#Amazon moment not showing shifts windows

We wanted to know what makes companies continue to innovate even after their initial success. My team and I recently completed a multi-year research project to better understand perpetual innovation. How did stodgy Microsoft, stuck in slow decline, ever muster the ability to leap ahead in the first place? As any corporate veteran will tell you, no single person, no matter how talented, can transform an organization. Those explanations have some merit, but they don’t go deep enough. Others praise Kevin Scott, Microsoft’s chief technology officer since 2017, who joined with the LinkedIn acquisition, partnered with OpenAI a year later, and pushed hard for technology inside Microsoft. Some say Google’s lead position forced it to move cautiously in order to minimize hate speech and misinformation. We’ve known for a while that high-tech success and transformation is more about the culture than the technology, and the management decisions each company made here seem to have made the difference. And it had laid the groundwork for chatbot-powered search before last week. Notwithstanding Google’s costly flawed demo earlier this month, its LaMDA chatbot was arguably just as good as the ChatGPT3 release that had taken the world by storm. The company had made fundamental advances in AI.

Google’s problem certainly wasn’t engineering. Already burned in 2014 by Amazon’s AI-enabled Alexa voice assistant, Google announced in 2016 that it would become an “AI-first” company. This wasn’t supposed to happen, especially not to Google. And in doing so, it was directly challenging Google, the undisputed champion of search, by trying to out innovate Google on its home turf. Yet on February 7, there was Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella telling reporters that artificial intelligence was creating a “new day in search.” Microsoft’s much-maligned Bing was integrating Open AI’s ChatGPT technology to generate information directly for users, not just links. Jeff Bezos was known to gesture east and admonish his Amazon colleagues not to become complacent like their Seattle neighbor. It was rich enough to be a fast follower, but too big and bureaucratic to lead in any market.

The tech giant hadn’t had a breakthrough innovation in decades.

#Amazon moment not showing shifts windows

For years now, observers of tech have written off Microsoft as a 20th-century phenomenon, fat and happy from its Windows monopoly.