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Microsoft Employees Critical Of Their Employer
bonch writes "BusinessWeek is running an article on internal unrest at Microsoft from their own employees. 'Once the dream workplace of tech's highest achievers, it is suffering key defections to Google and elsewhere... Much of the sharpest criticism comes from within. Dozens of current and former employees are criticizing -- in BusinessWeek interviews, court testimony, and personal blogs -- the way the company operates internally.' In related news, Steve Ballmer has pledged to make changes inside Microsoft to avoid the embarrassingly long development cycle of Vista, including a 'revamping of the engineering and the processes.' Is it too late?"
Sounds like pretty much everywhere I've worked which at one time seemed a dream job. Eventually things change. Workers set in their ways and expectations grumble the loudest. Truth may be, it still may be a dream place to work, it's just that many people don't like change, where others thrive on it (hint: Change is often an opportunity for promotion or to shift into another position you prefer.
Like my experiences, I fully expect some people will anonymously gripe, but still stay put because the change of finding a new job, fitting into a new workplace, doing work in new and different ways is often a bigger challenge then standing pat.
As for Ballmer, he's going to have to go through the kinds of things IBM has done many times over the past few decades. Competition is out there (notably Linux) and Microsoft really is stagnating. Windows Vista may well be their Edsel.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
We can only hope.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
As the saying on leadership goes: "A fish rots from the head down." If the report about the chair is true, then I would suspect that this is where it begins.
(Again, we don't know if the story is true...)
Try to hack my 31337 firewall!
http://minimsft.blogspot.com/
"We're not Developers, Developers, Developers! for you anymore!"
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
Also on BusinessWeek there's an interview with Ballmer where he dodges every question he's asked (and re-asked) regarding morale issues at Microsoft, competition, release delays with Longhorn/Vista, etc.
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/05_3Oddly he didn't jump around screaming "Developers, developers, developers!!!" this time around.
Quantum mechanics: the dreams that stuff is made of.
I have dealt with people at Microsoft in the past, and found that their problem is not with their engineers or with the guys in the trenches, but with the business development guys. Seriously, how many of them does it take to screw a lightbulb? It's pathetic ... So much schmoozing and nonsense, no focus on real results - everyone is always trying to get that one big deal, not focusing on the incremental stuff that is vital to actual innovation taking place.
... Which they can totally do, as evidenced by the tremendous amount of innovation seen in Office 12, for example ...
The best thing Microsoft could do is make a statement that they will stop issuing statements, and let their work/products speak for themselves
This is no surprise. Microsoft has gotten so big that they have become a jack of all trades but no longer a master at anything. When you try to do everything you expand so large that its hard to control the growth of the company and management policies. Microsofts sole power was in being able to compensate people well but people are leaving not because of money but because they do not like the job. This could be a big problem for Microsoft and we will watch Google and other companies slowly eat up some of the top devs from MS.
All companies have internal employee gripes about working there with very few exceptions. Those exceptions tend to be companies that are flush with cash and are able to treat their employees as they should be treated. But when it comes to "brass tacks", the niceties are the first thing to go. Now, I should also say that I can't stand Microsoft or Windows, I think they're both shite. But, Windows isn't going to suddenly disappear and niether is Microsoft. Witness the auto industry. There are companies out there that make shitty autos but you don't see them dying out. You also don't see consumers russhing out to buy a new car every time the auto industry says to do so. The same thing applies to Windows. As much as Microsoft might wish that people will flock to Vista (whatever flavor) the real truth, and they know this, is that there are people who are STILL going to be running Windows 95 out there if it still works for them. So, none of this article warrants gloating about the demise of Microsoft. It ain't gonna happen. If it were, then Chevy should have disappeared decades ago.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
With some of its key breakthrough features gone, Vista's improvements include better handling of peripheral devices, such as printers and scanners, and cutting in half the time it takes to start up. Those are needed improvements, and there's no doubt that hundreds of millions of copies will be sold as people upgrade to new PCs. But the changes are hardly the stuff of cutting-edge software engineering.
Indeed. Microsoft is going to have to rely heavily on its marketing dept. in order for Vista to sell. I mean, seriously, what does it really have to offer that is a big improvemnt on XP, or even 2000 for that matter. Sure, the fanboys will all buy it becasue it is the "new and exciting MS Operating System" and joe sixpack will get it with his new computer, but what businesess will be able to justify the cost of a meaningless upgrade.
If MS is really going to be pushing better printer and scanner compatibilty, a new GUI, and faster startup times as the big features in Vista, they might as well just let all of their top programmers go to google and start hiring all of the top marketing people in the world to replace them.
I'm a MSFT stockholder. All you layabouts, get off your duffs and get back to work. Whaddya want, more free Cokes? Give me a break.
You want to be smurfy, get good enough to work for the research arm and then we'll talk. Otherwise be thankful you aren't stuck in a cubicle at Symantec or somewhere lame.
Youse don't know how good youse got it.
Well, I guess that's better than internal unrest from someone elses employees
And where are we now? IE7 is the same browser it's been for, what, 4 or 5 years now... they just added tabs. Did they even write the code for tabbed browsing themselves or did they send the CrazyBrowser guys a couple dollars for their code? At a time when CEO's and programmers alike should be getting exciting, we have reports of pissed of workers and incidents involving Google-cursing and chair-chucking. And what's the deal with WinFS anyway? We hear that we'll need a gig of RAM to run this thing, but what the heck is it going to be used for?
I can't see how they could release this for, as Balmer puts it, an embarassingly long time. If Balmer is 'revamping of the engineering and the processes' this late in the game, things must be pretty rough. Development seems pretty stale right now and the pressure is on Microsoft -- if this OS isn't as popular as it has historically been people (and distributors) might take a look at Red Hat or Ubuntu.
So yeah... this alleged change comes a liiitle bit late.
To put this in perspective MS has 61,000 employees. If MS has 200 disgruntled employees then that's 0.003% of their staff. At a former company we had 150 employees and it's safe to say that 10% of them were disgruntled, if not more. If you want to find a disgruntled employees, look not at Microsoft but at the DMV, Delta and Northwest airlines. /devils advocate
The culture just isn't what it used to be, and besides that, people are getting burned out, considering the kind of hours we've kept for the last howevermany years. Not to mention that management has made some bad decisions lately that have hurt the company, and there's a murmur of concern going around that Cars is going to be Pixar's first ho-hum movie.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.
Chairs will continue to fly until morale improves.
As a soon-to-graduate senior, I can't possibly express how much I want to avoid Microsoft, but I can try. For one, you have anti-compete clauses. Although from what I've seen and heard these are pretty common, but MS is in everything. I think the only IT industry they haven't infiltrated is porn, and while it is a very richeous and worthwhile industry, that isn't what I'm trying to do with my life. Combine that with the fact that their development is very dictated: 'this is what we want, we just need manpower to actually type the code in.' Microsoft, you used to be cool. What happened to you? You fell off and started making things quick and cheap (no so quick in Vista's case) to make as much money as possible. While this may be a smart approach to business, it isn't a smart approach to customers. These problems are what net you all the criticism
Perception is the thin dividing line between reality and fiction.
Microsoft has so much money that besides the screw ups we KNOW about, it could screw up on numerous unknown projects without ever having a hit to it's bottom line. Thus you get a culture where stupid is as management does. The end result is lack of true innovation which also results in lack of choice for consumers and businesses.
About 20 years ago we have various vendors come in and pitch their Big Iron to us. We hardly needed DEC to show up, because we already loved them. We had to let IBM show up because the boss always had a soft spot in his heart for them and people with suits and ties who know nothing about operations or programming think IBM=Answers.
So these IBM guys come in and pitch to us like they were made in the Gotti family. A few questions are fielded semi-informatively, but the tone said "listen you stupid moron, stop wasting our time, just buy the the thing because we know and you should know, there's nothing better and you're just a damn fool if you don't".
We didn't. Ironically we ended up with Pr1me, because our new software would run on it. IBM eventually went through a few years of real housecleaning, as everytime I tried to contact Sales regarding an order for an RS/6000, I got a different salesman or an answering machine with "I'm no longer with IBM please direct your call to ..." Finally getting the order through a district sales manager for the state(!) and even he had to be told what we were ordering and not to keep trying to tack on color monitors and laser printers we didn't want or need.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
...to change a lightbulb?
Seven.
One Project Manager...to write up the requirements.
One MBU Intern...to report on how Apple engineers did it in Tiger.
One Marketing Droid...to call CNet and tell Ina Fried that it'll be changed in an innovative and exciting new way in Windows Vista.
One Software Engineer...to begin work on it and then take a job at Google implementing Lightbulb Beta.
One CEO...to throw his chair around his office when he finds out.
One PR Flack...to explain to Bob Enderle how "although the lightbulb won't be changed in Windows Vista, it will be released in 2007 as a separate, more refined technology."
And Paul Thurrot, who will receive a private demostration of the lightbulb, devote one week on SuperSite explaining that Apple's lightbulb in Tiger is dimmer, Google's Lightbulb Beta is "limited," and MS's solution, while late, is indeed superior and "Highly recommended."
Unbreakable office furniture!
It's just like Apple when Jobs was ousted and Scully took over. The pinheads don't know how to inspire/lead/challenge the techies.
Same thing with HP when it was no longer a place for engineers, run by engineers.
You can probably find the same pattern repeating at lots of high tech companies.
From the article:
After the ruling he praised Google, noting, "the culture is very supportive, collaborative, innovative, and Internet-like -- and that's bottoms-up innovation rather than top-down direction."
Why do I get a mental picture of a row of Google engineers mooning Steve Ballmer?
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
I worked at Microsoft for a few years. I never found it to be a dream workplace. Many of the largest complaints I had (that of feeling like I was the victim of interdepartment turf wars) turned out to be extremely widespread.
The basic problem is that despite a huge amount of effort on the part of senior management pushing a message of "help beyond your department," departments still have to justify budgets, and are very unwilling to cite cross-department contributions in this process. So you get a message of "go do this: it is important to the company" and then when you are done you get "I wish you hadn't taken the time out of studying for more MCP exams to make these admittedly great contributions."
The problem was so bad in my department that the General Manager went to great lengths to make himself available on the floor and break down any image of him as being inaccessible. And yet he was entirely unsuccessful in this endevour.
When I left, it became clear that my entire department was not long to remain in the US. About 2 months ago, they finally committed to lay off those in my department.
I never found Microsoft to be a dream place to work. Politics of the worst sort (yeah, politics are everywhere), and in particular failure to recognize outstanding performance lead many blue badges in my department to feel very unhappy with their jobs. In short, we never felt valued.
By nearly any account, I was a steller contributor. I was asked to provide leadership roles in various ways, from conducting training for my coworkers to acting as a technical lead in the response to the Blaster worm. Yet again, even though these roles were done at the request of management, I never felt that my contributions in these special projects was appreciated in any way, shape, or form. May have just been my department though.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
I was a Microserf in Support... that's right; not all Microserfs are developers.
Here are some problems with Microsoft:
1. Training - There's a phone; now go do that support stuff
2. Customer satisfaction surveys - Customers got mad when you had to tell them "Windows doesn't work that way". You had to get a 8 or 9 out of 9 on everyr survey or your manager would get mad. Unsupported product? Third-party issue? User error? Tough!
3. Managers - I had 5 managers in one year. One manager skipped free training because it interfered with "Survivor" on TV. Only manager had atechnical clue; the rest might as well have managed a pizza parlor
4. Co-workers - they regularly backstabbed contractors. Why? Because they could
5. No internal processes - Support engineers have to just make everythingm up. There are NO processes for escalation
I am glad to be gone from that madhouse
See here is the problem. Microsoft's historic earnings record has made the leaders more or less beyond reproach from shareholders. The early participants largely control the company (Gates is still the Chairman, IIRC), so it would take a large change to make this happen.
Since Balmer and Gates have been involved in the company from the beginning, though decades of extremely strong growth, there is a strong tendency to defer to them.
Furthermore, Balmer isn't that far out of character compared to Gates re: management and competition (too bad the court record in Caldera v. Microsoft was sealed; it was interesting to read before then). So the default idea is that they must be doing something right.
If Microsoft had the right CEO, I think it highly likely the company would begin introducing some very compelling products again. Their technical products are still good (Yukon, VStudio, etc.), but public has a bad view of the company now due to IE/Windows vulnerabilities.
IE/Windows problems are largely due to design flaws and cannot be fixed without breaking backwards compatibility. This is why many of us see the new emphasis on security to be laughable at best.
I used to work at Microsoft. There is a strong corporate cult mentality there, even in departments like mine where morale was quite low. It is one of those paradoxes you have to experience to appreciate.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
I tested hardware for Win98se, WinMe, Win2k & WinXP. And main annoyance I had with my job was that it was far too boring. I would often email in sick Monday, Tuesday, & sometimes Wednesday. When I came in, I was able to easily catch up and log all my test scores by Friday afternoon. The job was just too slack, and it showed with management who would take our entire team out to Hooters resturant, come back 2 or 3 hours later drunk off their asses. The boss would invite me to go with them, but I really dont like getting drunk in the early afternoon. We had mini-fridges in the lab and occasionally people would start drinking at noon.
.ini files which got Lotus Notes to work (call after call to internal support didnt work). My boss accused me of hacking the operating system, and I got dinged pretty bad on my evaluation. So while I did have some fun at MS, it set a bad example of conduct for future jobs.
While some may think this is great, it really creates horrible work ethics should you move on to a new job. Lots of young people thinking that this was normal, and when they moved onto a new job outside the company they might assume that its ok to eat, drink, sleep, & shower at work. This is basically what happened to me, I moved on and ended up getting fired from two jobs, for doing things that were considered very tame at Microsoft (swearing in a casual way, using email for non-business related purposes like talking a friend down the hall). I came really close to getting fired on my current job for creating a batch file to copy
Policy and proceedure are radically different at Microsoft compared to companies like Starbucks, or Blue Cross.
The irony for me was that MS was going to hire alot of entry level testing positions (they lost the perma-temp lawsuit). I didnt think I was qualified, but my boss pressed me to apply. I never got the job because im not very good at answering Brain Teaser type questions, if only the interviewers had asked me questions relating to my job, maybe I would have been hired. But most of the people in my lab, the ones who didnt really care about getting hired on full time, got hired full time. Including the potheads and alcoholics.
I had one guy who couldnt take the stress of working at MS get hired on full time, and he would duck into the parking lot to smoke pot for 2 hours when he told everyone he was over at the developers office testing. This one guy was responsible for testing Digital Video devices, and he was just too fucking stupid for words. The developer however was the smartest, nicest guy I ever met there.
It's always too late to improve the past, and it's
never too late to improve the future.
The article seems to raise the spectre of two distinct kinds of issues: management problems and engineering problems. I think Microsoft manages its business operations very well, and perhaps could use some improvement in its management of human resources, but I won't comment about that substantively.
Realistically, the windows source base is vast at this point, and being needlessly complicated by the demand to build a dozen different versions, and by the need to maintain support for legacy applications. This is a real problem, but it's a good problem to have. The open question is what is to be done for it.
The conservative position held under Ballmer's leadership appears to be "throw more time/money/people at it" and stay the course. But there may not be enough time/money/people. Complexity compounds combinatorially.
One reasonable alternative is to maintain a Win32 legacy compatibility operating system, and fork an incompatible version that breaks backwards compatibility, in order to make the development of new technologies much more managable. For a smaller player, fragmenting a market they need to grow would be suicidal. But for a monopoly like Microsoft, whose monopoly position is threatened by rising competitors, it is a good move, because it will fragment markets which OSX and Linux would otherwise gain, while keeping their installed base secure. Moreover, with a faster release cycle they can collect more "Microsoft taxes". A faster release cycle requires a less complex technical base.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
No doubt what you say is true. But ultimately it will come down to the quantity of unhappy institutional investors. If enough of them begin to complain loudly enough, Warren Buffett will say to Gates, "Well Bill, MSFT did pretty well when you were CEO. I'm not saying you should take that job again, but it's time to start looking..."
A side thought: I think Ballmer would be an excellent CEO for a company like Nike, Carl's Junior, maybe even a car company *cough*GM boring designs*cough*. They offer totally marketing driven products, which SB is very good at promoting.
Imagine how much harder physics would be if electrons had feelings! -Feynman, maybe
I beg to disagree.
I used to work at a software shop that did business apps on the one hand, and games on the other hand. Guess what ? Both are essentially the same job, with the same processes and quite a bit of skills in common, even if games are usually in C/C++, and Biz apps in another language. When you get down to it, it's setting specs and developping to them. The Artists are more of an issue than a fun factor, with their inate tendency to disregard technical constraints. But then again, you get that also with ergonomics / looks in biz apps, especially if they are web-based.
I found the level of maturity quite a bit higher with the biz apps developement people. Superficially, that does seem to mean less fun, but in the long run, that means fewer conflicts, more learning (vs grandstanding)... You even get to interact more with your users, and evolve your projects over time (vs "just" having magazine reviews and pewing out rushed patches).
I am not a developper, but if I were, I'd definitely go for the Biz Apps market.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
There are critics inside every organization... I bet there are critics inside Google too. This is nothing new, other than they got some folks inside Microsoft to talk about it.
Wait a while....they'll be writing the same article about Google.
Cut out the security reviews they implemented several years ago.
Eliminate debugging cycles...
Oh, and cut out the design phase..."Gotta get that code out the door and if we don't start coding now, we'll never get done in time..."
Oh, wait, they never had a design phase...That was actually the "marketing feature list" phase.
Oh, and last but not least...postpone the "Universal Searchable Filesystem" until Windows 2010...
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
That things were going well under Gates was an accident of the market. I don't think that Ballmer can be blamed for most of the current problems. After all the issues of market saturation, and emergant competition were nacient when Gates left the helm.
I don't discount what you say, but there are so many other companies out there that are interesting and trading is still active enough for Microsoft, that most of the critics today, can simply sell their stock carefully and invest elsewhere. Note, however, that Microsoft stock is not performing well by any standards, and that Microsoft appears to be losing investor faith left and right. So it could happen, but I think that most investors are likely to simply say "Hmm... I think it is time to take my money elsewhere."
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Nearly everyone where I work is critical of their employer too. People bitch no matter what.
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That things were going well under Gates was an accident of the market
I disagree with you here. I think Gates is a better businessman than that, and his competitors were not his equal.
I think that most investors are likely to simply say "Hmm... I think it is time to take my money elsewhere."
They already have, That's why the stock is at a low PE. I think of MSFT as a call option on the unrealized potential of the company. A new, effective CEO could make all sorts of changes - spinoffs, new product lines in hardware (an area where Microsoft has a very good reputation), and other forms of restructuring. I think Gates is also buddies with Jack Welch. No idea if Gates listens to him. Of course Ballmer is supposedly a student of Welch, but he must not be turning in his homework.
Imagine how much harder physics would be if electrons had feelings! -Feynman, maybe
Microsoft's has always been a catch-up company.
Their formula for success has always been integration niched me-too products combined with four parts ruthless competition that skirted the lines of legality.
The problem with morale in the company at this point is that they have so thoroughly captured the OS and business application market that they have no one to defeat and no one to catch up to.
Development groups in areas that were sewn up for the company ten years ago are not going to get top notch resources (money, material, or folks), will be discouraged from innovation, and will not receive compelling leadership. The reason is because all of that is bad for the bottom line. Never understimate how flat stock prices and the almighty market analysts can foist the most insanely suicidal practices on even the most profitable companies.
As soon as a viable competitor business competitor emerges, those groups will snap back to their usual rabid selves. (It will have to be a business competitor though, because it doesn't pay to steal business from a competitor that isn't getting paid, but that's another thread altogether...)
Also, I'd be willing to bet that in the areas where Microsoft has viable competition (gaming console market, internet services, etc.), the resources, leadership, and morale are much better.
I remember seeing how MS Research Labs was lean&mean, when it started up. (professors from Academia were ditching their jobs & working at MS because it was such a superior environment over Academic bureacracy). Funny thing, now MS Research Labs has themselves become a HUGE bureacracy, with a ton of depts. Now, Google is to MS..like MS Reserach Labs was to Academia. MS has become Big&Bloated, just like their MS Word. Take a hint from the spinoff from HP, called "Agilent Technologies".
Also, the emerging competition from Linux is not like you had with DR-DOS, OS/2 or anything like that. This is the one competitor Microsoft has ever had which is both serious and cannot be destroyed by targetting the vendor. This is fundamentally different than things in the past.
I question how much Microsoft's lack of success against Linux has to do with Open Source Magic(tm) verus just poor product positioning.
For years, Microsoft had great success with NT selling it as "Not Unix", but what they failed to realize was that in certain segments (finance, ISPs), there's a huge demand for something that "Is Unix", and Linux fit that bill on commodity hardware. When MS attempted to sell to these markets, they largely failed because they couldn't understand why the customers didn't see NT as the obvious replacement for something supposedly obsolete like Unix.
As a tangible example, SFU/Interix has been around since 1998 or so, but they've only recently started integrating it into the base OS. Had they seriously provided a Unix application environment years eariler, they would have cut off a big chunk of Linux growth.
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
...says Ballmer... "We won the desktop. We won the server. We will win the Web. We will move fast, we will get there. We will win the Web." When did Microsoft win the Server? I must not have been paying attention when they handed out that award! (I will give them credit for owning the desktop for the foreseeable future. However, I beleive the desktop will become less and less important in the future as more people use network appliances to accomplish most computing tasks.)
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Either Ballmer, Allchin, and Gates give up control of the company, or Microsoft will be irrelevant (if not bankrupt) by 2012-2015.
Something I've said many times before, and will maintain, is that Microsoft have never had a concrete, long term operating system strategy after Windows NT 4. That is evident from the fact that 2000 and XP were both merely incremental upgrades to NT 4 for the most part.
Vista is going to be comprised of leftovers...Things which Microsoft would have incorporated years ago if it hadn't been for them having to make ship dates. It is also going to be Microsoft's last release that the majority of the computer-using public care about.
Microsoft need to do what Apple have done; move to a BSD core, and thus allow each group to play to its' own strengths. The BSD people are very good at making a core, underlying operating system. Microsoft on the other hand have proven that they're good at UI and glitz. If the two were to be combined, we'd have a system unlike anything we've yet seen...the best of both worlds. This is where the GNU crowd need to see that the BSD license is useful in the grand scheme of things...because it gives companies who want a closed-source product a competently-constructed base.
However, I know that realistically, Microsoft are not going to do this. Gates, Ballmer, and Allchin are going to stay in control, and the company is going to become irrelevant, because they won't let go of their usual, failed way of doing things.
Disney used to consistently be on the list of top 100 companies to work for. The corporate atmosphere changed, not the people. If you mean "change" being a switch from focusing on the needs and interests of their employees and customers to "shareholder value", then yes, you're quite right. People don't like that kind of change, except for the shareholders of course.
Same thing happened at EDS, which used to be a really great company to work for. The focus shifted from quality service to executing contracts as cheaply as possible. Morale tanked, service went to hell, contracts impoded, downward spiral began.
Dell is currently experiencing the beginning of its slide. One of the first signs is a shift away from quality customer service. That's how it begins.
The only thing surprising about the MSFT internal distress is how long it took for people outside the company to find out.
If you want to test my theory, then watch SAIC. Currently an employee owned company, but they're about to go public. My bet is their IPO will lead to a period of rapid growth, eventually shifting to a focus on making money for the stakeholders. Service will suffer, the employees that have been there the longest (and hence make the most) will get forced out so they can be replaced with lower cost replacements. Turn over will increase, service will suffer, contracts will be lost. SAIC will turn into EDS.
I think it's funny how bean counters see the old guys as a liability to be replaced. Forgetting that the reason they have been with the company so long and make the most money is that the customer likes them and they get the job done.
When bean counters get ahold of your business, the same thing is going to happen as when Republicans get ahold of your country.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
ever worked for a large firm (before or after) to compare your experiences at MS with?
I have worked for at least five and the experience is pretty much the same everywhere, except for one that was a wholly family-owned private bank (despite being rather large by the standards of the day).
I tend to chalk up the issues I have with large organizations due to the soulless nature of publically owned companies. If they have an owning management, that controls the fate of the organizations, their focus is less on internecine warfare between executives. The focus is more on doing business, which requires having and keeping quality employees, which requires loyalty and attention to their development. This kind of attitude spreads downward from the management and infects the whole organization. In both cases.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
Clue: The theme "the secret life of [nonsentient/mythical beings/objects] where they turn out to have lives just as mundane as yours" was great THE FIRST FOUR TIMES YOU DID IT.
Unfortunately for you, every other CG animated production in the last ten years has traded on the same exact theme. Christ, it's done, stick a fork in it and turn it.
If Pixar's next big thing is going to be 90 minutes about the secret life of Luxo lamps, pack it in while your rep is still shiny. Chris Ware's "Bunny" got an Oscar because it was good storytelling, not because it had great diffuse lighting.
When I'm buying "Incredibles" even though I hate the "government good/lawyers evil" pap because it has sexy hair shaders, you're hurting.
"Made up/misattributed quote that makes me look smart. I am on
Well, yeah, a guy who admitted that he would be working as an insurance saleman if it were not for M$ is not the best man to be running a tech company. Then again, M$ is not much of a tech company as it is a sales and marketing company.
You can see how nuts Balmer is from the article himself. The complaints are that people are not being rewarded by a company that's got poor organization and infighting that interferes with getting things done. His response is ludicrous:
Employees' complaints are rooted in a number of factors. They resent cuts in compensation and benefits as profits soar. They're disappointed with the stock price, which has barely budged for three years, rendering many of their stock options out of the money. They're frustrated with what they see as swelling bureaucracy, including the many procedures and meetings Chief Executive Steven A. Ballmer has put in place to motivate them. And they're feeling trapped in an organization whose past successes seem to stifle current creativity.
Worse is what he has to say about those problems:
"We have as excited and engaged a team of folks at Microsoft as I can possibly imagine," says Ballmer. "[Employees] love their work. ...[cites Xbox and MSN as successes and might as well have farted] says Ballmer. "We won the desktop. We won the server. We will win the Web. We will move fast, we will get there. We will win the Web."
Won the server? He's losing the desktop and what does that have to do with NOT PAYING PEOPLE WHEN YOU ARE BURSTING WITH MONEY or STUPID FUCKING INTERNAL SALES MEETINGS WHEN YOU SHOULD BE PUTTING OUT PRODUCT? Steve, baby, being second rate was good enough for Windoze 3.1 and 95. For all the money your company has you should have something on the desktop 6 times better than KDE, Gnome and all that have, but you don't. You've got a piece of shit that has not fundamentally changed in ten years. That and the bad attitude of thinking he can cram that second rate junk down people's throats is pure lunacy.
It is so over for that company and that's good. At last the closed source nighmare of the 80s can die. The greed heads and control freaks can go back to insurance sales and the business can revert to key banging and hacking among equals.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
MS mice came from HP. There was a fella that posted on here in the late 90s who was at HP, on his home page there was a link to "Stuff I Play With That You'll Never Be Able To Get" and there was a pict of the HP optical mouse, which was the classic MS Optical Mouse.
Ive contacted MS support 3 times (expensive if you dont have a contact..lol) They are more then compentant, not like your normal call center.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!
Ahem. Hrm.
HAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!
OK.
About a week or two ago, I was working on a server for a client in the area. I work for a consulting firm; we do everything from initial planning to wiring to building computers to support. This client had a 2003 Small Business Server, which basically ran as a file and MS-SQL server for their accounting software.
Well, dumbasses got hacked. The machine was on a public IP, and they saw fit to change their administrator password to "admin" while we weren't looking (with remote access enabled). Anyway, rootkits galore. The crux of the issue is that they basically needed a Wipe and Reload; BUT, their accounting software cost them $10,000 to have someone flown in from the software provider and install the software. So, wipe and reload is not an option - they can't afford to reinstall the financial software.
Oh, and their backups are corrupted. That's what they get for keeping them on the hard drive with the OS, but who's counting? Oh, plus, we set it up for daily backups, and then a weekly one - so it has 7 days, plus weeklys for a month, plus monthlys for a year. I had to go back 3 weeks before I even found a partial backup without the r00tkit, and they can't lose 3 weeks of financial data.
So, I take the server back to the shop, put it on the tech bench, and try to clean out the rootkit. Nothin' doin - it's got its fingers into everything. Luckily, I was able to get the Cam screener of "The Cave" that had been uploaded from efnet. Anyway... I can't get rid of the rootkit. I boot up off of ERD Commander, attach to the install, and flush the pre-fetch directory. Reboot. Can't log in. I do this and that. Can't log in.
So - I call Microsoft. Not only do I call Microsoft, but the shop I work for is a Preferred Partner, so we call the super secret number. Not only do we call the super secret number, but we call the super secret "BUSINESS CRITICAL OUTAGE / SERVER DOWN 24 HOUR AVAILABILITY" line. Granted, it costs $250 per incident, which you have to pre-purchase in packs of 10 ($2500 at a time)...
And get someone in india. Who takes down our information and puts us on hold for an hour.
And then someone else in india picks up. He has us try this and that until he realizes we have 2003 Small Business Server, and he says that the receptionist told him we had Enterprise Server (we told her Small Business, but who knows if she understood a word I said), and that's not his department (are they really that different, if you can't even get a login prompt?). He transfers us to SBS, where we sit on hold for another hour. So now we're at 3 hours, and we just got ahold of the right person.
Then, Habib (or whatever) talks us through the same steps. Then he tells us to install a 2nd windows install (in C:\Windows2\). Then pull files out of that install. That doesn't work, so we install SBS SP1. Same thing - doesn't work. Nothing works. But, we've spent another 3+ hours on the phone installing and configuring SBS and SP1.
SIX HOURS. I didn't once talk to a native english speaker in SIX HOURS on their BUSINESS CRITICAL OUTAGE phone line. My problem didn't get fixed.
The Plural of Anecdote is Data, but Microsoft's tech support still SUCKS.
~Will
sig?
The exodus of good employees from MS and their inability to attract top talent can be easily explained. Microsoft's stock price has been flat for the last five years.
People didn't flock to Microsoft from 1990 -2000 because it was such a wonderful place to work. They went there to get rich on stock options. Working for MS now is no different than working for GM or Dupont. The massive growth phase ended five years ago and will never return.
The reason people are leaving for Google can be explained by this
graph.
Frankly, working for a big corporation is not a dream. It's a crying shame. Do you think you have value to the corporation? Think again. Do you think loyalty is rewarded? Hardly. Look at the airline industry. All those United employees put in all those years, and in one day, their pensions were gone. Money, socked away for 20, 30, or 40 years. And that was part of their compensation.
Who's to blame? Wallstreet. Demands by investors. The press. If you're in this for the long haul, you're disrespected... and your stock price plummets. The market wants a quick return. You can't go around with 20 billion in assets, and maybe a 1 or 2 percent profit. The market won't like you. Stock will plummet, shareholders will vote out the directors, CEO will get fired.
It's just like revolving debt. The market doesn't respect savings. They only care about debt and the interest on the debt. If you're cash heavy, you're a target for breakup. So you have to carry a lot of debt as a poison pill. It's sad.
I would also point out that Apache runs on FAR more servers than IIS.
I'd like to point out that even in their heyday, Netscape didn't fool themselves into thinking they were 'winning' on the basis of the count of public-facing Internet websites.
Apache can run on any number of millions of Internet servers, serving up vanity pages and mom-and-pop retail sites.
The money is in corporate Intranet servers facing inward, to employees. And crummy site-counter statistics on the Web aren't even CAPABLE of counting those.
resigned
"organizational model"
einhverfr, there is a simpler explanation of the same thing, in my opinion. Microsoft was never relationship oriented. Mentally, Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer are still the socially disfunctional teenagers they were when they started.
Microsoft has never been a trust-based company. Anyone who tries to manage without examining the quality of relationships must manage by constantly testing the limits of what he or she can push other people to do. "Testing the Limits" management makes employees feel disrespected, because they ARE being disrespected. Before, programming was so exciting that employees were willing to be abused. Now that is beginning to change.
Microsoft has always sold mediocre products. The company has always been organized around taking advantage of technical ignorance, and around examining just how little people will accept. Think how miserable it is to work at a company that never does a good job!
Microsoft Basic was the first major product. It was poorly implemented and poorly documented. For example, there was no way to write a strictly binary file! An ASCII Hex 07 character would ring the bell rather than be written to a file.
Microsoft Assembler was provided with manuals printed from a dot matrix original. The assembler was unreliable. It would sometimes just not produce the correct instructions. The world had to wait for Borland Turbo Assembler to get a reasonably good assembler.
In an hour of testing the first version of Windows NT, which I had bought, I found 3 pages of serious bugs. My money was totally wasted.
The first version of Microsoft Access had huge bugs.
Microsoft Word in Office 2000 sometimes destroys its own files. (Tip: Open the Microsoft Word file in Open Office and save it as a
ChkDsk.exe (Check Disk) supplied with Windows XP Professional has a log file parameter. ("/L:size NTFS only: Changes the log file size to the specified number of kilobytes. If size is not specified, displays current size.") However, according to Microsoft technical support, Chkdsk does not actually produce a log.
Many other Windows XP command line interface programs don't actually work completely with Windows XP. The CLI is very incomplete and toy-like.
Microsoft software has had incredible numbers of very severe security vulnerabilities and Microsoft has been very slow to fix them. The vulnerabilities have cost customers hundreds of billions of dollars. If Microsoft had to pay for the destructiveness of all the vulnerabilities, Bill Gates would be the poorest person in the world, instead of the richest. Microsoft is like the cigarette companies. If the cigarette companies had to pay the total cost of cigarettes, including medical bills, cigarettes would not be profitable. If Microsoft had to pay for the damages caused by its mediocre software, Microsoft would not be a profitable company.
Apparently in an effort to create copy protection, Microsoft designed Windows XP to save configuration data from most programs in one huge file called the Registry. If that file somehow becomes corrupt, it can be impossible to repair for a reasonable amount of money.
Microsoft is managed around taking advantage of technical situations rather than managed around trying to develop good products. Microsoft is, in that way, more an abuse company than a software company.
I never worked for MSFT, but I interviewed with them and turned them down to take a position in a small software-related service company. About 10 developers and 40 tech support guys, an IT supervisor, a couple of sales people, and a bigwig. It was definately the right choice.
It's a challenge, and there's always something new and exciting for me to do. In the last two years, I've designed and built a high-availability server solution solution based in Linux, including writing all the server software, shell scripts, monitoring systems, etc. (no small undertaking). I've built a number of database interfaces using C# and .NET. I created a remote administration tool (admittedly based on free software :). I've created a web front-end to an application, done artwork with Photoshop, and have recently moved on to video/audio editing for marketing materials. And that's less than half of what's been on my plate in the past 24 months.
If you haven't guessed, I'm the wildcard at my company. I do the jobs no one else knows how to do simply because I pick it up the fastest (and often becuase I volunteer). I feel very much appreciated at the office. My coworkers (and particularly my boss) are generally quite astounded by the depth of knowledge I have over such a wide range of topics, and the work I create is publicly admired and appreciated.
This sounds like opportunities that you'd only find in a small company. What sort of corporation would lest on person such a wide variety of jobs?
Well, contrast that with my wife. She works for a major retail corporation that I know you've heard of. She started as a seasonal employee, was promoted to department manager in 3 months, and in 2 years has been promoted so many times that her salary has more than trippled.
She's an excellent manager and a very hard worker. She can motivate her employees to do twice as much as the company average, but with half the time and resources. And still her employees all love coming to work for her. On her own, she generally can do the work of about six people. Even early on, she had managed to accomplish so much with so little literally every manager above her paid her a vist to ask her about her methods--all the way up to the CEO.
Now she has recently begun travelling about the country making the company a better place; fixing broken methods, motivating employees, and creating innovative soulutions to difficult problems. What she does in her job is kind of similar to what I do in mine, but transposed to a retail environment on a corporate scale.
So what's my point? Well I think it's all about attitudes and people (particularly you). A lot of people who work at my wife's company hate their job. Typical "corporate America" attitude. My wife started at the very bottom (not even a "real" employee). But she became an expert in everyone else's fields by volunteering to do their work for them; just because she thought it would be fun to do. She then shot up through the ranks so fast that only corporate policy kept her from being promoted faster.
I think there are a lot of companies that are just plain bad. When brilliant and innovative minds feel trapped, your company can sink no lower. However, the majority of the time, the problem is that most people are dumb, and most people are lazy. Whatever side of the fence you're on, it takes a lot of intelligence to recognize a brilliant solution, and it takes a lot of brilliance to create something intelligent.
"With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine. However, this is not necessarily a good idea...."
RFC 1925
The Big Lie is a great technique to compete against Microsoft, and MS uses it just as much against Linux (and other competitors) with issues such as security and TCO. Why do people use it? Because it seems to work. Do you think Balmer and Gates trash talk because they are petty?
Xix.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
After re-reading what I wrote in the parent comment, I realize that it is excessively pro-Microsoft, in my opinion.
There are entire huge areas of abuse that I didn't mention.
Several years ago I accompanied some friends to a computer store to help them buy a computer. We were offered Microsoft Office for $50. That's why Lotus SmartSuite and Corel WordPerfect lost market share. There was always a two-tier market for Microsoft Office. You could pay full price, or you could pay $50. It seemed to me that Microsoft was less than intense about stopping the pirates, because that ran the competitors out of business.
Microsoft did the same thing with DOS. At one time, 5 local and national distributors with which I did business all carried pirated DOS. I visited one distributor that indicated they were genuinely concerned, and showed them that it was easy to detect a pirated copy. Microsoft verified that. Other DOS-like operating systems were not able to compete with broad-scale piracy.
In 2002, Microsoft implemented a plan it called "Software Assurance". At the time, Ed Foster, who writes a famous column called GripeLine, called Software Assurance "manipulation
In his column released on September 15, 2005, Ed quoted one customer as saying that Software Assurance was "one of the biggest sucker jobs of all time".
Ed said, "The thing that Software Assurance has always assured is Microsoft revenue -- what the customer has gotten is risk, and lots of it. Expecting Microsoft to deliver value when they've already got your money is just not a very good bet."
Those are just two short examples. Some people believe that there are hundreds of Microsoft abuses like that, but, as far as I know, no one has counted all of them.
Next time, try the Psychic Friends Network. They don't know the answer either, but they are friendlier, cost less, speak English, and won't waste your time.
In related news, Steve Ballmer has pledged to make changes inside Microsoft to avoid the embarrassingly long development cycle of Vista, including a 'revamping of the engineering and the processes.' Is it too late?"
I actually don't think Vista would've been so delayed if it wasn't for Microsoft suddenly, sometime between build 4083 and 5048, decided: "OK, let's throw this XP SP2 kernel out of here and base Windows Vista on Windows 2003 SP1 instead!", essentially forcing them to start from scratch in many areas, which the public build 5112 showed. Lots of interesting stuff previously in was suddenly gone, and it was curiosly looking much like XP/2003 Server again. The look of that build was what made even Windows and OS X evangelist Paul Thurott say the Longhorn project had the markings of a shipwreck.
This, and that XP SP2 development took a lot of developer time from the team that should've been working of Vista, and that SP2 became delayed, probably forms at least about a year of delays.
As usual, there are two sides of the coin with things like this -- it's not simply bad for a Windows user; it's good that they take their time to not rush things out.
Interestingly, if Microsoft had done a less of a sloppy work with Windows XP so it wouldn't need a supersized SP2, Vista would probably have been able to be released earlier. And they can hardly hide behind that the age when XP was released wasn't a virus-infected Internet age, so it should've been predictable XP would've needed a strong security given its audience and being a major hacker target. In hindsight, that should've been the focus of XP, not a fancier UI. Instead, only now is Microsoft understanding this, and are pushing for e.g. a stronger firewall in Vista, and a new account system *nix always had. Their first clearly security-oriented OS is arriving in 2006. It's hard to stop yourself from laughing.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!