How? Cut the bureaucracy. Build a medium-sized team away from the bureaucracy and levels of the company at large, to give it the agility of a startup, but still

How? Cut the bureaucracy. Build a medium-sized team away from the bureaucracy and levels of the company at large, to give it the agility of a startup, but still have it integrated into the Microsoft company structure. Microsoft's problem is no doubt bureaucracy. Microsoft's Mac Business Unit (MBU) puts out decent software and works pretty well. The MBU apparently have more freedoms than the other divisions of Microsoft. If they make their web force more like a startup within a business, in the sense that they build a department that more or less governs itself, they will move much faster within the web space. Edit: a friend of mine just showed me this. http://www.boston.com/business/technology/articles/2008/06/30/microsoft_seeks_next_big_idea_in_cambridge/ http://www.boston.com/business/technology/articles/2008/06/3... "Microsoft Corp. is reinventing itself, and it's looking to One Memorial Drive for a dose of innovation. That will be the home of Microsoft's Boston Concept Development Center, a first-of-its-kind research unit that's assembling dozens of engineers and designers and sniffing out technologies with the aim of incubating new Internet businesses within the company." Looks like they're going in the right direction.