Microsoft: Cool ideas are not enough for us

Microsoft has said it cannot survive on "cool ideas", just hours after a former executive accused the company of being a "clumsy" and "uncompetitive innovator". Dick Brass, who served for as a vice president at the company from 1997 to 2004, launched a broadside in Thursday's New York Times that accused the company of falling victim to in-fighting and petty political squabbles. In his attack, Brass detailed how innovative projects had been stifled and killed off at the company, handing an advantage to rivals like Apple and Google. "Microsoft, America's most famous and prosperous technology company, no longer brings us the future," he wrote. "Unlike other companies, Microsoft never developed a true system for innovation. Some of my former colleagues argue that it actually developed a system to thwart innovation. Despite having one of the largest and best corporate laboratories in the world, and the luxury of not one but three chief technology officers, the company routinely manages to frustrate the efforts of its visionary thinkers." Responding to his accusations on Thursday evening, however, Microsoft's head of corporate communications suggested that Brass's claims were off target. "At the highest level, we think about innovation in relation to its ability to have a positive impact on the world," wrote Frank Shaw. In a dig apparently aimed at Apple, which last week unveiled its iPad touchscreen computer for the first time , Shaw said that Microsoft did not quantify success simply by the number of exciting concepts that it developed. "For Microsoft, it is not sufficient to simply have a good idea, or a great idea, or even a cool idea. We measure our work by its broad impact," he wrote. Shaw's post admitted that the criticisms made by Brass stung, but said that some of the technologies that Brass had used as examples of failure - such as the ClearType display system - had, in fact, become important products for Microsoft. "For the record, ClearType now ships with every copy of Windows we make and is installed on around a billion PCs around the world," wrote Shaw. "Now, you could argue that this should have happened faster. And sometimes it does." Meanwhile, he responded to claims that senior insiders at Microsoft deliberately scuppered the development of tablet computers by pointing out that some software had been specifically developed with touchscreen computers in mind. The company did not refute some of the more specific claims made by Brass - but in responding at all, Microsoft made it clear that some criticisms had hit home. The American company has long bragged that it outspends its rivals in terms of research and development, but with few obvious new businesses beyond its Windows and Office systems it has been accused of being a follower rather than a leader. Publicly, the company has said it is committed to increasing research spending through the recession, with Craig Mundie, the company's chief research and strategy officer, suggesting that it was important to keep investing during the downturn to help Microsoft develop new technologies while its rivals concentrated on staying afloat. "The thing we'll work the hardest to preserve is our research and development spending," he said. Despite these claims, however, the company's research and development spending actually fell by around 10% last year. In its most recent financial results , which cover the three months ending on December 31, Microsoft said that it had spent a total of $2.079bn on R&D - down from $2.29bn in the same period of 2008. Last year Microsoft's senior vice president of research, Rick Rashid, admitted that some technologies developed by the companies engineers can take many years longer than expected to reach the market . "There are technologies which seem to take a really long time," he said. "When I first got to Microsoft, one of the first projects I worked on was interactive TV systems. It was very sophisticated, everything was great. We built it, we deployed it, people seemed to like it – but it never went anywhere. It wasn't the right time."