Is creativity dangerous for corporations?

It has been not so long ago that MadCatz, creator of original peripheries went bankrupt. It fell victim to venturing into the uncertain world of software. Fifteen years ago something similar, yet opposite, happened: Microsoft massively scaled their activities in hardware development and concentrated on its core business. Was this “giving up the silly stuff” something, that saved Microsoft?

• Be also sure to check out my other posts and follow me @kralizec and subcribe to my Youtube channel at Kralizec Gaming Youtube Channel

Way too creative

It seems that creativity and corporate just don’t work with each other. Even though giant companies often have development departments – sometimes big and important, like is Microsoft Research it seems that the bigger the company is, the bigger and more inflexible they become and all the more they should focus on one single area, in which they become number one.

The general development cycle looks like this: Company comes out with a profitable product, diversifies to a similar product and then in good faith, that the next logical step is continuous diversification, adds more and more ideas, which are less and less profitable. Then are two possible scenarios: Either the company gets rid of the exotic project or they sink it.

This formula is being repeated over and over and it seems to confirm the universal wisdom of Scott Adams, who shows the corporate as world of its own in his comic strip Dilbert, in which an employee spends most of his time dealing with intra-company bullshit or fighting the inner machinery and he is left little time to actually develop products. Plus, it seems like the products aren’t the real focus, it’s all about intra-company politics.

The Dilbert corporation in potentially an incredibly powerful creative machine which could spout out ideas like a geyser, but those just get lost in the never ending meetings and executive decisions. This system not only leads to bad decisions, but also sucks out the creative energy out of once motivated employees which can be seen the Y2K episode of the Dilbert animated series. In it, we see a window to the past, in which the now lazy Wally once was a motivated engineer, before the corporate sucked all his enthusiasm and the will to do anything.

It’s happening over and over. I even have a feeling that once a company opens a development division that deals with more abstract concepts, it is pretty much destined to fail. Few years ago I noticed news about the activities of Nokia Research that dealt with i.e. the development of intuitive UIs for mobile phones. One of their activities was that they searched for Indians somewhere in South America, who saw a mobile phone for the first time in their life and they review their interactions with the phones. This potentially interesting study could have only limited practical impacts – most real and even potential customers has some sort of idea of how a mobile phones works and how to control it.

If Nokia instead of trying to create these unattainable things and focused more on practical questions, like the development of the mobile version of Maemo Linux, they perhaps wouldn't end up like they did – and from the already burning Symbian platform jumped to another burning platform Windows Mobile, essentially killing their mobile division.

How Microsoft invents

In general, it seems, that creating its own development division that can bring a big product – but also potentially nothing – is something only a really big company with solid and long-term revenue can afford to do. And there aren't a lof f them.
But if there is one, it’s Microsoft and their Microsoft Research, which has been established in 1991 and employs roughly 1000 scientists and developers even today, that concern themselves with advanced concepts like quantum computers, artificial intelligence and the human-machine interface.

When I’m looking at people that work and worked for Microsoft Research, it is quite an impressive list, on which you can find people like Peter Lee, who worked for DARPA, there are people who have been awarded with the Touring Award (an award given for advancements in computing), people who have been awarded with the Fields medal (an award for talented mathematicians) and many more.

Microsoft Research has departments all over the world, those usually specialize on a specific problem. Theoretically it look quite impressive, the problem comes when they bring the ideas to real life. We don’t see some of the benefits, because similarly to other companies they are being patented and prepared for the time “when the times come”. This is happening quite regularly – I remember when the nineties were starting, just a few students were interested in the problems of distributed algorithms and working with big data and these days it’s one of the most wanted qualifications with the giants like Oracle, Google or even Apple.

I don’t dare to judge the real benefits of research in these area, I’ll focus more on smaller and more practical things that were created withing Microsoft Research. For example, one fantastic research program was the one that researched not only improvements to mouse ergonomics, but also brought us really revolutionary concepts, like the optical motion sensor.

The time when Microsoft was taking gaming controllers to the next level

Optical mice was something Microsoft offered first – and this technology was such a success that these days we don’t see any other kind of mice. The stop from the ball mouse certainly isn’t just evolution, it is a totally revolutionary technology that on top of that seemed absurdly complicated, expensive and need completely inadequate computing power in its first generation.

Another great technology that Microsoft brought us is force feedback. Its development came with the fact that PCs were becoming a really popular gaming platform. Force feedback is a form of haptic feedback, which Microsoft extended to feedback that uses force. It was first seen in the Microsoft SideWinder Force Feedback Pro (1997) joystick – and its most prominent feature were too huge motors, that moved a massive stick and actually tried to tear your hand of at times. Force feedback is the standard in better joysticks these days even though a lot of “real pilots” complain because it doesn’t perfectly represent reality.

But Microsoft didn’t stick just to joysticks, but focused also on steering wheels. It offered a high quality wheel Microsoft Force Feedback Precision Wheel (1997) that allowed the player to perceive how the car behaved on different types of surfaces. I have to admit, that this extra level of immersion was something completely amazing – I never really liked racing games, but Need for Speed 3 with force feedback completely astonished me. Again – force feedback is in all better steering wheels these days and even the cheap controllers have simple rumble packs – we just can’t imagine gaming without touch feedback in this day and age.

When we get to gamepads, the situation somewhat changes. Microsoft gamepad are a weird mix of great construction and origanal, yet a bit silly ideas – silly a lot if I may add so. One of the classic and high quality gamepad was SideWinder Game Pad 1.0 (1996) that was simple, ergonomic and had a great build quality and unlike other gamepads of its time, made for the gameport interface, was also pass-through (chainable). Even though it had its few design flaws we can find all the positive things we can also find in all further gamepads from Microsoft – including the new ones, made for Xbox One and those are still one of the best gamepads available for PCs.

But Microsoft wasn’t making only ergonomic and somewhat conservative design. It experimented – and that wasn’t as successful. Even the first of the adventurous gamepads Microsoft SideWinder Freestyle Pro (1998), that used motion controls to control games was problematic. Sometimes it had its advantages – like with motorcycle simulators Motocross Maddness but in most cases the motion control just complicated the game. It was really hard to keep the controller leveled, you often moved the controller when you were touching the buttons – but mainly: If you played for a long period of the it became very uncomfortable.

And even today we can find a lot of games that are controllable with motion controls – either on console or mobile phones, but these games are usually specially created to be controlled intuitively and that certainly wasn’t the case before the year 2000.

Probably the most adventurous – and really crazy – was the SideWinder Dual Strike gamepad (1999). Microsoft tried to create a gamepad made specially for playing shooter games, and the was they solved it is that the gamepad was made from two unevenly large halves. The left-one was there to control the movement using the D-Pad and the right-one resembled a pistop grip, that was connected to the left half with a ball joint. Theoretically that the idea that you will move with your left hand and aim with your right hand seemed like a good one – because that is the way you do it with a keyboard and mouse. But! It wasn't On top of that, two movement axis aren’t enough, for really free movement – you need three.

Madcatz: Crazy hardware for crazy prices

While huge companies live from their huge markets, it’s usually the small companies who innovate and risk. Quite a few of them finds their own niche, their own area in which they really excel. One of these companies was MadCatz that brought a vision of configurable – or somewhat configurable – devices. Their peripheries were expensive and were reminiscent of monstrous cyber-punk things. Just remember MadCatz Strike 7, that resembled Legos when you looked at the amount of parts, but when you were done, you got this giant keyboard with many features including a colored display that allowed you to see many additional information.

Even though MadCatz tried to look like a classy company for gamers, I always had serious doubts about their build quality. I saw several gaming mice that had their primary (left) button all clicked out before the warranty come to an end. The build quality seemed cheap – and the cover of the battery compartment of tht Rat Office pretty much scared me: A plastic piece with two small hooks cca 0.5 mm x 0.25 mm held the batter under a spring. This is – from a mechanics view – an idiotic solution. Even Apple wireless keyboards had an aluminum cover that held the battery on at least three turns.

Complaints about the build quality came hand in hand with the complaints about the not so small prices, don’t forget that MadCatz was one of the most expensive gaming companies on the market – weren’t the thing that brought MadCatz to their grave. Even though I’m unsure where from the long-term problems of MadCatz came form, one thing is certain, one of the things that made it a lot worse was when the company decided to publish the game Rock Band 4. While the cooperation with the games developer Harmonix seemed logical, the Rock Band brand had a good name, the game itself was good and highly praised and MadCatz saw synergie in making specialized guitar and drum controllers.

Helping out the marketing of the game seemed logical as well and thus make large amounts of money making the game controllers. But even though the game was well criticized between critics and even players, it didn’t sell as well as expected – and instead of helping the financial situation, just made it worse.

Give it up before it’s too late

A decision to cancel a failed project is a good decision. Alphabet (Google) is pretty much legendary with how mercilessly they cancel projects that don’t prove themselves commercially soon enough. The cancellation of most Microsoft experiments was probably right as well. We don’t even know about many of them, because they were terminated before getting to the public.

And that is the second problem. Sometimes the corporate world just doesn’t have the nerves or will to push for something that isn’t that bad. Something that a small start-up will take-up and later succeeds with it and the corporate world then tries to buy it out, sometimes completely illogically and using way too much money. There are moments when you are just watching and shaking your head at the money corporations are willing to use - for example - 2 billion dollars for which Facebook bought Oculus Rift.

And now we can see the real dilema: It would be better for corporations to finance their own research and development, but it often times doesn’t know what do do with it. They underestimate it, they put in too much money, they have a products they don’t know how to sell. Some companies get destroyed by this process. Other decide not to risk at all and then buy the potential start-up – and then they pay way too much for it.

Creativity – is just dangerous for corporations.