The Garage never should have existed: Why Microsoft’s grassroots innovation lab worked for so long

Posters from Microsoft Garage science fairs and hack events, many funded by the Microsoft groups that hosted them, as seen in 2016. (Photo courtesy of Quinn Hawkins) I saw the news via GeekWire that after 17 years, the Microsoft Garage, which I co-founded, is coming to an end. In software, 17 years is a very, very long time. I’m proud of how long it lasted. The funny thing about the Garage is that it never should have existed. When we started it, Microsoft already had bigger, better-funded grassroots innovation programs. And none of us had any idea what we were doing. We’d never built anything like it. And yet the Garage outlasted all of them. And grew bigger than any of them. Some of that was luck. But I’d like to believe some of it was smart choices. Here are four that I think mattered, in hopes they help someone else with a similar opportunity. In case you don’t want to read the whole thing, here’s the short version: Doers, not talkers. Make it a potluck. Don’t worry about the billions. Don’t be afraid to do epic shit. 1. Doers, not talkers When the Garage started, the other innovation groups at Microsoft had one thing in common. They were built around ideas. Submit an idea. Vote on the ideas. Fund a few winners. This was bad for a couple of reasons. First, it attracted people who liked talking about things more than doing them. Second, voting doesn’t work. Put ideas to a vote and the obvious ones win. But if an idea is obvious, someone has probably already built it. What you’re really looking for is someone with a special insight. Committees are terrible at spotting special insights. So the Garage focused on people building small projects. Nobody had to vote. Nobody had to agree. If you wanted to build it, you built it. That meant someone could build a test tool that made one annoying part of their job easier. Clark Roberts, Victor Boctor, and Mike Cook thought code reviews were too painful, so they co-built CodeFlow as a Garage project. It spread across Microsoft’s development teams and eventually into Visual Studio. Philip Su coded up Dr. Who, the fastest way to look someone up inside the company. Truong Do wanted one mouse and keyboard for all his computers, so he built Mouse Without Borders, which became the first Garage project released to the public. @import url('https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Roboto+Slab:wght@500&display=swap');@media (max-width:768px){.gw-pq{display:none!important}} “Nobody could ask us where the billions were. …