Fighting organizational inertia in R&D
Microsoft Excel, which includes popular programs such as Word and Excel, contributes about one third of the firm's overall revenue ($9.42 billion in the latest fiscal year). However, as acknowledged by a recent report, Office's growth is slowing down.
In 1997, Microsoft created a special engineering group, known as NetDocs, with the goal of completely rethinking and reinventing Office. This group is working in parallel with the basic team responsible for Office, a fact that is creating an obvious tension within the firm. Says CEO Steve Balmer: "You always have a phenomenon [in which] ... everybody wants to be the lead dog. But we need to lead in multiple fronts."
Source: Rebecca Buckman, "Microsoft Readies a New 'Office' While Renovating the Old Standby," The Wall Street Journal, July 27, 2000.