Slashdot Mirror
Mini-Microsoft Shakes Things Up
Henry V .009 writes "BusinessWeek calls him Microsoft's Deep Throat. Although Steve Ballmer denies reading the blog, there are plenty at Microsoft who do. Mini-Microsoft says he wants to "slim down Microsoft into a lean, mean, efficient customer pleasing profit making machine." The user comment section of the site is the real gold: thousands of comments from Microsoft employees who tend to have a dim view about the company's recent evolution. And Microsoft may even be responding to all the internal criticism."
Microsoft ... Deep Throat ... customer pleasing
Is this what it has to "come" to for Microsoft?
I'm agneglectic, too lazy to care if there is a God.
Wow. This guy is nuts. I'm stunned that anyone could have such a love/hate relationship from the inside of a monster corporation to go to these lengths to fix it.
His employment agreement surely makes him liable for incalculable damages, not to mention inciting other employees to violate their contracts (which is punishable for contracts in general).
Maybe they won't know who it is until they find this guy still bailing out the hull after the last rat has left the sinking ship. I think they'll find him sooner, especially now that he's talking to the press.
This is clearly an inside tale, but I can't help but wonder if it's some new form of marketing.
Pretend you're a badguy insider, develop a following, and then you can mitigate rumours/leaked info/etc.
Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. It's the only thing that ever has.
Try the Google cache
Posted AC to avoid accusations of karma whoring..
http://rhfootball.blogspot.com/
(Now that blogs are searchable, we're finding all sorts of things!)
Most of the guy's complaints could come straight from a Dilbert cartoon. Seems to me like someone hasn't worked for a large bureaucratic organisation before.
On the other hand, the computer business is not an environment in which bureaucracies survive for very long. At least, not without radical change.
Perhaps this is the chink in MS armour that it's competitors have been waiting for.
>>
I am the director, and this is my movie
Steve Balmer will wear a frickin' laser on his forehead now. I'd watch out if I was you.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
They have fallen into the that old joke of Lily Tomlin, Included for perspective and for those of you who thought (rightly) that SNL was not worth watching. (once they were worth watching)
..just lost Peoria.
The Phone Company
Ernestine.....Lily Tomlin
Ernestine: We handle eighty-four billion calls a year. Serving everyone from presidents and kings to the scum of the earth. We realize that every so often you can't get an operator, for no apparent reason your phone goes out of order, or perhaps you get charged for a call you didn't make.
We don't care.
Watch this.. [ she hits buttons maniacally ]
You see, this phone system consists of a multibillion-dollar matrix of space age technology that is so sophisticated, even we can't handle it. But that's your problem, isn't it? Next time you complain about your phone service, why don't you try using two Dixie cups with a string?
We don't care. We don't have to. We're the Phone Company.
--
At the end of it all they want to make it all work, it's just they are fumbling in the dark. Get too big and your quality goes to hell.
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
That blog is hosted by Google's Blogger, that's why Balmer do not read it, his host file redirect all Google-related site to the loopback address, his doctor order that, in order to avoid a high blood pressure accident !
1) Get your thorn's blog posted on slashdot.
2) Have them annihilate one of blogspot's servers.
3) Hope blogspot cancels his account out of frustration.
4) ???
5) Profit!
It would be a new twist on the old idea of selective leaks. It certainly would be an effective way to convince the public (and the market?) that microsoft is sensitive to and accomadating of internel disagreements. This might also be just the "rallying cry" that Gates and Ballmer need to cut loose thousands of employees too.
If you see any new concrete bridges going up near the Redmond campus, a discontinued blog and a mysterious cavity showing up when using GPR, we will know how seriously Microsoft takes criticism.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
One would think that the author of the BusinessWeek article linked in the summary would've
1) seen the man's credentials
2) been able to spot a fake
when meeting the blogger in person.
Many Microsoft employees have never worked anywhere else. They were plucked out of college and have worked for MS ever since. So it would be reasonable to think that their view of corporate life would be a little bit skewed.
As for your signature, Windows can't use UNC paths as a path to be 'cd'd to. You can copy from a UNC path, but not 'cd' to it. To navigate a network drive, you need to "net use * (UNC)" it. It will give you a valid drive (like x:) to which you can cd to. Not the most painless approach, but it works, for some definitions of "works".
Jesus saved me from my past. He can save you as well.
It's been theorized he's (yes, he) is a mid-level guy in PSS. A few of his posts bear this out, but a few others don't. Like I said, he's very careful with what he gives away.
Having said that... yes, this is another opportunity for the slashbots to come out of the woodwork to post their ever-hilarious "M$ is teh suxx" jokes.
Anyway... must get some sleep.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
It is inevitable that this guy is screwing up.
They will find him, and when they go, I expect he will have a meeting with Ballmer. It will not be pretty.
It won't be like Deep Throat, who, even though suspected, managed to not get found out until recently. Even with him, folks had their suspicions.
Especially now that this guy attracts attention. All Ballmer has to do is tell his team of mini-Ballmers, "find him!" and it won't be long.
http://www.thebricktestament.com/the_law/when_to_
Where's the proof this guy is a Microsoft employee?
How many Microsoft employees have disputed it? Mini has stated a lot of inside information that real employees of Microsoft could easily confirm or deny, and I have never heard a viable claim that Mini isn't real. It's pretty much considered a given that Mini is real, and their comments have been validated by known insiders quite a few times.
would they make similar comments if they worked at some other large corporation?
Most large corporations suck, and that is precisely what Mini has been trying to say all along. Saying that HP is even more sucky says nothing, and pretty much entirely misses the whole point. In Vietnam people work in sweat shops from 6am to 11pm every day for pennies, but I'm not going to use that to validate poor working conditions here.
I've worked at several corporations, and while a couple were pretty good, there were some terrible corporations that are nothing but endless shuffles of executives building empires and covering their asses (and absolutely RAPING the financials of the company for themselves), building a world of executives, and a completely separate world of plebs. Mini's various comments makes it sound like Microsoft is evolving to this, and given Microsoft's storied past that is quite simply sad.
My worst nightmare -- that someone sane starts fixing the problems at MicroSoft. How would there be any room left to compete?
Joke.
The only way to really fix Microsoft is to split it into two corporations each for every product line, and open all APIs with no anti-GPL license restrictions. And use the ill-gotten gains Gates, Balmer, et. al. have accumulated to fund start-ups to company with the baby-Softs. And open the evolution of the APIs under the control of a joint committee of the EFF and representatives of the several Linux and BSD distributions.
It ain't gonna happen.
It says explicitly in the article "Mini, who does indeed have a Microsoft blue badge, the type given to full-time staff."
There's your proof. He's got a blue badge and the reporter saw it.
Everything I need to know I learned by killing smart people and eating their brains.
It's amazing how otherwise well-informed people didn't pick up years ago on the fact that it is easy to identify a writer based on the statistical properties of their writing. This guy is providing plenty of material for the analysis. Do a cross check against the email for all employees, and game over.
Also very few people actually print out corporate memos like the Ballmer memo he mentions (yes, strikingly many do, but as a percentage, it's small). So that narrows down the field right there, and I haven't even got beyond the top post on the blog. Sure, he could have printed it at home, but did he? Naaahhhh.
If he hasn't been fired by now, it's not because they can't find out who he is. They are just waiting for the right moment.
If vista comes out with all this CGMS-A and AACS compliance, then it will be too late to "please customers". They won't be able to roll it back under pain of DMCA conviction for manufacturing "circumvention devices".
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
The "perfect or perish" mentality just doesn't work. It doesn't work for factory workers, athletes, students, or politicians. When applied, all you get are a whole new crop of PhD's in CYA, each pointing the finger of blame at the next Doctor of Posterior Osculation.
The MM blogger seems very down on paying attention to "process", which tells me that A) the PHBs at Microsoft are all into process and B) this guy is a frustrated, unpromoted newbie, probably hired after XP was released.
Firing all the dead wood sounds nice, until you realize that means firing the people who wrote the cash cow.
The It they don't get is that Open Source Software is the future. They don't want to give up the golden dream, which means hiding their source, which means using a hierarchical development model, which means bureaucracy and inferior products.
Oh well, caveat regnum.
Raise your children as if you were teaching them to raise your grandchildren, because you are.
Have you even read some of the entries and comments? You might want to try reading them before commenting.
These people are probably the loudest critics of Microsoft, and because he and most people who comment have an internal perspective, their strikes are direct and to the point too, not like the drivel that gets reiterated here.
Marketing? How can exposing things like the company's recent trend in hiring MBA middle managers be good PR? How can saying things like the company's growth going to the single digits in the last 5 years be a marketing ploy? How can complaints about delays in projects like Longhorn, Office, etc. due to the internal bureaucracy be good in any way? There's even a mention of Office for Linux in one of the comments (though it's presented as an extreme example to drive a point home). How does this serve MSFT? Will investors go "yea, let's keep jacking up the share prices because insiders say Ballmer is a poor leader and Gates a poor software architect?"
This guy isn't around to deal with rumors. In fact, some rumors are being upheld (or confirmed for the optimist) by what the entries and comments hit at. This guy is exposing the problems that are in the way M$ works internally. If he was going on about how everything's fine and dandy inside, and everyone's full of love and bliss, then maybe it's a marketing ploy. But I, stretching my imagination to its limits, would not able to show how exposing and ranting about problems will drive stock prices up.
So no, sorry, the blog does not appear to have anything to do with marketing.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
Corporate entities do have characters, be they corporations or states. New Englanders are very different from southerners in the US, and from Californians, too. The English, French, Russians, etc have different national characters. Sears has a different personality from K-Mart (or used to), and for that matter a different personality from Sears 10 years ago, at which time customers were treated as a nuisance. That is a corporate character flaw in my book. (YMMV) I took my money elsewhere till it changed.
MS's character flaw is hubris, the "We know it all, we know what's best for everyone,.. we are above the law... we are can do no wrong... etc." attitude that they swagger around with and sneer at everyone else. (Pride goes before a fall.) I've taken my money elsewhere, not that they would notice, or care. It matters to me, though.
If you want your life to be different, live it differently.
"slim down Microsoft into a lean, mean, efficient customer pleasing profit making machine." I didn't know George Foreman works for MS now.
We don't have to wait for Woodward or Bernstein to die, or anything.
you had me at #!
Maybe it's Ballmer.
Reading the first post on the blog, this guy is exhuberant, talks agressively and confidently. Definitely a marketing person, maybe high level. Or hangs out with them enough to be able to ape the attitude. The user id "Who d'Punk" fits a bemused high level exec who is untouchable, and wants a forum where the rules of political correctness are relaxed.
There are some signature turns of phrase that really stand out. I bet it's already an open secret at MS who this is, and they are probably chuckling now at how slashdot gets excited over a mystery they already know the answer to.
The First Amendment applies in the first instance to the federal government ("Congress shall make no law...") and by virtue of the 14th Amendment, to the states. It does not apply to private parties. Its only relevance to private parties is that contracts contrary to public policy are not enforceable, and the First Amendment is one piece of evidence bearing on public policy regarding freedom of speech. In fairly extreme cases, you can expect a court to void a contract on public policy freedom of speech grounds, but it has to be something really extreme, such as an employment contract forbidding the employee to speak about topics having nothing whatever to do with the company. It is very clear that contractual restrictions on speech, such as NDAs, are considered valid by the courts.
In the Network Associates case, the Attorney General of New York (Eliot Spitzer, running for Governor), sued Network Associates for fraud and deception. He argued that the specific wording of the restriction on reviews could falsely lead the consumer to believe that the restriction was not imposed by Network Associates but by state or federal law. He also argued that because the clause was in some documents and not others (see the opinion if you want the details), it was not endorceable as a matter of contract law, and that for Network Associates to represent that it was constituted a deceptive practice. The court accepted these arguments. The First Amendment was not the basis for the ruling.
You can read Judge Shafer's opinion here.
Cripes... how paranoid can you get?
You have the common "default believe" attitude which makes astroturfing and guerilla marketing work so well. If you had the "default distrust" attitude this article would have bells ringing all over your head.
Consider what he is writing, what kind of NDAs he must have signed when being hired and how easy it would be to track him down (anonymity in internet really does not exist).
Antti S. Brax - Old school - http://www.iki.fi/asb/
"A house divided upon itself cannot stand."
Given the amount of competitive progress that Linux has been making recently, it's more than understandable that Microsoft are experiencing some dissention in the ranks. Ballmer isn't anywhere near lucid or flexible enough to genuinely fix the company's problems, either; his tactics can be expected to consist of reassuring the press that everything is fine on the one hand, and then playing business as usual on the other.
Microsoft's most pressing problem is that it desperately needs to get rid of the old guard. Jim Allchin being put out to pasture at the end of 2006 is a step in the right direction; it just needs to be done to a few more people there, Ballmer included.
If at least the majority of the senior management can be persuaded to take their stock nest eggs and ride off into the proverbial sunset, then there might be some hope for the company. They are stuck in their thinking, and more than anything else, Microsoft needs a fundamental paradigm shift in virtually every area if it is going to survive. People need to realise that a very large portion of Microsoft's success has come from marketing. Technically speaking, their software has never been more than barely adequate, and that has been due to some chronic problems with their design philosophy. That design philosophy will not change while the current senior management are still at the helm.
If it's going to happen, however, it needs to happen soon. Microsoft's release cycle is getting longer, and I suspect that if nothing has changed by around 2008-9, the company will reach a tipping point after which, long term, nothing will save it.
It's part of their annual management revolution exercise. They all do it, they hire a bunch of consultants who pretend to interview people with anonymity and those people pretend to answer honestly. Then they collect all their surveys and determine that
a) everything is fine and management had it right all along
b) there is little that management is prepared to change let alone pay for
c) people need to figure out how to motivate themselves better
d) there was another 5-7% of the workforce that needs to get cut quietly
e) 3 or 4 key executives will collect larger fiefdoms as a result of this reorg
f) mean employee tenure will drop another 6 months and management will spin turnover as 'recharging the organization.