9 ms·

Microsoft's office: Why insiders think top management has lost its way

148 points by jeffwidman 16y ago

dsuriano 16y ago
"Windows Everywhere" is a bad strategy for Microsoft. I still don't think Windows Phone 7 was a good name. Why didn't they just go with Microsoft Phone or something?
- rbanffy 16y ago
  I believe that kind of misperception happens when you ask your employees the important questions rather than asking your competition's customers.
  - me_again 16y ago
    I have to disagree. You think Apple polled Windows Mobile users what to call the iPhone?
    - rbanffy 16y ago
      No, but Apple has Steve Jobs. Microsoft has Ballmer. There is a difference. ;-)
      - kenjackson 16y ago
        But the name of the iPod originally came from a freelance marketing guy, not Jobs himself. After the success of the iPod, the iPhone name was pretty easy. With that said they could have called it the Apple Phone and probably not lost a sale.
        rbanffy 16y ago
        Since the iMac is a Mac, the iPod is not a pod, it seems the name "iPhone" shares more with the iMac than the iPod. Microsoft's product problems are not that related to naming.
        stevenj 16y ago
        "Good artists copy, great artists steal." -Picasso Jobs is an artist. Ballmer isn't.
- g123g 16y ago
  xPhone would have been nice, reminding people that they also created something as cutting edge as XBox which gave Sony and Nintendo a serious run for their money.
  - lotusleaf1987 16y ago
    That would just remind people of the iPhone every time they mention an xPhone.
    - alexqgb 16y ago
      Which reminds me, Apple doesn't sell an iBox.
- shareme 16y ago
  CE=Communicate Everywhere, was not a good name either
- binarycheese 16y ago
  Zune Phone would have been better than that horrible WP7 name.
ozziegooen 16y ago
It seems like most of Microsoft wants Steve Ballmer to make a major change to Microsoft. I'd really like to see him follow the "New Detroit" idea and announce a major re-thinking of the company. But, I'm sure he won't. They'll complain, his approval ratings will get worse, Microsoft will decline, and he will stay in denial. Peter Drucker is rolling in his grave.
- pnathan 16y ago
  You mean MS isn't applying the "Business X-Ray" and start cutting products? :) Right now, the only MS product I rely on is... ... ... ... Yeah. Everything MS that I use is in a support role (Windows). I don't use any MS products directly.
- anamax 16y ago
  > I'd really like to see him follow the "New Detroit" idea and announce a major re-thinking of the company. How about we wait until "new Detroit" actually succeeds before using it as a model? Folks are constantly doing "major re-thinking" of various things and most of the ones that get implemented turn out to be disasters, especially the urban ones. ("The projects" were one such "re-think".)
marshray 16y ago
What I found most interesting about that article was how, unlike most articles on CNN, the comments were dominated by people saying approximately "Yes I actually worked there from xx to yy and I fully agree with the substance of this article."
DanielBMarkham 16y ago
This is the natural end-game of being a hugely successful company: you box yourself in. You make so many rules about what can happen and how it all has to work that nothing can escape. They have to break up. I just don't see any other way around it. Each little new idea that might help somebody competes with dozens of special interests all looking out for some little fiefdom or concern that may or may not be important -- nobody knows. The place becomes a huge echo chamber where outsiders can't be heard except through marketing studies and sales staff reporting through the chain of command. I wish this situation was unique to Microsoft, but it is not. Any large shop that makes software ends up creating their own prison. The open question is whether Google and Facebook will also end up in this same spot.
- kenjackson 16y ago
  The open question is whether Google and Facebook will also end up in this same spot. As you said, everyone will end up here. There's virtually no way a rational company can avoid it. It's textbook Innovator's Dilemma. Eventually you're faced with a situation that there is a new product/service that is cannibalizing your product. You can hasten the cannibalization of your cash cow and maybe succeed in this new space (or maybe not), or you can milk you cash cow for all its worth. If you do the math its almost always better to NOT hasten your own demise for an uncertain future. But even if you were to break them up, there's really no good way to break them up that really helps all that much. Windows and Office? Nothing else can really exist on its own. Now you have two big monsters that have the same problems, but spread out in two companies. I think you have to let nature take its course. Which probably means some breakout technology that lets them continue their cash cow while providing new scenarios. If Windows 8 can actually merge the desktop, tablet, and phone in a way never even envisioned, that would be a shot. But it's such a long shot I wouldn't hold out much hope.
  - MartinCron 16y ago
    Even if integrating desktop, tablet, and phone in a way that has never been envisioned is a good idea at all (and I can't say). I feel that Windows 8 will either be way too soon to do it well, or they will way take too long to ship Windows 8. We haven't even got one proven good iteration of anything Windows on phone or tablet yet.
mw63214 16y ago
I still don't get how all these articles frame the debate as Microsoft playing catch-up with all the "innovation" coming out of Apple? I get the management culture and internal struggles and "analysis paralysis" that comes with the cover-your-butt mentality, but as far as I can tell, Microsoft is one of the very few companies that has entire departments dedicated bringing cutting-edge technologies to market. The only other companies that comes close(that I've seen) are Google and perhaps Philips. Talk to researches at elite technology schools, and I would venture to guess that they would put Microsoft far ahead of Apple, and maybe Google, in the innovation race. However, if you talk management or P/E people, they would probably give you a different answer. So I guess I'm in agreement that there's an internal problem at Microsoft, but that it lies with the culture, not the actual scope of their ability to innovate.
- danilocampos 16y ago
  > Microsoft is one of the very few companies that has entire departments dedicated bringing cutting-edge technologies to market. So where are these technologies? And why isn't Microsoft hauling huge sacks of money home each year from multiple products that didn't exist in the 90's? As far as I can tell, they make money from vendor lock-in with Office and Windows, and a gaming division founded by a visionary who left because he couldn't stand working there anymore.
  - schwabacher 16y ago
    Kinect is pretty impressive, and I think WP7 is innovative in its ability to display content on a small screen in a natural way. I don't know if I agree that they are ahead of Google and Apple, but they have come up with a few cool things.
    - danilocampos 16y ago
      Kinect is awesome, but as I said here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2420579 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2420579 They bought Kinect from another company – the hard work of getting approvals and resources and everything else to start on it had already been done outside of Microsoft. It's definitely an impressive bit of tech, but would it have been possible were its genesis subject to the byzantine internal politics of Microsoft? I dunno. I wouldn't put money on it. As to WP7, it's actually more of an indictment of Microsoft than it is a credit to them. Consider how much of a clusterfuck their mobile strategy has been for the last four years. It took them forever to get their bureaucratic shit together and actually ship something that resembled a next generation smartphone, and once they did, they did a piss-poor job supporting and improving the platform, despite the very high standard set by both Google and Apple for the same. It's a perfect example of their inability to execute or respond to changes in their industry.
d4nt 16y ago
I've often thought that Microsoft would have done much better if the justice dept had broken it up. Being everything to everyone just doesn't work as a business strategy. But separate Windows/XBox and Office/enterprise apps companies could focus on their respective markets.
simonw 16y ago
""" Yet Ballmer & Co. remain in denial, they say, because the great gushers of cash Windows and Office generate means they don't feel the urgency they otherwise would –shielded from the pain of its many disappointments by two of the more successful franchises in the history of business. """ That reminds me of an article about Pixar (which I can't find now) which talked about how the management team are especially careful to seek out problems when the company is being successful. If stuff is going well, it's easy to gloss over problems with morale, teamwork etc.
- alexqgb 16y ago
  I believe Ed Catmull refers to this as 'keeping your crises small.' That is to say, it's much better to actively surface problems before they leave the shop than it is to ship with issues, and try to deal with implosions after the fact (ahem, Vista). Here he is, giving a really good talk at Stanford Business School, in which he covers this (among other good ideas). About an hour, but worth much more. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2h2lvhzMDc http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2h2lvhzMDc Interestingly, an ethos like this suggests that the fate of Microsoft is NOT inevitable. It's only becomes that way when you no longer care about shipping garbage. Exhibit B: Detroit in the 70's and 80's.
ozziegooen 16y ago
Some good quotes from the comments: "I personally know two women got promoted to be managers, not because of their performance, but because they each is a higher manager's mistress. In short, Microsoft's is a fear-based culture. How could Microsoft not fall rapidly?" "I'd attend a meeting where we needed 3 or 4 relevant people to discuss something but 30 or more would show up, to represent their group's interests, even if they had no real idea of what was going on. It was nearly impossible to reach any consensus, all decisions ultimately got made by whatever interested PM had the most clout - often not the PM with the most expertise or relevance" " I recall the sole-sucking Business Process Reviews we'd go through. The culmination would be a Bill/Steve meeting. It was the 30 people developing 98 slide powerpoints with 2 point font (again, no exaggeration). It was game over for me once I sat through that."
kkshin 16y ago
One of Microsoft's biggest problems that contributes to their insular view is that they are located in Redmond. They're insulated from the rest of the highly competitive technology field (except for Amazon). This works out great for them when it comes to retaining talent in Redmond as employees are usually not willing to uproot their lifestyle to head to 'greener pastures'. Contrast this to how Google handles compensation and employee retention. Granted, Google is a much smaller organization and can afford to be more nimble, but part of it has to do with with the fact that being in the valley means that its incredibly easy for talented, motivated engineers to move to the next hot startup once they're dissatisfied with their current job. In Redmond, however, these options don't really exist and creates a culture of stagnation. People goto their jobs because they have and leave as soon as it is culturally acceptable. I fear a lot of Microsoft's future as I just don't believe that they are able to recruit top young talent anymore. Not only is Microsoft not a "hip" place to work anymore, but their compensation is generally below market. Its pretty standard for funded startups to give more BASE salary than Microsoft. Google's base is roughly 50% more than what Microsoft pays. New hires at Google make more money than level 64 Microsoft engineers (5 levels from starting). Microsoft will continue to execute and create good products, but until their internal culture drastically changes they will slowly slide into irrelevance.
- MartinCron 16y ago
  I'm not going to claim that Microsoft isn't too insular (it is) and I live and work in Seattle on purpose, so I'm a little biased about this, but I don't think it's just about the location. Besides Amazon being a huge presence, more and more established tech companies are opening development offices here (Google, Facebook, Zynga) just to take advantage of the talent that's here. Not to mention the fairly healthy startup culture that feeds from and back into the beast in Redmond. Leadership, culture, and politics are all much bigger problems than geography.
  - potatolicious 16y ago
    I agree leadership, culture, and politics are bigger problems than geography, but it's still an issue. Sniping younger people from MSFT is sometimes trivially easy because of its remote location in Redmond - surrounded almost exclusively by nice, quiet suburbs. I know a lot of MSFTies braving the commute across the lake daily (1-1.5h each way!), but people get tired of it fast, and by and large the young want to live on the west side, in the city proper, not out in the 'burbs. There's a reason why Google is now in Fremont, Facebook is downtown by the Market... I know personally (and some others who feel the same way) that there's not a chance I'll take a commute over the lake every day, and likewise no chance I'll live on the east side.
ibdknox 16y ago
As a recently departed (read 5 months) ex-PM at Microsoft, I think MS's problems, at least in my division, stem from three things: a lack of vision/leadership, too inward of a focus, and the ridiculous bevy of meaningless communication. I think the article touches on each of these in a certain way, but not exactly in the same way I mean them. One thing I noticed about the middle management at MS was that they never defined a direction. No one ever set out a vision. The result of this was that each little section of a product would decide what the best possible direction for the product would be and build features to that vision. The summation of this effort is a frankenstein product with a user experience that is equally as scary. No one worked together unless they were forced to and even when they did, they never really worked toward a common goal. Based on my experience, I believe that a single charasmatic, intelligent, and visionary person could have easily turned our division around. All it would take is strong leadership and a crystal clear vision. We had neither. The article makes a point of MS being focused too much on itself, and I wholeheartedly agree. One of the things I was praised for was knowing what the rest of the tech world was doing (I worked on VS). What astounded me was how little others knew about non-MS technologies. We were beaten to the punch by other products nearly every time because we only ever focused inward and not on what the world itself was doing. Moreover, when people did look out the window they focused on the wrong things and instead of trying to innovate saw it as a need to start chasing tail lights. Lastly, I got several hundred emails a day as a PM. Despite that deluge of written communication, I felt that no one was really ever saying anything of value. Sadly, most people aren't great communicators and the result of a culture that promotes a ton of communication is a torrent of useless discussions that take away from what really matters. It seemed to me that most managers were there solely to deal with the fact that no one was working together or communicating properly. I would argue that at least 1/3 of a person's workload at MS is the direct result of this inability to communicate and it absolutely destroyed many of the efforts I would've liked to have seen succeed. I don't believe replacing Ballmer is some magic bullet. I think the company needs to be 1/10 of the size to reduce communication and to get people working together. I think it needs someone with a vision for the way things should be that isn't based on what's already out there. And I think Microsoft has a chance if it could only take a step back and see that it's no longer an innovative company, but instead a peddler of last year's model.
- 16y ago
slackerIII 16y ago
The fundamental problem at Microsoft is that building your career is a better (more lucrative) use of your time than building your product. You can be successful there without ever making a successful product. Microsoft acquired my startup and I spent 2 years there wondering what the hell was going on until I came to that realization.
- Lazlo_Nibble 16y ago
  Yup. You get the behavior you incent, and my impression is that the incentives to play politics at Microsoft are far more pervasive nowadays than the incentives to build good product. In fact, one of the biggest incentives to build good product seems to be the additional leverage it gives you politically...
metageek 16y ago
>its people knew the competition so intimately that the best product managers could rattle off the birthdays of the CEO's kids. That's not competitive research, that's stalking.
VladRussian 16y ago
everybody/everything is subject to natural lifecycle. At 35 one is completely different from the one at 15. The complex living system like a large company is subject to it as well. You go through life, you change, you age [the undead of course are exception from the rule, like vampires or IBM]
- Luyt 16y ago
  +1 for the mention of the undead. COBOL is the undead. It refuses to die, billions of lines of COBOL still run today and will still run 50 years from now, probably much longer. In my nightmares I see an Undead Arcane Mage cranking out PROCEDURE DIVISIONS for centuries to come.
bad_user 16y ago
A survey of more than 1,000 Microsoft employees conducted in October by Glassdor.com showed that only 51% of them approved of Ballmer's performance as CEO. I'm familiar with these types of corporate surveys -- the questions are more likely phrased with bias, like "Do you agree that Ballmer is a good CEO?" (careful, he's watching your answers). And then they do an all hands in which results are discussed with team-level granularity to keep anonymity, but if the team has 5 people, out of which you're most likely to speak your mind (and everybody knows it), then everybody knows it was you who criticized the CEO. I've seen such a survey end up with 80% in favor of everything, even though the people were actually discontented with the way the company was being managed -- 51% is pretty bad ;-)
- steve-howard 16y ago
  Glassdoor.com is supposedly anonymous; the Microsoft employees surveyed would have been self-reported.
- GoodIntentions 16y ago
  My former employer did these types of surveys a couple times in the last few years I was there. Supposedly 100% anonymous but the survey link mailed to each employee had a hashed (unique) query string. People not taking part in the survey got follow up notices till they complied. No one believed any of it was anonymous. The results were worthless, but quoted regularly. It was that type of place.
ascendant 16y ago
Microsoft lost its way once Gates left. He was the visionary that started the company, and Ballmer was just a businessman. They need a visionary to lead, and from what I've read they need to do away with the internal turf wars. I know I've read a lot of blog posts from insiders saying that great ideas get smothered by other divisions all the time when they feel "threatened" by them.
ajays 16y ago
To quote Steve Jobs: "The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste. And I don't mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way, in the sense that they don't think of original ideas, and they don't bring much culture into their products. " This is so true. With other leading companies, you'll often see a product and it'll be so well designed and everything will be so thought out, that it'll bring an instant smile to your face. With Microsoft's products, on the other hand, you're often frowning the minute you open them. Just today, I fired up Entourage (MS Outlook for Mac) over a really flaky connection; and the first thing it does is update the Bulk Mail folder. Really, Microsoft? Would that be my first priority when I open an email client, to see what new junk mail has arrived? Then it proceeded to update other sundry folders, and near the end it did it update the Inbox (which is what I was waiting for).
- goldmab 16y ago
  Making usable software is extremely difficult, and I don't think Microsoft has been much worse at it than any of the other big companies. They have both well-designed products and poorly-designed products. It's such a huge company with so many different development teams of varying quality that it's silly to attribute the behavior of Entourage to all of Microsoft, as in, "Really, Microsoft?"
  - ajays 16y ago
    This is just but one example. I could give dozens more. The reality is: using MSFT products _often_ leave one frustrated and exasperated. These little paper cuts add up.
Osiris 16y ago
Google has apparently taken this lesson to heart. With Page taking over, it looks like his goal is to allow each group to act more independently, like startups, and to reduce the management structure so teams have more flexibility to do what they want to be successful.
joeycfan 16y ago
MS was boned the day Bill left - he was the Walt Disney of MS. Now, it's on the road to being just another company. Especially with the Frankenstein feet of Ubuntu getting closer to it every day.

148 points by jeffwidman 16y ago

"Windows Everywhere" is a bad strategy for Microsoft. I still don't think Windows Phone 7 was a good name. Why didn't they just go with Microsoft Phone or something?

rbanffy 16y ago
I believe that kind of misperception happens when you ask your employees the important questions rather than asking your competition's customers.
- me_again 16y ago
  I have to disagree. You think Apple polled Windows Mobile users what to call the iPhone?
  - rbanffy 16y ago
    No, but Apple has Steve Jobs. Microsoft has Ballmer. There is a difference. ;-)
    - kenjackson 16y ago
      But the name of the iPod originally came from a freelance marketing guy, not Jobs himself. After the success of the iPod, the iPhone name was pretty easy. With that said they could have called it the Apple Phone and probably not lost a sale.
      - rbanffy 16y ago
        Since the iMac is a Mac, the iPod is not a pod, it seems the name "iPhone" shares more with the iMac than the iPod. Microsoft's product problems are not that related to naming.
      - stevenj 16y ago
        "Good artists copy, great artists steal." -Picasso Jobs is an artist. Ballmer isn't.
g123g 16y ago
xPhone would have been nice, reminding people that they also created something as cutting edge as XBox which gave Sony and Nintendo a serious run for their money.
- lotusleaf1987 16y ago
  That would just remind people of the iPhone every time they mention an xPhone.
  - alexqgb 16y ago
    Which reminds me, Apple doesn't sell an iBox.
shareme 16y ago
CE=Communicate Everywhere, was not a good name either
binarycheese 16y ago
Zune Phone would have been better than that horrible WP7 name.

ozziegooen 16y ago

It seems like most of Microsoft wants Steve Ballmer to make a major change to Microsoft. I'd really like to see him follow the "New Detroit" idea and announce a major re-thinking of the company. But, I'm sure he won't. They'll complain, his approval ratings will get worse, Microsoft will decline, and he will stay in denial. Peter Drucker is rolling in his grave.

pnathan 16y ago
You mean MS isn't applying the "Business X-Ray" and start cutting products? :) Right now, the only MS product I rely on is... ... ... ... Yeah. Everything MS that I use is in a support role (Windows). I don't use any MS products directly.
anamax 16y ago
> I'd really like to see him follow the "New Detroit" idea and announce a major re-thinking of the company. How about we wait until "new Detroit" actually succeeds before using it as a model? Folks are constantly doing "major re-thinking" of various things and most of the ones that get implemented turn out to be disasters, especially the urban ones. ("The projects" were one such "re-think".)

marshray 16y ago

What I found most interesting about that article was how, unlike most articles on CNN, the comments were dominated by people saying approximately "Yes I actually worked there from xx to yy and I fully agree with the substance of this article."

DanielBMarkham 16y ago

This is the natural end-game of being a hugely successful company: you box yourself in. You make so many rules about what can happen and how it all has to work that nothing can escape. They have to break up. I just don't see any other way around it. Each little new idea that might help somebody competes with dozens of special interests all looking out for some little fiefdom or concern that may or may not be important -- nobody knows. The place becomes a huge echo chamber where outsiders can't be heard except through marketing studies and sales staff reporting through the chain of command. I wish this situation was unique to Microsoft, but it is not. Any large shop that makes software ends up creating their own prison. The open question is whether Google and Facebook will also end up in this same spot.

kenjackson 16y ago
The open question is whether Google and Facebook will also end up in this same spot. As you said, everyone will end up here. There's virtually no way a rational company can avoid it. It's textbook Innovator's Dilemma. Eventually you're faced with a situation that there is a new product/service that is cannibalizing your product. You can hasten the cannibalization of your cash cow and maybe succeed in this new space (or maybe not), or you can milk you cash cow for all its worth. If you do the math its almost always better to NOT hasten your own demise for an uncertain future. But even if you were to break them up, there's really no good way to break them up that really helps all that much. Windows and Office? Nothing else can really exist on its own. Now you have two big monsters that have the same problems, but spread out in two companies. I think you have to let nature take its course. Which probably means some breakout technology that lets them continue their cash cow while providing new scenarios. If Windows 8 can actually merge the desktop, tablet, and phone in a way never even envisioned, that would be a shot. But it's such a long shot I wouldn't hold out much hope.
- MartinCron 16y ago
  Even if integrating desktop, tablet, and phone in a way that has never been envisioned is a good idea at all (and I can't say). I feel that Windows 8 will either be way too soon to do it well, or they will way take too long to ship Windows 8. We haven't even got one proven good iteration of anything Windows on phone or tablet yet.

mw63214 16y ago

I still don't get how all these articles frame the debate as Microsoft playing catch-up with all the "innovation" coming out of Apple? I get the management culture and internal struggles and "analysis paralysis" that comes with the cover-your-butt mentality, but as far as I can tell, Microsoft is one of the very few companies that has entire departments dedicated bringing cutting-edge technologies to market. The only other companies that comes close(that I've seen) are Google and perhaps Philips. Talk to researches at elite technology schools, and I would venture to guess that they would put Microsoft far ahead of Apple, and maybe Google, in the innovation race. However, if you talk management or P/E people, they would probably give you a different answer. So I guess I'm in agreement that there's an internal problem at Microsoft, but that it lies with the culture, not the actual scope of their ability to innovate.

danilocampos 16y ago
> Microsoft is one of the very few companies that has entire departments dedicated bringing cutting-edge technologies to market. So where are these technologies? And why isn't Microsoft hauling huge sacks of money home each year from multiple products that didn't exist in the 90's? As far as I can tell, they make money from vendor lock-in with Office and Windows, and a gaming division founded by a visionary who left because he couldn't stand working there anymore.
- schwabacher 16y ago
  Kinect is pretty impressive, and I think WP7 is innovative in its ability to display content on a small screen in a natural way. I don't know if I agree that they are ahead of Google and Apple, but they have come up with a few cool things.
  - danilocampos 16y ago
    Kinect is awesome, but as I said here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2420579 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2420579 They bought Kinect from another company – the hard work of getting approvals and resources and everything else to start on it had already been done outside of Microsoft. It's definitely an impressive bit of tech, but would it have been possible were its genesis subject to the byzantine internal politics of Microsoft? I dunno. I wouldn't put money on it. As to WP7, it's actually more of an indictment of Microsoft than it is a credit to them. Consider how much of a clusterfuck their mobile strategy has been for the last four years. It took them forever to get their bureaucratic shit together and actually ship something that resembled a next generation smartphone, and once they did, they did a piss-poor job supporting and improving the platform, despite the very high standard set by both Google and Apple for the same. It's a perfect example of their inability to execute or respond to changes in their industry.

d4nt 16y ago

I've often thought that Microsoft would have done much better if the justice dept had broken it up. Being everything to everyone just doesn't work as a business strategy. But separate Windows/XBox and Office/enterprise apps companies could focus on their respective markets.

simonw 16y ago

""" Yet Ballmer & Co. remain in denial, they say, because the great gushers of cash Windows and Office generate means they don't feel the urgency they otherwise would –shielded from the pain of its many disappointments by two of the more successful franchises in the history of business. """ That reminds me of an article about Pixar (which I can't find now) which talked about how the management team are especially careful to seek out problems when the company is being successful. If stuff is going well, it's easy to gloss over problems with morale, teamwork etc.

alexqgb 16y ago
I believe Ed Catmull refers to this as 'keeping your crises small.' That is to say, it's much better to actively surface problems before they leave the shop than it is to ship with issues, and try to deal with implosions after the fact (ahem, Vista). Here he is, giving a really good talk at Stanford Business School, in which he covers this (among other good ideas). About an hour, but worth much more. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2h2lvhzMDc http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2h2lvhzMDc Interestingly, an ethos like this suggests that the fate of Microsoft is NOT inevitable. It's only becomes that way when you no longer care about shipping garbage. Exhibit B: Detroit in the 70's and 80's.

ozziegooen 16y ago

Some good quotes from the comments: "I personally know two women got promoted to be managers, not because of their performance, but because they each is a higher manager's mistress. In short, Microsoft's is a fear-based culture. How could Microsoft not fall rapidly?" "I'd attend a meeting where we needed 3 or 4 relevant people to discuss something but 30 or more would show up, to represent their group's interests, even if they had no real idea of what was going on. It was nearly impossible to reach any consensus, all decisions ultimately got made by whatever interested PM had the most clout - often not the PM with the most expertise or relevance" " I recall the sole-sucking Business Process Reviews we'd go through. The culmination would be a Bill/Steve meeting. It was the 30 people developing 98 slide powerpoints with 2 point font (again, no exaggeration). It was game over for me once I sat through that."

kkshin 16y ago

One of Microsoft's biggest problems that contributes to their insular view is that they are located in Redmond. They're insulated from the rest of the highly competitive technology field (except for Amazon). This works out great for them when it comes to retaining talent in Redmond as employees are usually not willing to uproot their lifestyle to head to 'greener pastures'. Contrast this to how Google handles compensation and employee retention. Granted, Google is a much smaller organization and can afford to be more nimble, but part of it has to do with with the fact that being in the valley means that its incredibly easy for talented, motivated engineers to move to the next hot startup once they're dissatisfied with their current job. In Redmond, however, these options don't really exist and creates a culture of stagnation. People goto their jobs because they have and leave as soon as it is culturally acceptable. I fear a lot of Microsoft's future as I just don't believe that they are able to recruit top young talent anymore. Not only is Microsoft not a "hip" place to work anymore, but their compensation is generally below market. Its pretty standard for funded startups to give more BASE salary than Microsoft. Google's base is roughly 50% more than what Microsoft pays. New hires at Google make more money than level 64 Microsoft engineers (5 levels from starting). Microsoft will continue to execute and create good products, but until their internal culture drastically changes they will slowly slide into irrelevance.

MartinCron 16y ago
I'm not going to claim that Microsoft isn't too insular (it is) and I live and work in Seattle on purpose, so I'm a little biased about this, but I don't think it's just about the location. Besides Amazon being a huge presence, more and more established tech companies are opening development offices here (Google, Facebook, Zynga) just to take advantage of the talent that's here. Not to mention the fairly healthy startup culture that feeds from and back into the beast in Redmond. Leadership, culture, and politics are all much bigger problems than geography.
- potatolicious 16y ago
  I agree leadership, culture, and politics are bigger problems than geography, but it's still an issue. Sniping younger people from MSFT is sometimes trivially easy because of its remote location in Redmond - surrounded almost exclusively by nice, quiet suburbs. I know a lot of MSFTies braving the commute across the lake daily (1-1.5h each way!), but people get tired of it fast, and by and large the young want to live on the west side, in the city proper, not out in the 'burbs. There's a reason why Google is now in Fremont, Facebook is downtown by the Market... I know personally (and some others who feel the same way) that there's not a chance I'll take a commute over the lake every day, and likewise no chance I'll live on the east side.

ibdknox 16y ago

As a recently departed (read 5 months) ex-PM at Microsoft, I think MS's problems, at least in my division, stem from three things: a lack of vision/leadership, too inward of a focus, and the ridiculous bevy of meaningless communication. I think the article touches on each of these in a certain way, but not exactly in the same way I mean them. One thing I noticed about the middle management at MS was that they never defined a direction. No one ever set out a vision. The result of this was that each little section of a product would decide what the best possible direction for the product would be and build features to that vision. The summation of this effort is a frankenstein product with a user experience that is equally as scary. No one worked together unless they were forced to and even when they did, they never really worked toward a common goal. Based on my experience, I believe that a single charasmatic, intelligent, and visionary person could have easily turned our division around. All it would take is strong leadership and a crystal clear vision. We had neither. The article makes a point of MS being focused too much on itself, and I wholeheartedly agree. One of the things I was praised for was knowing what the rest of the tech world was doing (I worked on VS). What astounded me was how little others knew about non-MS technologies. We were beaten to the punch by other products nearly every time because we only ever focused inward and not on what the world itself was doing. Moreover, when people did look out the window they focused on the wrong things and instead of trying to innovate saw it as a need to start chasing tail lights. Lastly, I got several hundred emails a day as a PM. Despite that deluge of written communication, I felt that no one was really ever saying anything of value. Sadly, most people aren't great communicators and the result of a culture that promotes a ton of communication is a torrent of useless discussions that take away from what really matters. It seemed to me that most managers were there solely to deal with the fact that no one was working together or communicating properly. I would argue that at least 1/3 of a person's workload at MS is the direct result of this inability to communicate and it absolutely destroyed many of the efforts I would've liked to have seen succeed. I don't believe replacing Ballmer is some magic bullet. I think the company needs to be 1/10 of the size to reduce communication and to get people working together. I think it needs someone with a vision for the way things should be that isn't based on what's already out there. And I think Microsoft has a chance if it could only take a step back and see that it's no longer an innovative company, but instead a peddler of last year's model.

16y ago

slackerIII 16y ago

The fundamental problem at Microsoft is that building your career is a better (more lucrative) use of your time than building your product. You can be successful there without ever making a successful product. Microsoft acquired my startup and I spent 2 years there wondering what the hell was going on until I came to that realization.

Lazlo_Nibble 16y ago
Yup. You get the behavior you incent, and my impression is that the incentives to play politics at Microsoft are far more pervasive nowadays than the incentives to build good product. In fact, one of the biggest incentives to build good product seems to be the additional leverage it gives you politically...

metageek 16y ago

>its people knew the competition so intimately that the best product managers could rattle off the birthdays of the CEO's kids. That's not competitive research, that's stalking.

VladRussian 16y ago

everybody/everything is subject to natural lifecycle. At 35 one is completely different from the one at 15. The complex living system like a large company is subject to it as well. You go through life, you change, you age [the undead of course are exception from the rule, like vampires or IBM]

Luyt 16y ago
+1 for the mention of the undead. COBOL is the undead. It refuses to die, billions of lines of COBOL still run today and will still run 50 years from now, probably much longer. In my nightmares I see an Undead Arcane Mage cranking out PROCEDURE DIVISIONS for centuries to come.

bad_user 16y ago

A survey of more than 1,000 Microsoft employees conducted in October by Glassdor.com showed that only 51% of them approved of Ballmer's performance as CEO. I'm familiar with these types of corporate surveys -- the questions are more likely phrased with bias, like "Do you agree that Ballmer is a good CEO?" (careful, he's watching your answers). And then they do an all hands in which results are discussed with team-level granularity to keep anonymity, but if the team has 5 people, out of which you're most likely to speak your mind (and everybody knows it), then everybody knows it was you who criticized the CEO. I've seen such a survey end up with 80% in favor of everything, even though the people were actually discontented with the way the company was being managed -- 51% is pretty bad ;-)

steve-howard 16y ago
Glassdoor.com is supposedly anonymous; the Microsoft employees surveyed would have been self-reported.
GoodIntentions 16y ago
My former employer did these types of surveys a couple times in the last few years I was there. Supposedly 100% anonymous but the survey link mailed to each employee had a hashed (unique) query string. People not taking part in the survey got follow up notices till they complied. No one believed any of it was anonymous. The results were worthless, but quoted regularly. It was that type of place.

ascendant 16y ago

Microsoft lost its way once Gates left. He was the visionary that started the company, and Ballmer was just a businessman. They need a visionary to lead, and from what I've read they need to do away with the internal turf wars. I know I've read a lot of blog posts from insiders saying that great ideas get smothered by other divisions all the time when they feel "threatened" by them.

ajays 16y ago

To quote Steve Jobs: "The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste. And I don't mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way, in the sense that they don't think of original ideas, and they don't bring much culture into their products. " This is so true. With other leading companies, you'll often see a product and it'll be so well designed and everything will be so thought out, that it'll bring an instant smile to your face. With Microsoft's products, on the other hand, you're often frowning the minute you open them. Just today, I fired up Entourage (MS Outlook for Mac) over a really flaky connection; and the first thing it does is update the Bulk Mail folder. Really, Microsoft? Would that be my first priority when I open an email client, to see what new junk mail has arrived? Then it proceeded to update other sundry folders, and near the end it did it update the Inbox (which is what I was waiting for).

goldmab 16y ago
Making usable software is extremely difficult, and I don't think Microsoft has been much worse at it than any of the other big companies. They have both well-designed products and poorly-designed products. It's such a huge company with so many different development teams of varying quality that it's silly to attribute the behavior of Entourage to all of Microsoft, as in, "Really, Microsoft?"
- ajays 16y ago
  This is just but one example. I could give dozens more. The reality is: using MSFT products _often_ leave one frustrated and exasperated. These little paper cuts add up.

Osiris 16y ago

Google has apparently taken this lesson to heart. With Page taking over, it looks like his goal is to allow each group to act more independently, like startups, and to reduce the management structure so teams have more flexibility to do what they want to be successful.

joeycfan 16y ago

MS was boned the day Bill left - he was the Walt Disney of MS. Now, it's on the road to being just another company. Especially with the Frankenstein feet of Ubuntu getting closer to it every day.