Burning the Ships E-Book

Marshall Phelps

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 275

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2009

Beschreibung

Now in paperback, the inside story of "the greatesttransformation of Microsoft since it became a multinationalcompany" Marshall Phelps's remarkable eyewitness story offers lessons forany executive struggling with today's innovation and intellectualproperty challenges. Burning the Ships offers Phelps'sdramatic behind-the-scenes account of how he overcame internalresistance and got Microsoft to open up channels of collaborationwith other firms. * Discover the never-before-told details of Microsoft's secrettwo-year negotiations with Red Hat and Novell that led to theworld's first intellectual property peace treaty and technicalcollaboration with the open source community * Witness the sometimes-nervous support Bill Gates and CEO SteveBallmer gave to Phelps in turning their company around 180 degreesfrom market bully to collaborative industry partner * Offers an extraordinary behind-the-scenes view of thehigh-level deliberations of the company's senior-most executives,the internal debates and conflicts among executives andrank-and-file employees alike over the company's new collaborativedirection There are lessons in this book for executives in everyindustry-most especially on the role that intellectual property canplay in liberating previously untapped value in a company andopening up powerful new business opportunities in today's era of"open innovation." Here is a powerful inside account of the dawn ofa new era at what is arguably the most powerful technology companyon earth.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Praise

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Epigraph

About the Authors

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Chapter 1 - The Collaboration Imperative

We Need Relationships

A Lesson in Patent Holdups

It’s Déjà vu All over Again

“You’re Stealing Our Software!”

IBM on the Ropes

Convincing the Big Boss

IP Must Serve the Business

Chapter 2 - Like Cortez Burning His Ships

A Cultural Revolution

Why Collaborate?

How to Build a Licensing Operation

Open for Business

Perception versus Reality

Collaboration’s Bottom-Line Benefits

The Media Takes Notice

Chapter 3 - Money Isn’t Money Anymore

Back on the Home Front

The Unusual Friendly People

Calling All Entrepreneurs

“An Incredibly Rich Collaboration”

Value Greater Than Money

Chapter 4 - A Very Secret Mission

The Cathedral and the Bazaar

Peace or War?

A New Opening

“Done or Dead by Halloween”

A Hitch Develops

“Make This Work!”

The Die-Hards React

A Distinction without (Much) Difference

Chapter 5 - Leadership Starts at the Top

Gates’s Unusual Role

Corporate America’s Dirty Little Secret

Why the CEO Disconnect?

Creating Real Business Value

Leadership Must Start at the Top

Chapter 6 - The Road Ahead (with Apologies to Bill Gates)

A Rebirth for Independent Inventors?

Don’t Eat Your Seed Corn

Of Transparency, Clouds, and Other Visions

Just Say No to the “Free Content” Farce

Index

Praise for Burning the Ships

“When Marshall Phelps took the job at Microsoft in 2003, many in the industry believed he was on a fool’s errand. The task of helping to transform the culture and business practices of Microsoft through the use of its intellectual property seemed impossible. Burning the Ships proves that Marshall is the unchallenged master in designing creative uses of intellectual property to enhance business performance. And through his collaboration with David Kline, they’ve accomplished something equally unique: a thoroughly entertaining and informative ‘can’t wait to get to the next page’ read.”

—Daniel McCurdyChairman, Patent Freedom

“Burning the Ships offers a dramatic insider’s account of how Microsoft used intellectual property to remake its business strategy and embrace the open source movement and the new open innovation world—with real-world benefits for large enterprise customers and chief information officers everywhere.”

—Jim NobleChairman, World BPO ForumPast President, Society for Information Management

“When Marshall Phelps talks about intellectual property strategy, business leaders would be wise to listen closely. More than anyone else in business today, Marshall understands how open innovation has changed the rules of the IP strategy game. It’s time we learned the new rules!”

—Ruud J. PetersCEO, Philips Intellectual PropertyExecutive Vice President, Philips International

“It’s easy to talk open innovation and collaboration but extremely difficult to actually implement it in any company. Phelps and Kline bring to life the painful realities and unexpected rewards of embracing this change in Microsoft. The important story, though, is not the challenge of changing course, but that other companies can reap similar benefits of accelerated innovation, stronger partnerships, and better corporate image by ‘burning the ships.’ Read it and ‘start a fire.’ ”

—Jeffrey D. WeedmanVice President, External Business DevelopmentProcter & Gamble

“Through the power of example and compelling firsthand accounts, the authors have conveyed many practical insights about how intellectual property can be harnessed in new and creative ways to achieve overall business objectives and enable new collaborations once considered unthinkable. This book is extremely readable and refreshingly devoid of the abstract jargon and theoretical frameworks plaguing many works on IP management.”

—Daniel M. McGavockVice President and Intellectual Property Practice LeaderCRA International, Inc.

“Burning the Ships is the dramatic story of how Microsoft learned to collaborate for open innovation by using intellectual property to develop new corporate strategies.”

—Hisamitsu AraiFormer Commissioner, Japan Patent OfficeFormer Cabinet Member, Secretary General,Japan’s Intellectual Property SecretariatCEO of Tokyo Small and Medium BusinessInvestment Organization

“Burning the Ships gives a rare insider perspective on the thought processes behind the intellectual property strategies of companies like Microsoft and IBM. It offers revealing insights to practitioners in the field.”

—Willy ShihProfessor of Management PracticeHarvard Business School

“Marshall Phelps is the internationally recognized leader in the use of intellectual property as a strategic corporate asset. He recognizes that long-term survival in the constantly evolving information technology industry requires a flexible and nuanced intellectual property policy. Burning the Ships shows business leaders how to develop one for today’s open innovation environment.”

—Masanobu KatohCorporate Vice PresidentSenior Vice President, Global Business Group(in charge of North America)Fujitsu Limited

“Marshall Phelps is the principal architect of two dramatically different but equally compelling examples—one at IBM and one at Microsoft—of how intellectual property can be a transformational business tool when thoughtfully used to drive business strategy. It is a critically important message that he and David Kline make understandable to any company seeking to learn how it is done.”

—Don DavisManaging DirectorCommercial Strategy, LLC

“Once again a book involving David Kline—this time in partnership with the formidable Marshall Phelps—has moved the IP revolution forward. The story of Microsoft’s open innovation efforts, led by Phelps, is fascinating and informative. But the book also provides a whole new level of understanding of the necessity of managing and fully leveraging intellectual property as a strategic class of business assets. Intelligent companies that follow this example will find that they can grow in ways not previously contemplated.”

—Peter AckermanCEO, Innovation Asset Group

Copyright © 2009 by Marshall Phelps and David Kline. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.

Published simultaneously in Canada.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Phelps, Marshall.

Burning the ships : intellectual property and the transformation of Microsoft / Marshall Phelps, David Kline.p. cm.

Includes index.

eISBN : 978-0-470-49410-3

1. Microsoft Corporation. 2. Computer software—United States—Patents. I. Kline, David, 1950- II. Title.

KF3133.C65P47 2009

346.7304’86—dc22 2009000832

To Eileen Phelps and Sarah Kline

“For us, it was the equivalent of Cortez burning his ships at the shores of the New World. There would be no turning back.”

—Brad SmithGeneral Counsel, Microsoft

About the Authors

Marshall Phelps is Microsoft’s corporate vice president for intellectual property policy and strategy and is responsible for setting the global intellectual property strategies and policies for the company. He also works with governments, other companies in the technology industry, and outside institutions to broaden awareness of intellectual property issues.

Before transitioning to his current position in 2006, Phelps served as the deputy general counsel for intellectual property in Microsoft’s Legal & Corporate Affairs group, where he supervised Microsoft’s intellectual property groups, including those responsible for trademarks, trade secrets, patents, licensing, standards, and copyrights. He oversaw the company’s management of its intellectual property portfolio, helping to grow the patent portfolio to approximately 55,000 issued and pending patents worldwide today.

Phelps joined Microsoft in June 2003 after a 28-year career at IBM Corp., where he served as vice president for intellectual property and licensing. Phelps was instrumental in IBM’s standards, telecommunications policy, industry relations, patent licensing program, and intellectual property portfolio development. Phelps also helped establish IBM’s Asia Pacific headquarters in Tokyo and served as the company’s director of government relations in Washington, D.C.

Upon retiring from IBM in 2000, he spent two years as chairman and chief executive officer of Spencer Trask Intellectual Capital Company LLC, which specialized in spinoffs from major corporations such as Motorola Inc., Lockheed Martin Corp. and IBM.

Marshall Phelps is also an advisor on intellectual property to the Japanese government, and executive in residence at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business. He holds a bachelor of arts degree from Muskingum College, a master of science degree from Stanford Graduate School of Business, and a doctorate from Cornell Law School.

Phelps was elected to the initial class of the Intellectual Property Hall of Fame in 2006. He may be reached at [email protected].

David Kline is a journalist, author, and intellectual property consultant who has earned a reputation for his unique ability to demystify complex IP issues and explain them in a clear and relevant manner to a broad business audience. His best-selling 2000 book, Rembrandts in the Attic from Harvard Business School Press, is considered a seminal work in the field of intellectual property strategy within corporate America.

As a journalist, Kline has covered some of the world’s most dramatic stories for the New York Times, Christian Science Monitor, NBC and CBS News, the Atlantic, Rolling Stone, Wired, and other major media. The first Western reporter to go behind the battle lines in Afghanistan in the 1979 to report on the developing anti-Soviet resistance war, Kline was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in international reporting by the Christian Science Monitor that year and covered the war for a variety of major media over the next eight years. He was also the first reporter to uncover the 1983 famine in Ethiopia, as well as the first to document the failure of the U.S. drug war against the Bolivian “Coca Nostra” in the mid-1980s.

A highly regarded business writer, Kline has also written for the Harvard Business Review, Sloan Management Review, and Strategy + Business—three of the most prestigious U.S. management journals—as well as for Chief Executive, Business2.0, Wired, and other business and technology publications. He served as the “Market Forces” columnist for Wired’s early online magazine, HotWired, and the “NetProfits” columnist for the former Upside magazine. Kline has also been a commentator on public radio’s “Marketplace” business show as well as a frequent speaker before business audiences.

In addition to Rembrandts in the Attic, Kline is also the author of Road Warriors: Dreams and Nightmares Along the Information Highway (Dutton, 1995), and Blog! How the Newest Media Revolution Is Changing Politics, Business, and Culture (CDS, October, 2005). He may be reached at [email protected].

Acknowledgments

This book was a bear to write. But thankfully, a great many people helped us to wrestle it into submission by sharing their thoughts and insights, brainstorming about the future, helping to explain what might otherwise have been inscrutable technological issues, digging deep into old files for critical facts or the dates of crucial events, and in general being forthright and often brilliant in their criticisms and suggestions.

Put another way, to even attempt to write a book about a subject as complex and multifaceted as the transformation of Microsoft requires more in the way of advice and counsel, criticism and support, than the casual reader might suppose. We are grateful for everyone’s help.

At the same time, we want to make it perfectly clear that any errors, omissions, or stupidities in this book are ours and ours alone.

Among the many people inside and outside Microsoft who gave so generously of their time and wisdom to this project, we wish to thank in particular (but in no particular order) the following:

Brad Smith, Bill Gates, Nathan Myhrvold, Horacio Gutierrez, Lori Harnick, Mike Marinello, Susan Hauser, David Kaefer, Anne Kelley, Tanya Moore, Lisa Tanzi, Bart Eppenauer, John Weresh, Ken Lustig, Marty Shively, Tom Robertson, Tom Rubin, David Harnett, Dan’l Lewin, Jason Matusow, Atsushi “Yoshi” Yoshida, Susan Mann, George Zinn, Mark Murray, Mike Ensing, Tricia Payer, Tom Burt, Larry Cohen, Sanjay Sidhu, Rainer Kuehling, Jim Foster, Sam Medici, Dan McCurdy, Dick Gerstner, David Jones, Marti Murphy, Kathryn Foreman, Katie Carter, Georgia Barnes, and of course the amazingly resourceful Joyce Schnepp.

Additional thanks go to Masanobu Katoh of Fujitsu; Ruud Peters at Philips; Yoshihide Nakamura of Sony; Editor Joff Wild at Intellectual Asset Management magazine; Senior Associate Vice President for Development David Kennedy at Stanford University; and Professors Wesley Cowen and Ashish Arora at Duke University, Naomi Lamoreaux at UCLA, Iain Cockburn of Boston University, and Bo Heiden at Stockholm University.

We wish also to express our special gratitude to our editor at John Wiley & Sons, Susan McDermott, for her enthusiasm and insight; to our rock of an agent, the ever-supportive and highly prolific Jim Levine at the Levine/Greenberg Agency; to our friend and colleague Dan Burstein, for his perspective and wisdom about book writing and publishing; and to our tireless and masterful editorial assistant, Jennifer Powell.

Finally, as anyone who has ever written a book knows, it is the author’s family who bears a special burden in such an endeavor and deserves special recognition. We offer this now, with all our love and gratitude, to both our families.

Introduction

Why should anyone care what happens at Microsoft? This was the first question my coauthor David Kline and I asked ourselves when we sat down to consider writing this book in the summer of 2007. Thankfully, among all the questions that we would face over the next year and a half, this one was the easiest to answer.