Monica Harrington

Monica Harrington: Mike Maples, formerly Senior Vice President of Microsoft Applications, once famously said “our rightful share is 100 percent.” People who heard that later and never had to motivate development teams were aghast.

But Mike was right. I say this as someone who worked for Mike and who later helped start a company that competed very successfully against Microsoft.

Mike’s whole point I think was that anybody who didn’t set audacious goals and then work relentlessly toward them shouldn’t be in tech.The pace of change is too quick, the competitors too close, and the chance for failure too great.

In the same spirit, Microsoft once ran an ad for Mac Excel that said: “Nine out of 10 users prefer Excel. What are we doing wrong?”

Within the product groups, we all knew that because of file compatibility and learning curve/training cost issues, having a clear leader with dominant share was something word processing and spreadsheet customers actually wanted.

We also assumed that “the other guys” –including WordPerfect and Lotus - each of which had greater than 90 percent share when I signed on – understood this and wish they’d aimed for 100 percent too. (I can think of several strategic errors each company made – but key was a fundamental misunderstanding of how fragile their huge leads actually were.)

Mike Maples also believed in collaboration; nobody was better at encouraging groups to work together and to work positively with people outside the company.

I still remember the memo Mike sent regarding contracts with smaller companies. At the time, so many little companies wanted to work with Microsoft that they’d agree to terms that were really not in their own best interests.

So Mike said that he wanted a cover note for each contract that laid out the case for why the deal was good for the other guy. And he wouldn’t approve the contract unless he really believed it. People outside the tech industry often don’t understand how fierce competition and a collaborative spirit can exist side-by-side.

That’s why so many people were surprised to see Steve Jobs and Bill Gates share a stage with Walt Mossberg a few years ago and clearly enjoy it. The truth of course is that they’d both been competitors and collaborators over many years. (The Mac lineup of apps was very important to Microsoft.)

It might be also be a surprise to some that within the game industry years ago, key developers from competing companies collaborated closely behind the scenes to solve the gnarliest technical problems for the good of everyone.

The reason I think tech industry people “get” that competition and collaboration need to mix is because we’re all in an innovation race together with tough problems to solve -- problems which are often hard for people outside the industry to grasp. (I don’t think anybody outside the industry during the late 80s and early 90s understood just how important file compatibility and training cost issues were or what a years-long slog it was to solve them from both a development and marketing perspective.)

In tech, at any given time in a specific market someone is in the lead. But conditions and positions that have been built over a long period of time can change quickly. It’s the innovation Tour de France.

Everyone who competes wants the race to be successful in order to attract more fans but the reason we do it is because we love the sport, love competition (and love the prizes!), and when things get really tough, we know how to collaborate and draft. We also know that a bad fall can be fatal.

Rule makers (the regulators) struggle to keep up and often the most effective referees are the participants and enthusiasts themselves.

Today the tech innovation race has a thriving, often supportive, but also quite critical enthusiast and professional online community. In tech, everyone hears if you blow it or do something fundamentally “unfair.” Because so much is new and the health of the industry is so critical to us all, government regulators are sometimes going to step in.

And when that happens, there’s an understanding within the community that companies are going to plead each case ferociously and that from case to case alliances may shift.

A company might square off against a competitor on one legal issue and then join arms the next. Importantly, the community’s going to weigh in.

And through it all, everyone in the industry shares a common concern that new rules won’t cause long-term damage to the innovation race itself.

Monica Harrington was formerly chief marketing officer for Valve and Picnik. She now does strategy and communications consulting for business and nonprofits, and blogs at Social Innovation Perspectives. Opinions expressed in guest posts are those of their authors, and don't necessarily reflect the views of TechFlash or its staff.