Which company are you: the Attacher

In an ongo­ing series of posts on the dif­fer­ences between large tech com­pa­nies, I look at the dif­fer­ent mod­els they take (refine,tin­ker, push, attach) and who their spir­i­tual chil­dren may be. In this entry, it’s all about the attacher.

The attacher: Microsoft

The pri­mary view of the attacher is that it has a solid prod­uct and now tries to attach every new effort to that prod­uct, mak­ing it increas­ingly unwieldy as the prod­uct now has to sup­port legacy and new approaches to ser­vic­ing customers.

For exam­ple, for a long time, Microsoft’s insis­tance that every­thing be tied to Win­dows looked like it might be a win­ning strat­egy.  But, over time, the strat­egy started falling apart. Sure, Microsoft’s tying of the browser into its oper­at­ing sys­tem made it rel­e­vant for the inter­net era, but even­tu­ally new play­ers (Fire­fox, Chrome, Safari) emerged and, because it was so deeply embed­ded into the oper­at­ing sys­tem, Inter­net Explorer had a longer update cycle, leav­ing it increas­ingly vul­ner­a­ble and forc­ing it to loose marketshares.

In the same way, Microsoft’s insis­tance that its mobile offer­ing be more like Win­dows left it with an incom­pat­i­ble user inter­face for mobile device. By the time the com­pany decided that it would toss away the con­cept of tool­bar and icons, it was already too late and Microsoft has ceded devel­op­ers’ mind­share to Apple (with iOS) and Google (with Android).

Rare in startups

A pre­con­di­tion for a com­pany to become an attacher is that they have some­thing to attach to. In other words, they already have an exist­ing prod­uct that has been suc­cess­ful and on top of which they are try­ing to bolt some­thing incom­pat­i­ble. In a way, I would argue that this is also what Apple does with iTunes, a prod­uct that may have a new logo but does so much more than music that its moniker seems incorrect.

How­ever, I would say that the attacher is, in the long run, a los­ing strat­egy. It shows that the com­pany is unwill­ing to let go of past suc­cesses, which may now work as an anchor around their feet, leav­ing them with less room to grow and adapt.