their journey from tech start-up to modern corporation. As such, they were thoroughly enamored with process and control. Like many organizations, Microsoft believed that the “right processes” would unlock future innovation and profits. They were terrifically proud of Market Opportunity Analysis.

Market Opportunity Analysis (MOA) was a prescribed set of market research tasks and analyses that Microsoft business teams were expected to subject their ideas to. All to make the process of decision making and innovation more rigorous and robust!

This was the same period of time when Bill Gates’ famous “think weeks” were the rage, where the great progenitor spent several days in seclusion reading dozens and dozens of technical papers in a manic attempt to “see the future”.

Analysis paralysis surely ensured. The big ideas were thrown up on the board, blessed by the boss, and then beaten down by weeks of analysis that uncovered every potential risk, flaw and pitfall. How many great ideas were rigorously analyzed and robustly thrown overboard, we will never know.

What is clear is that an organization so deep with talent was so thoroughly organized to resist the new and different. The analysis simply said NO.

Pre-Gerstner IBM stuck in declining hardware markets … Kodak confronting the advent of convenient digital photography … Xerox waking up to internet document transfer … all these great companies saw the future coming (and in some cases played a roll in inventing it). But the risk of playing a hunch on the new was too much for their SWOTs, 4 box matrices, Venn’s and NPV calculations.

Seeing the future is one thing. But assuming it can be put on the calendar and encased in a number is as foolish as it sounds.

As strategists, we have to help managers understand that infatuation with process and control is not a future producing or future friendly habit. Risk is not a number. And a hunch can’t be plugged into a spreadsheet.

Click here for the first post in this series. On a related note, check out this post on Arthur Clarke’s astoundingly accurate long range forecasts from 50 years ago.