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A recent NYT article by former Microsoft VP Dick Brass has been doing the rounds. It’s pretty middle of the road in terms of its judgement of Microsoft: over-run by middle management, caked in bureaucracy, both of which stifle innovation and creativity.

I’m not really going to give my take, because it seems a bit tawdry when I was only there for two years and was based in London for all of that time. Fortunately I don’t have to, because Scott Berkun unravels my half-baked thoughts very succinctly in a small part of his recent assessment of the company.

The primary problem at Microsoft regarding good design & innovation is the diffusion of creative authority. The problem is not the numbers of people at the company, or the layers of management, as many gripe about. Layers don’t help, but it’s not the problem. The real issue is the inability to grant creative authority to the few people worthy of it. Microsoft has always been a place that gives way too many people a say in matters of design, vision and user experience, and it shows in the pervasive mediocrity of the majority of its products. Films need directors. Orchestras need conductors. But if you divide things into 30 pieces and ask 30 people to play creative visionary, mediocrity ensues. The better products at Microsoft are the ones were [sic] VPs modify the distribution of authority to create clear creative authority.

I’ll quickly put that in terms that fellow colleagues of mine at the time will identify with.

Teams are encouraged to be accountable for everything that they do. Strategy, planning, design, execution, analysis. There are a dozen little teams running around, all being accountable for their part of the puzzle, without having any idea or thought about how they will link up with their neighbouring pieces to create a plausible end product.

I stand by what I said from day one. Technically, it’s a big ass iPhone. But the iPhone is really a pretty magical device. And this is a big ass one.

Here follows my prediction for myself and the iPad.

While it’s impossible for me to buy one, I don’t really want one. I certainly don’t need one. There’s no obvious gap in
my computing armour that it will fill.

That is, until the day it becomes possible for me to walk to a shop and buy one. Otherwise known as the UK release date. On that day, I will almost certainly walk to said shop and buy one.

I’m not proud of myself.

Yesterday I went over to The Werks to listen to Remy enlighten some of the Flash Brighton gang on what to expect from HTML5 in the coming months and years. The subject of Chrome Frame came up, with the general consensus being that it wasn’t really going to have an impact on the number of people browsing with IE, specifically IE 6. I take a different view on that question, and here’s why.

An email from Google appeared in my inbox only a few days ago informing of the impending drop of support for IE 6 on the Google Apps product line. Google don’t want to engineer for IE 6, and they’ve clearly made a decision that with Chrome Frame in the wild they are now at a point where they don’t have to.

Chrome Frame is a strategic move which allows them to drop IE 6 support in some of their core products quicker than they would otherwise be able to. It gives them an answer to users (mostly likely their enterprise customers) that can’t upgrade from IE 6 for whatever reason. Presumably the potential loss of revenue from those customers must now weigh in less than the cost of engineering for IE 6.

As a bonus, Chrome also patches some of the HTML5 and CSS 3 support that’s appearing in Webkit into the more modern versions of IE, which are still lagging behind.

The key point is that Chrome Frame paved the way for Google to make this move, and Google dropping IE 6 support is significant in terms of influencing people to move on from it, either by installing Chrome Frame, or by upgrading to a newer version of IE or a competing browser. It might be difficult to quantify this significance, but where Google lead the way, consumers and competitors tend to follow.

I believe that’s one of two main driving forces behind Google developing and releasing Chrome Frame: it frees them up from the pain of IE 6. The other reason is is that it allows their product teams to focus on the future technologies of HTML5 and CSS 3 now. To get ahead of the game. To discover new ways of using that technology. And to build the next generation of web applications while the rest of the world sits around fixing double margin float bugs.