Microsoft has done a lot of rethinking and revising in the past couple of years as to how to bring innovations more quickly to market. But it wasn’t until a keynote presentation today that I understood how the Softies have been rejiggering the pieces to get concepts more quickly to market.
Dean Halstead, the Visualization Architect for U.S. Federal Microsoft, was the opening speaker at the
SharePoint Saturday The Conference event I’m attending on August 11 in Annandale, Virg. Halstead, a 12-year Microsoft veteran, is considered an internal Microsoft Federal expert on innovative solutions, open government and government transparency.
Microsoft was in need of fixing its innovation processes and organization to help it become more agile. As an example, Halstead cited the Microsoft Surface. Although
version 1 of the Surface never came to market until 2007, the Surface prototype dated back to 2003 or 2004. What took so long?