5 ms·
It sounds like Microsoft's internal competition is exactly the same kind of dysfunctional as its external competition.
by angelbob 17y ago
It sounds like Microsoft's internal competition is exactly the same kind of dysfunctional as its external competition.
- Groxx 17y agoExcept they can't simply buy out their internal competition. If your business is consistently shooting itself where it most needs to grow, you're doing something so fundamentally wrong you deserve to die. This isn't anti-Microsoft fanboyism, this is natural selection at its core. I take this stance with any business that behaves like this to a large enough degree.
- stcredzero 17y agoExcept they can't simply buy out their internal competition. To put it in free-market terms, the boundaries of Microsoft got so large that they encompassed many antagonists, but insulated them from the mediating forces of the market. Reminds me of a situation at a previous company, where we were paying something like 1/4 mil yearly for a transatlantic E3 data line no one ever got to use. If one VP came up with a use for it, the other VPs would sabotage the project, so they could use it someday.
- DLWormwood 17y ago> If one VP came up with a use for it, the other VPs would sabotage the project, so they could use it someday. Disgusting, and telling of how un-savvy those VPs were. Within an organization, it's not very difficult to put a traffic or QoS cap on one department if the other departments were afraid of being shut out. A company that has VPs that think their one department in deserving of exclusive control of a corporate resource deserves to fail just like MS is.
- stcredzero 17y agoDisgusting, and telling of how un-savvy those VPs were. Yeah, and in the middle of layoffs too! We could've kept 2 more engineers employed with that money. (One department voted that everyone take a 10% pay cut instead of laying people off. And yes, this is while those resource shenanigans were going on!)
- stcredzero 17y agoFrom article: But those of us who worked there know it differently. At worst, you can say it’s a highly repentant, largely accidental monopolist. If you want people to forgive your "accidental monopoly," it pays to not act the 800 pound gorilla.
- Groxx 17y agoThey've been playing the "oops, sorry we crushed everyone else" card for a long time :|
- DenisM 17y agoWhen was the last time the acted the 800lb gorilla? When then yanked one publisher's books from their book store? Or when they refused to approve Google Voice for Windows? Microsoft has been thoroughly declawed by the antitrust suite - all the energetic and ruthlessly effective people who were driving company forward have left Microsoft about 10 years ago when they realized they can't use their favorite set of tools anymore. This is why Microsoft hasn't been changing the world in the last 10 years, in a good or bad way.
- ZeroGravitas 17y agoRailroading a shoddy partial translation of their Office suite memory dump format into XML through ISO, destroying that organizations credibility as it did so. That was a dick move.