Genius Makers by Cade Metz

Author:Cade Metz [Metz, Cade]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2021-03-16T00:00:00+00:00

12

DREAMLAND

“IT IS NOT THAT PEOPLE AT GOOGLE DRINK DIFFERENT WATERS.”

In the spring of 2016, Qi Lu sat on a bicycle, rolling through the park in downtown Bellevue. The city’s glass towers loomed overhead as he teetered down the promenade, struggling to keep his bicycle upright. It was no ordinary bicycle. When he turned the handlebars left, it moved right, and when he turned right, it moved left. He called it a “backwards brain bike,” because the only way to ride was to think backwards. Conventional wisdom said: “You never forget how to ride a bicycle.” But that is exactly what he hoped to do. Decades after he first learned to ride as a child growing up in Shanghai, he aimed to erase everything he’d learned and burn entirely new behavior into his brain. This, he believed, would show his company the way forward.

Lu worked for Microsoft. After joining the company in 2009, he oversaw the creation of Bing, its multibillion-dollar answer to the Google search engine monopoly. Seven years later, when he and his backwards bicycle wobbled through the park in downtown Bellevue, ten miles east of Seattle, just down the road from Microsoft headquarters, he was one of the company’s most powerful executives, leading its latest push into artificial intelligence. But Microsoft was playing catch-up. The trouble, he knew only too well, was that the company had spent years struggling to make headway with new technology in new markets. For nearly ten years, it had battled for a place in the smartphone market, redesigning its Windows operating system to compete with the Apple iPhone and a world of Google Android phones, building a talking digital assistant that could challenge the speech technologies emerging from Google Brain, and spending no less than $7.6 billion to acquire Nokia, a company with decades of experience designing and selling mobile phones. But none of it had worked. The company’s phones still felt like old-fashioned PCs, and in the end they captured almost none of the market. Microsoft’s problem, Lu thought, was that it handled new tasks in old ways. It designed, deployed, and promoted technology for a market that no longer existed. After reading a series of essays from a Harvard Business School professor that deconstructed the foibles of aging corporations, he came to see Microsoft as a company still driven by the procedural memory burned into the brains of its engineers, executives, and middle managers when they first learned the computer business in the ’80s and ’90s, before the rise of the Internet, smartphones, open-source software, and artificial intelligence. The company needed to change its way of thinking, and with his backwards bicycle, Lu hoped to show that it could.

The bike was built by a Microsoft colleague named Bill Buxton and his friend Jane Courage. When Lu took this counterintuitive contraption on its first test run, they came with him. As Lu made his way across the park in downtown Bellevue—a tiny man with short black hair and wire-rimmed glasses, rolling past

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