Gillmor: Microsoft breakup could have spawned amazing innovations


In 2000, Microsoft was faced with an existential challenge: the federal antitrust case "United States v. Microsoft Corporation" threatened to eliminate Microsoft’s monopoly power by fragmenting the tech giant into a number of smaller enterprises. It’s too bad Microsoft was able to avert the breakup, argues Dan Gillmor, director of ASU’s Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship. According to him, a smaller, nimbler Microsoft might have spawned amazing innovations.

In a Future Tense article, Gillmor acknowledges that we can only speculate about what the tech industry would look like today if Microsoft had been disassembled into several more specialized spinoffs focusing on specific areas like software, hardware and gaming. But, he observes, “the biggest innovations in recent years have come from smaller teams, often tiny ones.” Microsoft’s sheer size and complexity prevented it from reacting quickly enough to transformative changes in the way that technological innovations are developed, used and shared with the public.  

Gillmor, who also serves as Kauffman Professor of Digital Media Entrepreneurship and professor of practice at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, concludes by endorsing a potential successor to Microsoft’s outgoing CEO Steve Ballmer. To discover the identity of this potential corporate savior, check out the full article at Future Tense.

Future Tense is a collaboration among ASU, the New America Foundation and Slate magazine that explores how emerging technologies affect policy and society. The Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes is a research unit in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

Article source: Slate magazine

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