Slashdot Mirror
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."
- Johnson
- Allchin
- Raikes
- Bach
- Ozzie
Take the first letter of each name and you get Jarbo. I think they were going for Jar-Jar,but couldn't quite pull it off without ESRA reshuffle just prior to rolling out a major product launch. I think this bodes poorly. The Street may think this is very proactive and a good move, but I've seen these things from the backend often enough I think it'll only be a matter of time before they're circled like wagons with a bin lid over each's arse end.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
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.
Linus Torvalds, ESR, and RMS were all appointed as heads of the Window's product group.
the appointing of three new officers
Adding more bureaucracy doesnt help anything, especially in an organization already totally overbloated.
In "Unrelated" News:
Microsoft announces major reorganization to open-source on their Windows Vista Product. Source's inside of Microsoft hint at a new CEO to replace the sometimes over-zealous Ballmer. Sources indicate the man's name may be Stallman, or Torvalds... No one would comment on the new CEO. However in a brief statement from a laid off programmer, "I think they let all of us programmers go because of the shift to open source. Because lets face it, everyone can make a better product with those viral and pesty open standards."
More at 11...
A bullet sounds the same in every language. So stick a fucking sock in it...
And wikipedia reported it before MS put it on the wire service.
Rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic? Might be like the day or two before the actual sinking, but still just moving stuff around before the sink.
Just a boy doing unproffesional IT work that's way above his head.
..... If this will stop the chair throwing?
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
The best way to push a new product out is with loosely coordinated small engines (team leaders) with appropriate small gears (coordinators) interleaving in between the cogs.
Easy and fast to build up... Need more function? just add another wheel. Losing steam? Add another small engine.
What MSFT is doing is adding a gigantic, humonguous, caveman-styled stone wheels (CxOs) that plunders and thunders the country hillsides as it rolls, smothering and trampling all other wheels and cogs in name of progress!
Apparently, they haven't tried eXtreme Programming for the Business Manager (yet).
This reminds me of a Dilbert Cartoon
--
Wally to PHB: I don't understand how the new reorganization will help us "focus on our core business." Did our core business change? Or are you saying that *every* reorg prior to this was a misdirected failure?
PHB: Wally, when a car gets a flat tire, what do you do?
Wally: Well, if I'm you, I rotate the tires and drive home.
--
I think that pretty much says it all.
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
To truly understand the changes here, you must learn what the titles were before they were announced:
CELarry,
CECurly,
and CEMoe.
Umm.. OK, that sounded funnier in my head.
For a moment I hoped they were doing a major code reorganization to finally rid their code base of all the design/security flaws.
But hey, whatever floats their boat...
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
They could release MacOS X instead of Vista.
:-)
It wouldn't cost them that much, and it would be the first really good product Microsoftt has ever shipped
They could put in compatibility box to run Win32 apps natively on OS X, kill Apple's hardware business, and ship OS X on standard PC boxes.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
So do you suppose Steve Ballmer was later heard to say: "Now that that's done, where's the steering wheel on this train?"
I wonder how much faster the Microsoft insider's blogs are going to pick up. Reorg's usually start at the top and move down, ripping people from what they know and replacing them with people who don't. Dust usually takes a while to settle, which you can usually add onto the rollout time, which they mean to reduce. Odd that.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
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
Chair-man.
Tip your waitresses! I'll be here all week!
Indulge my conspiracy theory for a sec:
"The promotion of Ozzie, who will report directly to Chairman Bill Gates..."
"Rudder will take on a new role focusing on the company's overall technical strategy. He'll report directly to Gates..."
The others report to the CEO (Ballmer). Sounds to me as though the next CEO will be Rudder or Ozzie, but I'm on the record suggesting Ballmer was never the right person for the CEO spot in the first place. Maybe the Vista delays were the final straw for the board, so the directors are setting up for the inevitable succession.
Imagine how much harder physics would be if electrons had feelings! -Feynman, maybe
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.
Anyone who's been following Mini-MSFT's blog (highly recommended read, especially the comments from anonymous Microsoft employees!) is aware of the dire need for some reorganization in this company and the plague of overmanagement that has taken root since Ballmer took over as CEO. Of course, it remains to be seen if they'll actually make the necessary changes or if this is just more shifting around to put on a show for the shareholders (the stock's been flat since '98). But Vista has been, to put it nicely, a debacle.
"Sufferin' succotash."
Suggested reading for Microsoft Management:
1 835959/103-6695899-7729413?v=glance
The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering, by Fred Brooks. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/020
You've got a project at risk, scheduling and production issues, so the fix is to re-organize and add executive and middle-management incentives, as in:
If they meet incentive goals, the 120 or so vice-presidents will receive an eye-popping $1 million in salary a year, and general managers, the next level down, will get $350,000 to $550,000, according to a high-ranking source. But the rest of the staff is paid at market rates. -- Business Week
Granted, this upcoming train wreck will provide a certain amount of entertainment, but it will be pretty unpleasant to work through. Over a year of Death March time so your boss can get the Big Bucks. Eccch.
10 print "Re-Organization!" 20 goto 10
The secret to avoiding MalWare on Windows platforms is to use a version of windows so old that it doesn't have enough functionality for the virii to exploit! If you're running 98, you're pretty safe - most things in the wild that hurt 98 have died off due to XP (and ME and 2000 and NT). What's left is a pretty small threat. All the great new virii running around? 98 can't run 'em. Too old. Doesn't meet the requirements.
:) I'm quite happy with my 300 mhz machine - I can still play Dungeon Keeper II and browse the web.
Pretty nifty, actually
--LWM
I've always found that when I'm working on a ginormous software project that's literally years and years behind schedule despite drastic pruning of scope, the _exact_ trick to speed things up is to reorganize the whole company and add a few more officers.
I experience unshakeable confidence that the one and only thing the visthorn development effort was lacking was enough officers.
If you receive Business Week, read the cover story. MSFT is experiencing a brain drain (Kai-Fu Lee being but one example) due to its stifling bureaucracy.
While software development has become a fairly mature industry, its near-instantaneous economies of scale demand that any organization be fast enough to tackle the Next Big Thing. This is why very large software companies are doomed to lose at least a few battles, and why there will always be room in the marketplace for start-ups.. as well as for refugees from the mothership to staff them.
IBM couldn't be all things to all people, Oracle won't be (no matter who they acquire), and now we're finding that Microsoft is tripping over itself.
Large organizations have inertia. Is this really news?
--- The American Way of Life is not a birthright. Hell, it's not even sustainable.
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
They can re-org to get their products out the door! A clear sign of the efficiency, productivity, and qualtiy that can only be achieved in a hierarchical, proprietary shop.
No wonder Windows is so much better than Linux. You don't see Linus doing that kind of organizational work, now do you? :P Wouldn't it be great if he could? Too bad he can't cause it's Open Source. (Damned hippie commies!) Maybe if he could, then Linux could keep pace with the Windows release cycle...!
I guess that means we'll be seeing Vista any day now.
...That's right! Annnny day now.....
Infosys and Microsoft aren't in the same business. Outsourcer vs sw mfg.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
If this reorg. helps Ray Ozzie get control over the technical direction, that might make a big difference. Ray Ozzie (the technical mind behind Lotus Notes and Groove) is a true visionary. Probably no one knows more about the potential for SOA-based applications running over client/server and peer-to-peer networks.
...
Things could get interesting
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
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
I hate to say it, but it's the right choice. Microsoft succeeds when it gives people what they want. As competition stiffens, its only edge is in providing a better user experience. You don't go about doing this by putting developers in charge.
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
I personally think that managers in tech firms are ideally like programatic glue for holding components together. They are indepsensible, but adding too much makes things unmanageable. So management needs to be minimalistic and focused on interfacing productivity groups rather than controlling them per se.
I think that this is a *really* bad sign regarding Microsoft's possibilities going forward.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
They bought a bunch of "Learning to code" Boardgames, so they found out who actually coded and who was there only to clean the keyboards, but pressed the keys in a certain order that produced code ;)
I doubt it. Somehow they've managed to survive the previous 17 reorgs.