Entrepreneurial Innovation... at Microsoft?

How ironic is it that a title like that---Entrepreneurial Innovation at Microsoft---itself seems contradictory, or ironic? This is the company that perhaps more than any other, made computers work for ordinary consumers back in the 1980s and 1990s.

And yet, here we are, in 2010, and there's nothing at all surprising about reading an op-ed in the New York Times by a former Microsoft vice president, asking why it is that Microsoft has managed to become almost irrelevant to the quest for innovative new technologies.

Microsoft’s huge profits — $6.7 billion for the past quarter — come almost entirely from Windows and Office programs first developed decades ago. Like G.M. with its trucks and S.U.V.’s, Microsoft can’t count on these venerable products to sustain it forever. Perhaps worst of all, Microsoft is no longer considered the cool or cutting-edge place to work. There has been a steady exit of its best and brightest.

The headline on Dick Brass's article is "Microsoft’s Creative Destruction." I love that phrase, and in fact I originally considered entitling my upcoming book about entrepreneurship, "Creative Destruction for Fun & Profit." But I think there's something inspiring about the seemingly immutable law that says eventually almost every entrepreneurial, innovative new venture will become the stodgy status quo.

Now if I could just figure out why I'm hearing The Circle of Life playing over and over again in my head...