Garage co-founder Quinn Hawkins writes four reasons the Microsoft program lasted 17 years

Quinn Hawkins, who co-founded Microsoft's Garage, published an essay on Friday explaining how the employee program outlasted better-funded innovation efforts inside the company for 17 years, as Microsoft winds it down, GeekWire reported. He said the Garage never should have existed: Microsoft already had larger programs, and the founders had not built anything like it before.

Hawkins argued that voting on ideas rewards talk and obvious proposals. The Garage instead backed people who built small projects. He cited CodeFlow, later used across Microsoft and in Visual Studio, and Mouse without Borders, the first Garage project released to the public. He also said a tiny budget forced campus groups to pay for their own science fairs, which made local leaders treat the events as theirs. The program, he wrote, was not a hunt for the next billion-dollar product.