8 ms·

Well, one more blog post about the "ONE THING THAT KILLED MICROSOFT." Nothing killed Microsoft. It just exhibited mean regression, as everything eventually doe

by qq66 13y ago

Well, one more blog post about the "ONE THING THAT KILLED MICROSOFT." Nothing killed Microsoft. It just exhibited mean regression, as everything eventually does. It found itself on the very top of a mountain in an industry where you have to keep climbing to stay still. The same thing happened to Apple -- it had an unprecendented string of hits with iPod/iPhone/iPad and it took competitors a few years to catch up. Sometimes, a basketball player will make ten straight baskets. He'll seem invincible, then he'll make another and the crowd will go wild. But if he's a 60% shooter, at some point he'll miss a basket, and another, and another, and descend back into reality. That's just how the world is.

sillysaurus2 13y ago
Well, if he's a 60% shooter, then he has a 60% chance of making each shot. If he makes 10 in a row, then he's still 60% likely to make each of the next 3. Your argument seems to be that everything is doomed to fail, but there's no reason why that should be true within a single generation of people.
- qq66 13y ago
  What I'm saying is that the ten consecutive baskets make the spectators in the bleachers temporarily forget that they are watching a 60% shooter. Each consecutive basket takes them further and further into the delusion that what they are seeing is not random. And when the eleventh shot misses the basket, the jarring reintroduction of reality sends them looking for a reason "Why?" when the only real answer is "because."
  - 6d0debc071 13y ago
    The more baskets he gets the more likely it is that it's not random. The chance of him shooting a single basket, if he's predicted to get them 60% of the time and you have evidence justifying that confidence level, is .6 The chance of him shooting two such baskets in a row is 0.36 The chance of him shooting 13 such baskets in a row is 0.0013 It seems unfair to suggest that crowd are behaving irrationally when dealing with such a distribution. In probability you compare against other probabilities to determine what's most rational to believe. So - what's more likely: A cumulative probability that will occur very rarely? or That he's cheating? The more shots he makes the more likely that explanation becomes by comparison.... If people cheat more commonly than the odds of that distribution of shots would happen by chance....
    - aidenn0 13y ago
      They are behaving irrationally: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clustering_illusion http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clustering_illusion
      - brazzy 13y ago
        If they don't know they're watching someone with an accuracy of 60% over hundreds of shots and instead have to judge on nothing but 10 consecutive hits, it's actually perfectly rational to overestimate his ability, though it should of course have a low confidence and be constrained to the known possible range.
      - 6d0debc071 13y ago
        I'm not sure that they are: Yes the most likely time for him to score, all else being equal, is just after he's scored. This is really just looking at the cumulative probability of something not happening - the chance of not scoring on consecutive attempts goes down just as the chance of scoring on consecutive events goes down - (with the remainder constituting the other potential arrangements of observations.) And so observations for given events have a certain tendency, for a certain level of probability, to occur in clusters - which influences how much confidence you can place in something given the data. However, that does not make it likely that that'll keep happening for large runs, it's more likely that a yes will fall after a yes than that it'll happen elsewhere, but more likely is not the same as very likely. And the more observations you make the less likely it is that you're just looking at a cluster that'll occur naturally in a given number of cases. By way of a, perhaps simpler, example: if you flip a coin and it comes up heads six times out of ten, that might just be a fluke. If you flick a coin and it comes up heads six thousand times out of ten thousand, then you can be fairly confident that it's crooked.
  - philwelch 13y ago
    A 60% shooter isn't just a random number generator though, he's a human being with his own psychology. His accuracy for a given five minute stretch might vary based on confidence, fatigue, concentration level, and all of those factors on the opposition. If a player routinely shoots poorly when he's tired, substituting him off for a rest will raise his overall accuracy from 60% to maybe 70%.
InclinedPlane 13y ago
I spent several years at MS, 3 as an FTE, and Microsoft is definitely in decline, partly due to stack ranking, partly due to general cultural shifts from being a big, lumbering company. One of the things you have to realize is that a lot of the dynamics of the company over the last decade have caused a mind boggling amount of talent to simply evaporate out of the company. Many of the "fuck you I'm fully vested" folks who were around in the earlier days of MS either checked out or peaced out whenever they hit their personal bullshit thresholds. More recent hires have generally found that other companies are often more exciting, more rewarding, and more lucrative to work at. MS today tends to punish caring about things (not always, but more often than not). If you try to make a difference and put forth the effort to make merely sensible changes then you'll spend years struggling against the system and if you're lucky you'll only have moderate success to show for it. And the stack ranking system tends to reward people who are good at gaming the system rather than those who are good at actually delivering anything of substantive value to end users. Naturally, all of this tends to be very discouraging to engineers, especially those with a bit of maturity and experience who see that with their talent and skills they could go elsewhere and not get shit on all the time, work for a company they wouldn't be embarrassed about, and actually get stock options that are worth something. And, since techies tend to value working alongside other techies that they admire and look up to this sort of process tends to be a positive feedback loop. It's simply unimaginable that this loss of talent hasn't had a huge impact on the company.
- einhverfr 13y ago
  That and the levels system ensures that a lot of people who do care and have the talent have no way to contribute.
- dalek_cannes 13y ago
  Stack ranking causes employees to compete with each other rather than the company's competitors. It's all downhill from there.
  - InclinedPlane 13y ago
    It also encourages people to game the system through various ways. Such as ordinary office politics, of course. Also working on more visible and easily completed projects than tackling tough, more diffuse projects. And especially in spending time on new projects instead of fixing existing stuff. All of this has seriously hurt productivity within the company and the ability of big parts of the company to execute on projects that actually provide serious end-user benefits. The way to get ahead seems to be to work on the easiest and flashiest projects regardless of customer impact.
ryanhuff 13y ago
Comparing Apple's smartphone business to Microsoft does not appreciate the position that Microsoft was in during the 1990's. They essentially owned personal computing. They could put you out of business with a single announcement. Apple (or Google) does not hold that power. Microsoft's diminishing consumer market leadership has more to do with a changing world, and their inability to react, then competitors catching up.
einhverfr 13y ago
As I have put it, the problem with Microsoft is that they have this huge HR bureaucracy which seems intent primarily on ensuring that people do not advance their careers too fast. The review process is one part of it, but also consider that when I worked at Product Support Services, I worked with people who should have been coding Microsoft software but weren't due to the tyranny of the levels system. Those who were A- eventually were hired to do this. Those who were FTE's either left to pursue technical work or ended up left to rot as things were moved overseas. I knew very talented people who never got a chance because to get a chance they would have had to quit first. I think the fundamental problem has always been bureaucracy and a mentality of loyalty to one's department over loyalty to the users. I could tell you stories about rules I broke in order to take care of users in line with what I saw as the interests of the company as a whole.
- chris_wot 13y ago
  I would be interested in hearing those stories!
  - einhverfr 13y ago
    Ok, so here was one. There was a point where the Microsoft Office XP (or was it 2003?) advertised different qualifying products than it actually required. I felt that if we advertised it on the box, we needed to honor that. Our managers said, no, offer a refund. So I went ahead and I generated bypass keys allowing people to install the software without a qualifying product. I did so openly. My bosses were not happy. They said they were trying to solve the problem and we needed to do things their way. So finally after a few weeks of this frustration I broke the chain of command and talked with the general manager of my department instead. He agreed that this was totally unacceptable and got the manufacturing stopped, packaging re-done, and the like. My bosses were horrified that I would break the chain of command like this and I got reprimanded by them. Of course the word came down from the top not to generate bypass keys anymore but to offer the customers a free full version we would send to them at our cost. I looked at this, and offered it to the customers, but offered as an alternative a bypass key so they could just install the software they purchased, saving our company time and money. Honestly, I was surprised we weren't sued over the problem, but I was going to be darned sure it was not over someone calling in to my line. There were plenty of other things I did: For example, I actually delivered Linux tech support a few times (always very careful to set expectations that this could not be expected in the future). Needless to say, since my loyalties were to the company and the customers over my bosses, these never came out as positives in review.
kabdib 13y ago
Ex Microsoftie here. There are a few things I'd fix with MS, but I would definitely start with the forced curve system. It's basically evil. Sort of balled-up in this is the sense of fear that forces people to make bad decisions just to get promoted (my favorite example of this: The "Metroization" of the Visual Studio 2012 interface, with nearly unusable color schemes and all-caps menus. I have to assume that somebody got promoted because making VS 2012 look like the flavor of the day looked good on a review). I was in Xbox, which had a /lot/ of very, very good people in the same review band that I was in. It's hard to shine when you're sitting next to those folks; it's also hard to imagine not working with them, because one of the reasons I go to work is to study at the feet of masters. So I was looking at an "okay" review, maybe even "sub-okay", while doing work that would probably have brought the company a few hundred million dollars over the next ten years. And I couldn't stand it. And that's one of the reasons I left. Seriously, fuck the Microsoft review system. It's broken. Most everyone with a brain /knows/ that it costs MS really good people. But Ballmer and Brummel (the head of HR) seem to love it; maybe it makes it easy for them to remove threats? I honestly don't know why they think it's good.
- jblow 13y ago
  I think it just plugs into the Ayn Randian / objectivist mindset. "Some people are hard workers, and others are parasites, let's identify the parasites and axe them and we will have a utopia." Yes, nobody thinks of it in such an outright simplistic way, but I do think this is the basic appeal.
  - kabdib 13y ago
    It's a nice theory. But it doesn't work.
    - enraged_camel 13y ago
      Looks like the objectivists downvoted you. Such is the nature of Hacker News!
    - narrator 13y ago
6d0debc071 13y ago
60% may be his predicted mean, that his scores - taken as measurements - will tend to regress towards over time. However, that does not mean that there isn't an answer for why that happens; why he's a 60% shooter rather than a 70% one. Even if it's just an unsatisfying answer, like he's genetically flawed and was getting tired or something like that.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
keithpeter 13y ago
"There were many reasons for the decline of Microsoft under Steve Ballmer" Yes, when I read the opening sentence of the OA, my first thought was 'perhaps the thing that needs explaining is Microsoft's amazing success in the 1990s'. The rest is the usual random walk of any publicly quoted megacorp, attempting to function under huge weight of the structure.
exmicrosoldier 13y ago
In my opinion, maximizing a new business model is what made it HUGELY successful, and not finding a new business model is what is keeping it flat. I believe that it will have a very hard time transitioning to the "device and services" model with it's current corporate culture, as I understand it, which includes stack ranking. Regarding business models: MSFT had a variety of web services before Google; it had mobile before apple. It popularized the term "smartphone". Sure Google search was better, but the fundamental thing that made google fly as a business was adwords, a different business model than banner ads and paid placement on top. Apple did have a better device than anyone expected, but it made that device price competitive with a huge subsidy from AT&T. XBox choked out Sony Playstation's profit margin by imitating it's business model (lose money on hardware, make it back selling quality games via licenses per cd/hdrom/dvd), and then innovating with XBox Live, which included a new software services you can charge for business model, just not one that scales to dozens of billions a year like Office. If my experiences at Microsoft late 90s, half of the 2000's are still valid, then the currently proposed buisness model will fail. In good software architecture the design choices you make need to match the forces you have affecting your architecture. The business model: "a devices and services company." will require seamless co-operation across a whole company. I didn't see that in my time there. Exchange and SQL Server, two nearly billion dollar businesses, spent non trivial time trying to ally with other teams and kill each other "and take the mandate" rather than try to deliver great software. I had friends who worked in Exchange and SQL, and the ones in SQL were actively trying to make SQL Server do what Exchange does. I don't know if both businesses are merged now or not, but that was one of MANY places I heard about "killing and eating another team", before it happened to two teams I was part of, twice in a 6 year career. When a team is "killed and eaten" by another team, the eating team gets to distribute the dead team's 4.0's, and have more 4.0's for their team. Also, at MSFT at the time, there was a tremendous amount of lack of respect for other teams. "Those VB programmers at MSN don't know how to write scalable software." "Those jokers in...X...aren't really technical". I was in a visual studio building in a meeting, and a windows server group had the chutzpah to convince us that they had reserved our room and kick us out of our own meeting. As we left, one of the people in the meeting to heckle us with a derogatory comment of "We're the people who make all the money around here, we're more important." Stack ranking, plus the only Type A's filter, plus the seperate businesses with seperate P&L, and VPs that are stack ranked versus each other will not lead to seamless integration between diverse services and a great user experience. The way you pay, the way you measure, the persistent theme of "us versus them", and the filter for people that came in the door all contribute to a poisonous work environment for maybe 60% of the people. It wasn't poisonous everywhere, 2/3rds of my time there I wouldn't have traded for the world, but it was incredibly refreshing when I left to work for a place where the enemy was outside the building versus inside.

by qq66 13y ago

sillysaurus2 13y ago

Well, if he's a 60% shooter, then he has a 60% chance of making each shot. If he makes 10 in a row, then he's still 60% likely to make each of the next 3. Your argument seems to be that everything is doomed to fail, but there's no reason why that should be true within a single generation of people.

qq66 13y ago
What I'm saying is that the ten consecutive baskets make the spectators in the bleachers temporarily forget that they are watching a 60% shooter. Each consecutive basket takes them further and further into the delusion that what they are seeing is not random. And when the eleventh shot misses the basket, the jarring reintroduction of reality sends them looking for a reason "Why?" when the only real answer is "because."
- 6d0debc071 13y ago
  The more baskets he gets the more likely it is that it's not random. The chance of him shooting a single basket, if he's predicted to get them 60% of the time and you have evidence justifying that confidence level, is .6 The chance of him shooting two such baskets in a row is 0.36 The chance of him shooting 13 such baskets in a row is 0.0013 It seems unfair to suggest that crowd are behaving irrationally when dealing with such a distribution. In probability you compare against other probabilities to determine what's most rational to believe. So - what's more likely: A cumulative probability that will occur very rarely? or That he's cheating? The more shots he makes the more likely that explanation becomes by comparison.... If people cheat more commonly than the odds of that distribution of shots would happen by chance....
  - aidenn0 13y ago
    They are behaving irrationally: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clustering_illusion http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clustering_illusion
    - brazzy 13y ago
      If they don't know they're watching someone with an accuracy of 60% over hundreds of shots and instead have to judge on nothing but 10 consecutive hits, it's actually perfectly rational to overestimate his ability, though it should of course have a low confidence and be constrained to the known possible range.
    - 6d0debc071 13y ago
      I'm not sure that they are: Yes the most likely time for him to score, all else being equal, is just after he's scored. This is really just looking at the cumulative probability of something not happening - the chance of not scoring on consecutive attempts goes down just as the chance of scoring on consecutive events goes down - (with the remainder constituting the other potential arrangements of observations.) And so observations for given events have a certain tendency, for a certain level of probability, to occur in clusters - which influences how much confidence you can place in something given the data. However, that does not make it likely that that'll keep happening for large runs, it's more likely that a yes will fall after a yes than that it'll happen elsewhere, but more likely is not the same as very likely. And the more observations you make the less likely it is that you're just looking at a cluster that'll occur naturally in a given number of cases. By way of a, perhaps simpler, example: if you flip a coin and it comes up heads six times out of ten, that might just be a fluke. If you flick a coin and it comes up heads six thousand times out of ten thousand, then you can be fairly confident that it's crooked.
- philwelch 13y ago
  A 60% shooter isn't just a random number generator though, he's a human being with his own psychology. His accuracy for a given five minute stretch might vary based on confidence, fatigue, concentration level, and all of those factors on the opposition. If a player routinely shoots poorly when he's tired, substituting him off for a rest will raise his overall accuracy from 60% to maybe 70%.

InclinedPlane 13y ago

I spent several years at MS, 3 as an FTE, and Microsoft is definitely in decline, partly due to stack ranking, partly due to general cultural shifts from being a big, lumbering company. One of the things you have to realize is that a lot of the dynamics of the company over the last decade have caused a mind boggling amount of talent to simply evaporate out of the company. Many of the "fuck you I'm fully vested" folks who were around in the earlier days of MS either checked out or peaced out whenever they hit their personal bullshit thresholds. More recent hires have generally found that other companies are often more exciting, more rewarding, and more lucrative to work at. MS today tends to punish caring about things (not always, but more often than not). If you try to make a difference and put forth the effort to make merely sensible changes then you'll spend years struggling against the system and if you're lucky you'll only have moderate success to show for it. And the stack ranking system tends to reward people who are good at gaming the system rather than those who are good at actually delivering anything of substantive value to end users. Naturally, all of this tends to be very discouraging to engineers, especially those with a bit of maturity and experience who see that with their talent and skills they could go elsewhere and not get shit on all the time, work for a company they wouldn't be embarrassed about, and actually get stock options that are worth something. And, since techies tend to value working alongside other techies that they admire and look up to this sort of process tends to be a positive feedback loop. It's simply unimaginable that this loss of talent hasn't had a huge impact on the company.

einhverfr 13y ago
That and the levels system ensures that a lot of people who do care and have the talent have no way to contribute.
dalek_cannes 13y ago
Stack ranking causes employees to compete with each other rather than the company's competitors. It's all downhill from there.
- InclinedPlane 13y ago
  It also encourages people to game the system through various ways. Such as ordinary office politics, of course. Also working on more visible and easily completed projects than tackling tough, more diffuse projects. And especially in spending time on new projects instead of fixing existing stuff. All of this has seriously hurt productivity within the company and the ability of big parts of the company to execute on projects that actually provide serious end-user benefits. The way to get ahead seems to be to work on the easiest and flashiest projects regardless of customer impact.

ryanhuff 13y ago

Comparing Apple's smartphone business to Microsoft does not appreciate the position that Microsoft was in during the 1990's. They essentially owned personal computing. They could put you out of business with a single announcement. Apple (or Google) does not hold that power. Microsoft's diminishing consumer market leadership has more to do with a changing world, and their inability to react, then competitors catching up.

einhverfr 13y ago

As I have put it, the problem with Microsoft is that they have this huge HR bureaucracy which seems intent primarily on ensuring that people do not advance their careers too fast. The review process is one part of it, but also consider that when I worked at Product Support Services, I worked with people who should have been coding Microsoft software but weren't due to the tyranny of the levels system. Those who were A- eventually were hired to do this. Those who were FTE's either left to pursue technical work or ended up left to rot as things were moved overseas. I knew very talented people who never got a chance because to get a chance they would have had to quit first. I think the fundamental problem has always been bureaucracy and a mentality of loyalty to one's department over loyalty to the users. I could tell you stories about rules I broke in order to take care of users in line with what I saw as the interests of the company as a whole.

chris_wot 13y ago
I would be interested in hearing those stories!
- einhverfr 13y ago
  Ok, so here was one. There was a point where the Microsoft Office XP (or was it 2003?) advertised different qualifying products than it actually required. I felt that if we advertised it on the box, we needed to honor that. Our managers said, no, offer a refund. So I went ahead and I generated bypass keys allowing people to install the software without a qualifying product. I did so openly. My bosses were not happy. They said they were trying to solve the problem and we needed to do things their way. So finally after a few weeks of this frustration I broke the chain of command and talked with the general manager of my department instead. He agreed that this was totally unacceptable and got the manufacturing stopped, packaging re-done, and the like. My bosses were horrified that I would break the chain of command like this and I got reprimanded by them. Of course the word came down from the top not to generate bypass keys anymore but to offer the customers a free full version we would send to them at our cost. I looked at this, and offered it to the customers, but offered as an alternative a bypass key so they could just install the software they purchased, saving our company time and money. Honestly, I was surprised we weren't sued over the problem, but I was going to be darned sure it was not over someone calling in to my line. There were plenty of other things I did: For example, I actually delivered Linux tech support a few times (always very careful to set expectations that this could not be expected in the future). Needless to say, since my loyalties were to the company and the customers over my bosses, these never came out as positives in review.

kabdib 13y ago

Ex Microsoftie here. There are a few things I'd fix with MS, but I would definitely start with the forced curve system. It's basically evil. Sort of balled-up in this is the sense of fear that forces people to make bad decisions just to get promoted (my favorite example of this: The "Metroization" of the Visual Studio 2012 interface, with nearly unusable color schemes and all-caps menus. I have to assume that somebody got promoted because making VS 2012 look like the flavor of the day looked good on a review). I was in Xbox, which had a /lot/ of very, very good people in the same review band that I was in. It's hard to shine when you're sitting next to those folks; it's also hard to imagine not working with them, because one of the reasons I go to work is to study at the feet of masters. So I was looking at an "okay" review, maybe even "sub-okay", while doing work that would probably have brought the company a few hundred million dollars over the next ten years. And I couldn't stand it. And that's one of the reasons I left. Seriously, fuck the Microsoft review system. It's broken. Most everyone with a brain /knows/ that it costs MS really good people. But Ballmer and Brummel (the head of HR) seem to love it; maybe it makes it easy for them to remove threats? I honestly don't know why they think it's good.

jblow 13y ago
I think it just plugs into the Ayn Randian / objectivist mindset. "Some people are hard workers, and others are parasites, let's identify the parasites and axe them and we will have a utopia." Yes, nobody thinks of it in such an outright simplistic way, but I do think this is the basic appeal.
- kabdib 13y ago
  It's a nice theory. But it doesn't work.
  - enraged_camel 13y ago
    Looks like the objectivists downvoted you. Such is the nature of Hacker News!
  - narrator 13y ago

6d0debc071 13y ago

60% may be his predicted mean, that his scores - taken as measurements - will tend to regress towards over time. However, that does not mean that there isn't an answer for why that happens; why he's a 60% shooter rather than a 70% one. Even if it's just an unsatisfying answer, like he's genetically flawed and was getting tired or something like that.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

keithpeter 13y ago

"There were many reasons for the decline of Microsoft under Steve Ballmer" Yes, when I read the opening sentence of the OA, my first thought was 'perhaps the thing that needs explaining is Microsoft's amazing success in the 1990s'. The rest is the usual random walk of any publicly quoted megacorp, attempting to function under huge weight of the structure.

exmicrosoldier 13y ago

In my opinion, maximizing a new business model is what made it HUGELY successful, and not finding a new business model is what is keeping it flat. I believe that it will have a very hard time transitioning to the "device and services" model with it's current corporate culture, as I understand it, which includes stack ranking. Regarding business models: MSFT had a variety of web services before Google; it had mobile before apple. It popularized the term "smartphone". Sure Google search was better, but the fundamental thing that made google fly as a business was adwords, a different business model than banner ads and paid placement on top. Apple did have a better device than anyone expected, but it made that device price competitive with a huge subsidy from AT&T. XBox choked out Sony Playstation's profit margin by imitating it's business model (lose money on hardware, make it back selling quality games via licenses per cd/hdrom/dvd), and then innovating with XBox Live, which included a new software services you can charge for business model, just not one that scales to dozens of billions a year like Office. If my experiences at Microsoft late 90s, half of the 2000's are still valid, then the currently proposed buisness model will fail. In good software architecture the design choices you make need to match the forces you have affecting your architecture. The business model: "a devices and services company." will require seamless co-operation across a whole company. I didn't see that in my time there. Exchange and SQL Server, two nearly billion dollar businesses, spent non trivial time trying to ally with other teams and kill each other "and take the mandate" rather than try to deliver great software. I had friends who worked in Exchange and SQL, and the ones in SQL were actively trying to make SQL Server do what Exchange does. I don't know if both businesses are merged now or not, but that was one of MANY places I heard about "killing and eating another team", before it happened to two teams I was part of, twice in a 6 year career. When a team is "killed and eaten" by another team, the eating team gets to distribute the dead team's 4.0's, and have more 4.0's for their team. Also, at MSFT at the time, there was a tremendous amount of lack of respect for other teams. "Those VB programmers at MSN don't know how to write scalable software." "Those jokers in...X...aren't really technical". I was in a visual studio building in a meeting, and a windows server group had the chutzpah to convince us that they had reserved our room and kick us out of our own meeting. As we left, one of the people in the meeting to heckle us with a derogatory comment of "We're the people who make all the money around here, we're more important." Stack ranking, plus the only Type A's filter, plus the seperate businesses with seperate P&L, and VPs that are stack ranked versus each other will not lead to seamless integration between diverse services and a great user experience. The way you pay, the way you measure, the persistent theme of "us versus them", and the filter for people that came in the door all contribute to a poisonous work environment for maybe 60% of the people. It wasn't poisonous everywhere, 2/3rds of my time there I wouldn't have traded for the world, but it was incredibly refreshing when I left to work for a place where the enemy was outside the building versus inside.