5 ms·

It seems pretty clear that Microsoft's problem isn't with their ability to innovate. It's in their complete inability to get to market quickly, take risks and

It seems pretty clear that Microsoft's problem isn't with their ability to innovate. It's in their complete inability to get to market quickly, take risks and work together. And that is directly related to their HR policies in particular their ranking system.

kvb 14y ago
None of what you wrote is obvious to me. Partly this is because Microsoft is big enough that I find descriptions that treat Microsoft as a monolithic entity unconvincing. After all, they got Kinect to market quickly. SharePoint seemed to come out of nowhere to dominate its market, too. Thankfully, I've never had to deal with stack ranking, but I find it unlikely that it's the explanation behind Microsoft's various failures.
- bunderbunder 14y ago
  Microsoft's got a weird dual personality in that regard. There are plenty of smaller units within Microsoft that manage to do really great things. At the same time, oftentimes when the Mothership decides to try and get involved, what ensues frequently looks more like meddling than coordination. For example, look at how their mobile offering's .NET-based APIs and "WCF lite" GUI toolkit lasted for precisely one generation before someone got the bright idea of yanking it and replacing it with a whole new system based on a gussied-up version of COM. I have a really hard time believing that's an example of coordination. From the outside, it looks a lot more like someone from the Windows division becoming jealous of what folks from the other divisions were accomplishing, and deciding to horn in on that game while simultaneously reasserting the old Win32 technology base at the expense of newer technologies. It's also a spectacular waste of effort, and left a lot of us developers feeling like we just became collateral damage in an internal power struggle.
  - olefoo 14y ago
    > collateral damage in an internal power struggle Why I'm leery of Windows Azure, even though it seems to be doing mostly the right thng.
    - bunderbunder 14y ago
      Ditto. Azure looks nice enough, but at this point I can't in good faith recommend to my employer that we become any more exposed to opportunities for the carpet to get yanked out from under us by an executive in Redmond who's forgotten to take his Ritalin.
- taligent 14y ago
  Kinect was acquired and SharePoint is popular but it really did so on the back of existing infrastructure i.e. it was like an upsell. And I am not saying that stack ranking is responsible for all its failures but I fail to see how it encourages co-operation which is so critical for successful companies.
  - RDeckard 14y ago
    Kinect was not acquired.
potatolicious 14y ago
Not sure why you were downvoted. Upvoted even though I don't particularly agree. Having lived in Seattle for a couple of years, and knowing many Microsoft employees during that time, my outsider's view is that MS's consumer-side failures are largely geographical and cultural. Redmond, or even Bellevue, is extremely isolated from Seattle, which in and of itself is not exactly deeply intertwined with the cultural centers of the US. Locals know this - Microsoft employees who move from Seattle across the lake to the east side often joke about nobody ever visiting them again (sometimes less-than-jokingly). It's also more or less a company town - Microsoft's presence is so overwhelming and absolute that a lot of the technological zeitgeist from the rest of the country never make it there. If you lived/worked there it's easy to believe Microsoft's ridiculously optimistic PR pieces - pieces that would be hilarious when read in any other environment. This isn't even an urban/suburban argument (though it has shades of it), it's a "company town vs. diverse city" thing. Microsoft's geographical location gives its people tunnel vision and a grossly false picture of the technology sector. The second part I've observed is a lack of internal honesty within Microsoft. Failure seems to be couched in safe corporate-speak to the point where it's greatly muted (maybe that's the intent). You cannot expect your work force to pivot and fight hard when they've been falsely told their giant failure was a minor hiccup. I saw this after the WinPhone launch - MS employees were still honestly bullish about its prospects even when the market as a whole had completely rejected it. If MS wants to be nimble in the consumer space, it needs to set up shop in cities where their competitors play - you will not get an honest impression of how your products (or your competitors' products) are doing otherwise. They also need to have frequent, honest, no-holds-barred accountings of how they are doing. If a product was a flop, call it a flop.
- gfodor 14y ago
  Your observation in many ways can be extended to the Microsoft ecosystem as a whole. Microsoft as a company has always had this weird thing where the materials they release (marketing, documentation) are written in an alternative universe where no non-Microsoft technology exists. I haven't been part of the MS ecosystem for a number of years but I do get the sense this has been changing. But in many ways I don't think it's a deliberate framing, it's likely just as much due to the reality that inside of the Redmond/Bellevue bubble, things like Ruby on Rails, the iPhone, and non-IE browsers are weird, untrusted 3rd party technologies that nobody uses (partly because they think Microsoft products by definition are better, partly because they fear if word gets out they are toying with these things there will be negative consequences.) I remember when C# was originally released the degree to which Microsoft managed to pretend like Java did not exist was just plain bizarre. I guess one way to look at it is Microsoft is a good counterweight to the argument you should eat your own dogfood. You should, but you should not do so exclusively.
MatthewPhillips 14y ago
I partially agree. I think it's a combination of 2 things (the second being more or less the same as what you are saying): 1) Their brand reputation became toxic over time. Windows ME was seen as a bad product. XP prior to service pack 1 was seen as a bad product. Normal people knew what the blue screen of death with. Normal people made jokes about the quality of Windows. Correct or not, their market dominance (seen as insurmountable) contributed to it. By the early 2000s, no one liked Microsoft. Windows Mobile was just as good as the competition (pre-iPhone). It might not have been dramatically better, but it was just as good. In the 90s that would have been enough for them to swallow up the market completed, but it didn't happen here. People were slow to adopt smartphones in this time period. 2) They are just an old company. As you said, they are slow to get to market. It's the ship you can't turn around. Google is a lot like Microsoft in their ability to form partnerships, but unlike Microsoft is very nimble and able to adapt to the market, has the courage to try something completely new (Chrome OS was laughed at just a few years ago), and has the right amount of cockiness to make it happen (usually). There can only be one Google/Microsoft in technology. If you accept that, how can Microsoft possibly win?
- bunderbunder 14y ago
  > Their brand reputation became toxic over time. This. Combined with their failure to realize this. I strongly suspect that Windows Phone would have been more successful if they hadn't given it a name that evokes innumerable products with which everyone has a love-hate relationship at best. > They are just an old company. They're 362 days older than Apple.
  - MatthewPhillips 14y ago
    > They're 362 days older than Apple. This Apple is really NeXT.
    - seanmcdirmid 14y ago
      No its not. Culturally, its very similar to the pre-Jobs Apple, just with a lot more focus.
larsberg 14y ago
I'd argue against your statement that the company doesn't: > take risks and work together When I was there, I was _constantly_ being told (as a manager in DevDiv) that our next release had to work together with each and every new technology that might almost be ready near our ship time (Windows, SQL, Office, etc.). This added not only a huge amount of schedule risk, but dramatically slowed everything down. When your development team has to wipe their machine and install a new build of Windows every week (literally true during one ~9 month cycle of a product I was on), you lose a lot of time. Especially when those builds each pass basic smoke tests, so they're sufficient for running tests, but do not pass basic usage tests, so you can't, say, install Visual Studio successfully on some of them. Microsoft is well-practiced at the strategy of lashing together all of the boats before they head off to a battle at sea... And unfortunately I have little sympathy for people who complain about the ranking system. The numbers of "poor" ratings required were so low even back in more-aggressive days that they served more to prevent managers from copping out on delivering hard messages than unjustly delivering bad review scores. Though, certainly, many leads delivered the, "oh, so sorry, couldn't get you a better score" message. But, that's often part of why they're still leads and not managers.
- Jare 14y ago
  I believe the point is that while the software HAS to work together, the people (product owners and stakeholders) often don't. The result is that features cost a lot, and innovation costs even more; overall quality is driven by the lowest common denominator, and most products stagnate naturally because of that.
  - larsberg 14y ago
    I certainly agree with your point about the goal and the issue in some companies. However, having seen Microsoft in action from the inside, any collaborations - most of which are _required_ at gunpoint from top-down - result in a horde of program managers shuttling themselves from building to building "owning" the X->Y relationship, one each per group-pair and arrow direction. It's a win-win for them, as those are a quicker path to promotion than trying to build up internal scope or working with the external market (godforbid <grin>). Frankly, it's really, really expensive and painful for ~2000 developers on three different teams to each be adding a slew of features with one of those teams building on top of and coordinating the other two. Even with huge amounts of communication, tracking, and the best of intents, until the products at the bottom of the chain settle down, you can't make any progress at the top. And when the top is finally making progress, you actually can put developers in front of APIs (in our case) and then you find out that the stuff at the bottom is totally unusable, but it's too late, because they finally stopped churning and want to ship soon. I don't claim there's an easy answer, but throwing more people or tools at the coordination problem doesn't (I've seen it tried).
rbanffy 14y ago
> It seems pretty clear that Microsoft's problem isn't with their ability to innovate Citation needed. Seriously.

kvb 14y ago

None of what you wrote is obvious to me. Partly this is because Microsoft is big enough that I find descriptions that treat Microsoft as a monolithic entity unconvincing. After all, they got Kinect to market quickly. SharePoint seemed to come out of nowhere to dominate its market, too. Thankfully, I've never had to deal with stack ranking, but I find it unlikely that it's the explanation behind Microsoft's various failures.

bunderbunder 14y ago
Microsoft's got a weird dual personality in that regard. There are plenty of smaller units within Microsoft that manage to do really great things. At the same time, oftentimes when the Mothership decides to try and get involved, what ensues frequently looks more like meddling than coordination. For example, look at how their mobile offering's .NET-based APIs and "WCF lite" GUI toolkit lasted for precisely one generation before someone got the bright idea of yanking it and replacing it with a whole new system based on a gussied-up version of COM. I have a really hard time believing that's an example of coordination. From the outside, it looks a lot more like someone from the Windows division becoming jealous of what folks from the other divisions were accomplishing, and deciding to horn in on that game while simultaneously reasserting the old Win32 technology base at the expense of newer technologies. It's also a spectacular waste of effort, and left a lot of us developers feeling like we just became collateral damage in an internal power struggle.
- olefoo 14y ago
  > collateral damage in an internal power struggle Why I'm leery of Windows Azure, even though it seems to be doing mostly the right thng.
  - bunderbunder 14y ago
    Ditto. Azure looks nice enough, but at this point I can't in good faith recommend to my employer that we become any more exposed to opportunities for the carpet to get yanked out from under us by an executive in Redmond who's forgotten to take his Ritalin.
taligent 14y ago
Kinect was acquired and SharePoint is popular but it really did so on the back of existing infrastructure i.e. it was like an upsell. And I am not saying that stack ranking is responsible for all its failures but I fail to see how it encourages co-operation which is so critical for successful companies.
- RDeckard 14y ago
  Kinect was not acquired.

potatolicious 14y ago

Not sure why you were downvoted. Upvoted even though I don't particularly agree. Having lived in Seattle for a couple of years, and knowing many Microsoft employees during that time, my outsider's view is that MS's consumer-side failures are largely geographical and cultural. Redmond, or even Bellevue, is extremely isolated from Seattle, which in and of itself is not exactly deeply intertwined with the cultural centers of the US. Locals know this - Microsoft employees who move from Seattle across the lake to the east side often joke about nobody ever visiting them again (sometimes less-than-jokingly). It's also more or less a company town - Microsoft's presence is so overwhelming and absolute that a lot of the technological zeitgeist from the rest of the country never make it there. If you lived/worked there it's easy to believe Microsoft's ridiculously optimistic PR pieces - pieces that would be hilarious when read in any other environment. This isn't even an urban/suburban argument (though it has shades of it), it's a "company town vs. diverse city" thing. Microsoft's geographical location gives its people tunnel vision and a grossly false picture of the technology sector. The second part I've observed is a lack of internal honesty within Microsoft. Failure seems to be couched in safe corporate-speak to the point where it's greatly muted (maybe that's the intent). You cannot expect your work force to pivot and fight hard when they've been falsely told their giant failure was a minor hiccup. I saw this after the WinPhone launch - MS employees were still honestly bullish about its prospects even when the market as a whole had completely rejected it. If MS wants to be nimble in the consumer space, it needs to set up shop in cities where their competitors play - you will not get an honest impression of how your products (or your competitors' products) are doing otherwise. They also need to have frequent, honest, no-holds-barred accountings of how they are doing. If a product was a flop, call it a flop.

gfodor 14y ago
Your observation in many ways can be extended to the Microsoft ecosystem as a whole. Microsoft as a company has always had this weird thing where the materials they release (marketing, documentation) are written in an alternative universe where no non-Microsoft technology exists. I haven't been part of the MS ecosystem for a number of years but I do get the sense this has been changing. But in many ways I don't think it's a deliberate framing, it's likely just as much due to the reality that inside of the Redmond/Bellevue bubble, things like Ruby on Rails, the iPhone, and non-IE browsers are weird, untrusted 3rd party technologies that nobody uses (partly because they think Microsoft products by definition are better, partly because they fear if word gets out they are toying with these things there will be negative consequences.) I remember when C# was originally released the degree to which Microsoft managed to pretend like Java did not exist was just plain bizarre. I guess one way to look at it is Microsoft is a good counterweight to the argument you should eat your own dogfood. You should, but you should not do so exclusively.

MatthewPhillips 14y ago

I partially agree. I think it's a combination of 2 things (the second being more or less the same as what you are saying): 1) Their brand reputation became toxic over time. Windows ME was seen as a bad product. XP prior to service pack 1 was seen as a bad product. Normal people knew what the blue screen of death with. Normal people made jokes about the quality of Windows. Correct or not, their market dominance (seen as insurmountable) contributed to it. By the early 2000s, no one liked Microsoft. Windows Mobile was just as good as the competition (pre-iPhone). It might not have been dramatically better, but it was just as good. In the 90s that would have been enough for them to swallow up the market completed, but it didn't happen here. People were slow to adopt smartphones in this time period. 2) They are just an old company. As you said, they are slow to get to market. It's the ship you can't turn around. Google is a lot like Microsoft in their ability to form partnerships, but unlike Microsoft is very nimble and able to adapt to the market, has the courage to try something completely new (Chrome OS was laughed at just a few years ago), and has the right amount of cockiness to make it happen (usually). There can only be one Google/Microsoft in technology. If you accept that, how can Microsoft possibly win?

bunderbunder 14y ago
> Their brand reputation became toxic over time. This. Combined with their failure to realize this. I strongly suspect that Windows Phone would have been more successful if they hadn't given it a name that evokes innumerable products with which everyone has a love-hate relationship at best. > They are just an old company. They're 362 days older than Apple.
- MatthewPhillips 14y ago
  > They're 362 days older than Apple. This Apple is really NeXT.
  - seanmcdirmid 14y ago
    No its not. Culturally, its very similar to the pre-Jobs Apple, just with a lot more focus.

larsberg 14y ago

I'd argue against your statement that the company doesn't: > take risks and work together When I was there, I was _constantly_ being told (as a manager in DevDiv) that our next release had to work together with each and every new technology that might almost be ready near our ship time (Windows, SQL, Office, etc.). This added not only a huge amount of schedule risk, but dramatically slowed everything down. When your development team has to wipe their machine and install a new build of Windows every week (literally true during one ~9 month cycle of a product I was on), you lose a lot of time. Especially when those builds each pass basic smoke tests, so they're sufficient for running tests, but do not pass basic usage tests, so you can't, say, install Visual Studio successfully on some of them. Microsoft is well-practiced at the strategy of lashing together all of the boats before they head off to a battle at sea... And unfortunately I have little sympathy for people who complain about the ranking system. The numbers of "poor" ratings required were so low even back in more-aggressive days that they served more to prevent managers from copping out on delivering hard messages than unjustly delivering bad review scores. Though, certainly, many leads delivered the, "oh, so sorry, couldn't get you a better score" message. But, that's often part of why they're still leads and not managers.

Jare 14y ago
I believe the point is that while the software HAS to work together, the people (product owners and stakeholders) often don't. The result is that features cost a lot, and innovation costs even more; overall quality is driven by the lowest common denominator, and most products stagnate naturally because of that.
- larsberg 14y ago
  I certainly agree with your point about the goal and the issue in some companies. However, having seen Microsoft in action from the inside, any collaborations - most of which are _required_ at gunpoint from top-down - result in a horde of program managers shuttling themselves from building to building "owning" the X->Y relationship, one each per group-pair and arrow direction. It's a win-win for them, as those are a quicker path to promotion than trying to build up internal scope or working with the external market (godforbid <grin>). Frankly, it's really, really expensive and painful for ~2000 developers on three different teams to each be adding a slew of features with one of those teams building on top of and coordinating the other two. Even with huge amounts of communication, tracking, and the best of intents, until the products at the bottom of the chain settle down, you can't make any progress at the top. And when the top is finally making progress, you actually can put developers in front of APIs (in our case) and then you find out that the stuff at the bottom is totally unusable, but it's too late, because they finally stopped churning and want to ship soon. I don't claim there's an easy answer, but throwing more people or tools at the coordination problem doesn't (I've seen it tried).

rbanffy 14y ago

> It seems pretty clear that Microsoft's problem isn't with their ability to innovate Citation needed. Seriously.