Qi Lu, the president of Microsoft’s online services’ group, talked about some big, visionary ideas today at the Accel Stanford Symposium -- but one of the audience members sounded a little skeptical. Given Microsoft’s corporate culture, will those cool ideas ever be realized?
Lu acknowledged that there’s a perception of Microsoft as stodgy and not particularly innovative, but he argued that this perception doesn’t necessarily reflect reality.
“There are plenty of challenges and hurdles, but if we are committed and we all believe in technology … we can also figure out a better way to organize ourselves,” Lu said.
He didn’t say much about the organization of Microsoft as a whole, but Lu did talk about how he organizes the online services division (which is responsible for products like search engine Bing). On a large team, it’s important to have a clear mission statement, and then to come up with principles that help translate that statement into practice, he said.
“Our fundamental mission, as we see it, is to empower every human being on the planet with knowledge,” Lu said.
It’s not clear how widely Lu's ideas are shared outside his division. He joined Microsoft about two years ago, and whenever I’ve heard talks from or spoken to someone from the Bing team, I’ve noticed that they seem a little more “startup-y” and innovative than other Microsoft employees (who are perfectly nice, but more corporate). Even Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has said he likes working with Bing because it’s more like a startup.
As for those big ideas Lu talked about, here was my favorite: "On a mobile handset, no one should type in anything."
Microsoft's mobile competitors have also shown an interest in voice commands, but Lu's statement was a provocative way to underline the importance of a voice interface. Lu said he wants to evolve Microsoft's technology so that it not only converts voice-to-text but also understands what users want when they give a command like "table for two." (The concept sounds similar to Siri, the mobile app acquired by Apple earlier this year.)