Citizen Agency

Tim Bray posted an interesting observation that I think personally resonates, given that I switched to Mac over four years ago and haven’t looked back:

Last week I spent time talking to a lot of different technology
people, from all over the world geographically and organizationally and culturally.
The conversation kept looping back to Microsoft, and to the same sentiment: They’ve lost their mojo. Lots of people will end up using Vista, but does anyone care? The Microsoft execs look haggard and joyless, and half the interviews feel phoned-in. There’s real innovation in the Office UI, and everyone says “But it’s OK, the old keyboard shortcuts still work”. The advertising campaign is vapid and lame, but then that’s nothing new; they haven’t run an effective one in years. I’m sure that Microsoft can come back, the way IBM did after their bad patch last century; maybe the energy is building in a building in Redmond where nobody’s looking. I’ve never liked Microsoft, but now I realize how much energy they used to inject into the ecosystem, because it’s not there any more and I miss it.

What’s interesting about this, while a curious take on Microsoft’s challenges to keep its dominant industry position, is that it speaks to a much greater challenge, and one that might have otherwise been avoided.

Witness the loss of one’s mojo from the outside is never pretty. Especially in the slow mojo-death of Microsoft over the last five years, it’s been a rather excruciating affair. Though there have been glimmers of hope, much thanks to Scoble’s voice, the truth of the matter is that the core of Microsoft never changed, and that the values that propelled it to the top were antithetical to the openness, transparency and ethics that would rule in Web 2.0.

And mojo isn’t about what’s right or wrong inside an organization — it has much more to do with what’s going on externally — and how your actions and behaviors make people feel.

A wise woman once said that it’s not what you say, but how you make your audience feel that matters. And how Tim feels resonates for many, I would guess.

So in extending this a little further, I think Microsoft could have benefited from taking a Tinkerbell mentality — that is, one of utter subservience and partnership with its customers — listening to them, responding, guiding forward and taking risks, all because it believed it was acting in the interest of its most important customers, and not its shareholders.

But this is not what Microsoft did, and now, five or so years later, after countless missed opportunities, when Microsoft’s Tinkerbell is at its weakest, needing its customers to clap for it just to keep it alive, they can’t be bothered, much the same as Microsoft couldn’t be bothered when Firefox rose from the ashes of Netscape, a product of the ether, to answer for Microsoft’s insouciance. Now it seems, given the lukewarm response to Vista, that Microsoft’s Tinkerbell has, much like its mojo, died.

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