“Pay no attention to the former employee behind the curtain!”Yesterday, Dick Brass,

Published 8:00 am Friday, February 5, 2010

“Pay no attention to the former employee behind the curtain!”Yesterday, Dick Brass, an ex-reporter who once led the charge to build tablet PCs and e-books at Microsoft, published a fairly devastating critique of his former company in The New York Times. In an op-ed, Brass portrayed the software giant as a company where visionary thinking goes to wilt and die. A product, he wrote, of having “developed a system to thwart innovation.”Microsoft, as you’d expect, disagrees with Brass’ assessment of their creativity snuffing. In a rebuttal blog post, corporate vice president of communications Frank X. Shaw says that when Brass writes that Microsoft is a “clumsy, uncompetitive innovator” it might be because he doesn’t understand how it thinks about innovation.”At the highest level, we think about innovation in relation to its ability to have a positive impact in the world,” writes Shaw. “For Microsoft, it is not sufficient to simply have a good idea, or a great idea, or even a cool idea. We measure our work by its broad impact.”Flacks are immune to saying that their companies are also in the business of being a business (i.e. making a ton of money). Still, it’d be refreshing if Shaw had just said Great and cool is all we need, now who’s coming along for the ride?