3 ms·

This is very interesting to me, and I'd like to know more about what didn't work in the previous structure. I worked at Apple for a long time, and if I could h

• kyllo 13y ago
  I agree that, at least for a large company, product/vertical structure is better than functional/horizontal structure, and I think that Microsoft is just too big to be one company at all anymore, and that they should have split off into separate subsidiary companies of a holding company, each with a clear product category and mission, somewhat like GE. Then they can even sell the money-losing ones if the board wishes.
• clauretano 13y ago
  It could be a bit awkward at Microsoft, the way things were in the before time. You had things like a SaaS suite where one component was run by a service operations team under the Office org, but another component in the same suite being in the Server & Tools org. Oh, and then you'd have MSIT running those same services on their own data center infrastructure, with their own team of service engineers. You'd also have a "dedicated" version of that Saas offering, sold to huge corporations, where it was basically the same thing but on dedicated hardware and run by yet another team. There was nothing unified about it. On top of that, you'd have one or two competing products (usually via acquisitions, or one product would be positioned more toward consumers than enterprise), a legacy product, etc all with their own teams. The internal competitors were the enemy.