results. Keeping companies innovative is a topic that has gained plenty of attention in the business world, but Moore says his latest book is focused on practical ways to reinvent and rethink the inertia that can stop “adolescent” businesses from making it out of the nest.
“For a long time we thought, ‘Well, if our R&D were just better, if we were more innovative.’ And it turns out we’re plenty innovative and we’ve got lots of R&D,” Moore says. The answer, instead, lies with changes like rebuilding the compensation and planning systems to make sure companies are keeping their eyes on their future businesses rather than just dividing up next year’s budget between the current heavyweights.
In the Seattle area, Moore says there are two apt examples in Amazon and Microsoft. Amazon has done extraordinarily well, Moore says, at stiff-arming Wall Street when necessary to ensure that cloud computing, e-readers and other future businesses were delivered well.
“I would say that Amazon might be one of the best companies in the world at that. [Founder Jeff] Bezos—for years he fought off the Street when the Street said ‘You’ve got to convert to performance. This whole thing around the cloud, Jeff, what are you doing?'”
But that’s an exception. Like most big businesses, Moore argues, Microsoft has had a harder time making good on all the smarts at its disposal for executing new products.
“If you look at the problem statement you’d say, gosh, Microsoft has these two mega, mega, mega-franchises. It’s very hard for anything else to get airtime there. And so, what are you doing with your R&D money? Because if you can’t get the next business out, why are you trying to build it? Maybe you should just buy it.
“So organic innovation at Microsoft is a real challenge right now—not because you can’t get the R&D budget. You can’t get the go-to-market footprint that would matter.”
As we wind down the buzz from South by Southwest Interactive, it was also interesting to ask Moore how his classic “chasm” analysis compares to the current period, where products and services have the ability to get a huge number of users in a relatively short amount of time. Moore says the original chasm-crossing metaphor has held up very well on the business-to-business side of things. But on the consumer side, he jokes, “Facebook is going to a billion users—where was the chasm, dude?”
Moore says the answer there is in monetization, which echoes something that fellow business thinker Steve Blank touched on at SXSW in his presentation “New Rules for a New Bubble.”
“What happened with the Web is we separated adoption from monetization. That’s why adoption could essentially be friction-free, if it were viral,” Moore says. “It has been a monetization chasm. There was a period where it was not clear how Google was going to monetize. There was a period where it was not clear how Facebook was going to monetize.”
Those are the successful ones. But they can be easily countered with YouTube or MySpace or a number of even less notable money pits.
There’s plenty more where that came from—I haven’t even gotten into Moore’s thoughts on the new social, mobile and cloud infrastructure that today’s growth is going to give us on the other side of any bubble-burst. Safe to say the guy has plenty of ideas and can talk about them for quite some time.
