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Major Microsoft Re-Organization
Robert Scoble writes "Microsoft is unveiling a major reorganization today to help get Vista out the door. Some of the major changes include the appointing of three new officers to the three major divisions. The Microsoft Platform Products & Services Division will be led by Kevin Johnson and Jim Allchin as co-presidents; Jeff Raikes has been named president of the Microsoft Business Division; and Robbie Bach has been named as president of Microsoft Entertainment & Devices Division. In addition, the company said Ray Ozzie will expand his role as chief technical officer by assuming responsibility for helping drive its software-based services strategy and execution across all three divisions."
Typical corporate reaction to a Death March Project: "This is taking too long! I know, we'll throw more managers at the problem - that'll fix it!" MS is following in the footsteps of most big tech companies. When it started, it grew rapidly and pushed out a lot of code (really! MS used to write code!) because most of the staff, including the management were working on projects. As companies "mature", and more layers of mostly useless management come in, the actual percentage of staff producing paying work diminishes and growth slows.
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
the appointing of three new officers
Adding more bureaucracy doesnt help anything, especially in an organization already totally overbloated.
Vista (n) -"A distant view or prospect, especially one seen through an opening, as between rows of buildings or trees"
How apt, because I'm struggling to see through the Microsoft PR to see what Vista really is. We had this problem about five years ago when the marketing team got hold of .NET. .NET was mentioned everywhere from in the server family, to Office, to
development tools. When PR gave way to reality, .NET was a only a development tool and was really just Microsoft's (good) answer to Java. Nothing
like the revolution the PR machine would have you believe.
They question is whether Windows Vista going to solve a problem for me? The one thing that made XP a solution to my family was the welcome screen. Once they could select their username from a list that made it possible to give each family member an individual and run them in low privileged accounts. This has turned the family computer maintainence problem from a daily hastle to a once in a year activity.
What is Vista going to give me to make my job any easier? The only thing I would have bought Vista for is IE7 because of its nice anti-phishing features but this is going to be available in XP too. Even if this was ever a reason to upgrade, Firefox will likely have these features too in the next couple of months negating the need for Vista.
Feature after feature has been culled from Vista. We've got all these security "enhancements" in it but I can achieve the same in XP by following the NSA's Hardening Guide. Okay, this same level of hardening may be easier for the laymen to achieve in Vista but the layman doesn't care about security. When his PC fucks up due to a huge malware problem he just buys a new computer.
The man off the street does not need vista. In fact the man on the street doesn't even need XP. There are plenty of people still using Windows 98 and having a good time. Lord knows how they keep malware off their machine but they do it.
And what about business. WinFS might have been useful, but it was cut. Monad might have been useful, but it was cut too. They've wasted time with Maestro when the open, widely deployed PDF format already exists.
A reorganisation of Microsoft will not help these problems and I suspect the PR team will not save them from interia this time..
Simon
Many small start up companies succeed because they do nothing but what they do best. That was why MS succeeded at first, (among other things).
But they lose that when they add management. Some people think that its inevitable that such a thing happens to large companies, but I give you a counter example: Pixar.
Pixar has become the number one name in computer animated movies, and have had at least half a dozen box office toppers. But they continue to produce quality and quantity quickly because they have relatively few mangement positions which do their jobs well, and there are fewer seperations between ideas and implementations.
That is the problem that needs to be addressed, not only in MS, but in other companies like Yahoo and even some non-profit projects.
FanFictionRecs.net
M$ is officially reorganizing but really they are ossifying. With Allchin being superseded by a marketing/sales guy, it's suddenly become a lot less likely that Windows will ever evolve into the kind of system software that is needed in the future. Most of the world, to this day, uses the Windows NTFS and its fragmentable master file table to store their data on ever-larger disk drives. Probably now we'll just see 'better and better' defragmenters as the innovation of the future. The Windows user interface will further solidify as a 2D 'click on the icon on the desktop' and the Windows computer will further 'evolve' into an appliance that plays multimedia, reads web pages, email and AIM, and plays games. Windows ossification. The only slightly interesting thing will be how Microsoft will get users to pay bigger license fees than they are paying now for the new Windows.
Ok, now that's scary. It'd be a great coup, but scary becuase the software would be that good. As a bonus, they get to lock the music market with iTunes. Only problem is AAPL's market cap is $44B, they'd need to reach about 20% above that to get the board to sign on and MS "only" has about $40B on hand. I doubt they'd be keen to try and raise $20B to finance the buyout.
Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws-Plato
don't forget that MS could fail to turn a profit for two or three years and continue to make its payroll in full. There's some level of security when you have $20bil+ in the bank.
World Changing - News for Humans, Stuff about our planet
The main response I'm left with is that this will make it somewhat more difficult for an interested company outsider to determine exactly how much money the XBox is losing. Before, this was easy, since the Home and Entertainment division was pretty much the "XBox and everything related" division. Now they are combining divisions, so as the XBox 360 is released the financial numbers for the XBox venture are going to be combined with other stuff and thus somewhat obscured.
What exactly goes into "entertainment and devices"?
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts