Bureaucracy or Opportunity?... at Microsoft

Ken Moss, GM of MSN Search, is blogging in MSN Spaces.
I still don't like this blogging platform. I believe Scobleizer doesn't like it neither... that's why he is using typepad and Radio Userland.

In his blog Always Thinking, Ken wrote:
Innovating anywhere requires “thinking like a start-up”. There are many teams within MSN that think of themselves as “start-ups within Microsoft.”

Let me give you a few real examples from my experience these past two years:
< 2 weeks : the time it took to get final approval from Bill and Steve after we decided that we had to build our own search engine from the ground up
< 4 weeks : the time it took from conception to launch for the NCAA college basketball module on MSN Search that gave live scores.
2 days : the time it took from ask to agreement for Microsoft Research in Beijing to help solve some thorny relevance issues on MSN Search

Hard to believe... or... this is why people still like Google or even Yahoo! as their favorite search engine.