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Why Microsoft?
theodp writes "Before a large crowd of students at the University of Washington computer science department, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer was asked why students should care about Microsoft enough to want to work there. Aside from the ending, which begs for an if-you're-happy-and-you-know-it-clap-your-hands remix, Ballmer seemed to handle the question adequately for an MBA-type, although TechCrunch has a different opinion, suggesting 'maybe it's time for the great salesman to hang it up.' Oddly enough, a recent resignation letter from a Microsoft developer en route to Facebook ('Microsoft has been an awesome place to work over the past twelve years. In college, I never thought I'd work for Microsoft. Then I interned in 1997 and fell in love.') may be more what the skeptical CS student was looking for in terms of a Microsoft endorsement."
4 stories in a span of a couple of hours. Why Microsoft?
did you forget to take your meds?
... and a fancy name on the good old CV :D
We all trash Microsoft for making shitty products, but in the end we would all work for them given the chance.
Maybe because if you have just a semi-successful career there, it looks awesome on a resume? I mean, let's face it...unless your office is run by an anti-Microsoft kind of person, the average company hiring IT folks (programming or otherwise) would likely be extremely impressed to see that on your resume, especially if you stayed there for multiple years and leave on your own rather than being fired.
One of the biggest lessons you can't learn in college: sometimes, a job is worth taking for no reason other than how it contributes to future opportunities. Ditto for taking classes post-college.
Living With a Nerd
I wonder how much Ballmer was sweating when he answered that one? The guy can prolly lube himself up just by walking. It *is* a good question, tho.
C|N>K
Because Microsoft has a proven track record for Developers Developers Developers!
My postings are informational and does not constitute legal advice. Act on it at your risk.
It doesn't even matter that this was Microsoft, other than the fact that if it were IBM we'd never have gotten an article about it. However, the kid in question may have been asking why IBM, or why Ford? Why not? Healthy, established companies with plenty of money that pay dividends. Everyone has heard of them and if you're "good enough" to work for them, then you should be "good enough" for anyone else later. Just because you and your buddy start a website in your dorm room and print up business cards declaring fancy titles doesn't mean that's going to be a good reference when you find out that becoming an accidental internet billionaire is harder than you thought and have to go find a real job.
But, oh yeah, Apple is "changing the world" with their "magical" products (disclaimer, this is being typed on a Mac), so clearly everyone who is anyone should want to go work there. Or the new flavor of the week Rails shop. Or wherever. And for some people, maybe that's a better option and if they can make it work, good for them. I work for a small company practically no one has heard of, and right now it works for me. But, I'm to the point where I would much rather have the greater stability that working for a larger company would provide. In a few years the questioner will likely start to see the same thing.
Most computer science students take the subject because they finish high school and think "what career pays well?". On the other hand those with a passion for technology all their youth tend to end up as Electrical Engineers. Thus, with no historical appreciation for the kind of technologically disruptive and legally overbearing company they have been, you can understand why Computer Science students may be lulled into a false sense of self-worth and pride about working for Microsoft.
Microsoft will pay you well and you feel you are part of a community.
The downside is that you have to hide your MacBookPro and iPhone from public view.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Microsoft wouldn't really be that bad to work at because all their problems occur in management. Everyone who I've talked to that works at Microsoft loves it, the reasons their products are crap is because they have terrible management, separate people into "teams" which have little communication with each other, then they have separate "teams" working on the same product... which ends up being a mess.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
2. Pay a large dividend.
I absolutely agree with this one. Microsoft is not a growth company anymore, and it's time for them to quit pissing away tens of billions of dollars of their shareholders' money on debacles like Xbox, Zune, and Bing.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Why Microsoft?
Easy. Limited possibilities, so you don't have to think much, or solve real problems. Many mediocre job opportunities.
Why not?
Difficult, you are faced with real challenges, which some folks find positive. Also much better pay and growing market. You also get much less dispensable at some random downsizing. Ethically correct.
Microsoft is and always has had a good reputation as a place to work. A lot of the senior managers came up from the trenches and do care about the working environment.
I mean, say what you want about their business practices, quality of software and anything else, they've always come across as a good employer.
Oddly enough, a recent resignation letter from a Microsoft developer en route to Facebook ("Microsoft has been an awesome place to work over the past twelve years. In college, I never thought I'd work for Microsoft. Then I interned in 1997 and fell in love.") may be more what the skeptical CS student was looking for in terms of a Microsoft endorsement."
Reading the rest of the long post, it's not explicitly clear why he left MS but he hints at several reasons. One of which was brought up by mini-microsoft about the little fiefdoms that became the culture at MS:
A PM once remarked of a former Microsoft VP known for being ultra-aggressive in meetings: "I'd rather have him pissing from my tent than into my tent." Everyone within earshot chuckled at this witty political insight. I'd actually rather not have anybody pissing on any tents, mine or otherwise.
The other is the perks are going/gone. Some of it is understandable but he seems concerned that MS was focusing on the wrong things.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
We are constantly inventing new phrases and new usages. Why raid an ancient and well used phrase, disembowel it, and stuff a completely new meaning inside? If you want to play alien body snatcher, do it with real humans, not with time honoured Latin phrases.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
But I want my own division with lots of spending and employees!
Xbox is a money loser for MS. They may make some money on the titles and licensing and Xbox Live, but they're in a big hole for the hardware. Financially, Xbox is not successful.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
2005 called. It wants its statistics back.
The Gaming division has been making a profit since 2008. While the article doesn't say how much of that is on the hardware, I seem to recall seeing another article (that I can't find now), from either late 2007 or early 2008, that stated MS was finally making money off of each 360 sold.
Then again, as long as suckers keep paying money for Xbox Live subscriptions, even if the hardware was still losing money, its infrastructure would be making it back. That is, now that the models that had the ludicrously high failure rate are off the market.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
A friend that recently departed from M$ said the internal organizations are so politicized other groups would refuse cooperation or willfully withheld information "because they can."
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
I've never worked for Microsoft or GM, but from the outside the two look very similar.
For years both were/are giants in their respective industries - the standard of those industries if you will.
Years of shoddy products and internal political turmoil took their toll on both companies.
I wonder if Microsoft will avoid GM's fate - financial problems and an eventual government rescue? It's hard to imagine Microsoft with financial problems, but at one time in the not so distant past, it was also hard to imagine GM with financial problems.
-ted
The Tech crunch article says this " why someone would want to work at Microsoft when there are so many more exciting companies out there, like, say Apple." The answer is simple. Apple are crap to work for. There is a REASON why Apple have never appeared on the Fortune top 100 places to work and Microsoft has for the last few years (since at LEAST 2006) Granted they arent up there, but they ARE there.... Remember Apple is the place that will lead you to suicide if you even slightly make a fuck up too... :)
Like many days, today's /. feed is more than 50% stories related to Microsoft. OK, I get that the community here is predominately pro-Linux/anti-MS and I should expect the stories to skew to one side. But I'm not seeing the nerd value in a lot of these stories as they seem to only be posted to support and/or justify the collective belief that all things MS suck.
I'd like to see more news for nerds and stuff that matters make it to the feed.
Ballmer should just never, ever appear on camera. He just shouldn't do it. Some P.R. person needs to take him aside and convince him that it would be better to have some spokesmodel than for his simian presence to scare the young.
You are welcome on my lawn.
2005 called. It wants its statistics back.
It's not statistics. It's called basic accounting. Even in your article, 2008 was the first year they made a profit. It lost $2 billion the previous year. Before Xbox can be called financially successful, it has to break even first.
The Gaming division has been making a profit since 2008. While the article doesn't say how much of that is on the hardware, I seem to recall seeing another article (that I can't find now), from either late 2007 or early 2008, that stated MS was finally making money off of each 360 sold.
MS Earnings for Entertainment and Devices /Home and Entertainment/ Consumer Software, Services, and Devices Division
Net the division has lost $8.8 billion. MS does not split up that by product but MS has acknowledged that it took $1 billion loss on Xbox 360 in 2007 alone to repair for console repairs.
Then again, as long as suckers keep paying money for Xbox Live subscriptions, even if the hardware was still losing money, its infrastructure would be making it back. That is, now that the models that had the ludicrously high failure rate are off the market.
Recently it was estimated that Xbox Live made $1 billion in revenue last year. If we assume that it was at a healthy 30% margin, then combined Xbox/Xbox Live made $1 billion in profit last year. At this rate, it will take 8 years just to break even. Only then will Xbox to make money for MS. However, Xbox Live is not classified as Xbox revenue; it's considered part of Windows Live revenue as it is part of services. It's the same reason why iTunes Store revenue is not classified as hardware revenue for Apple.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
When I graduated Microsoft was one of two organizations courting me. I decided that working at a nuclear weapons complex was the more ethical decision :)
Joking aside, there was more than one person I knew in college who were platform agnostic when I knew them, but they all became complete MS fanboys after working there. It was pretty strange to me. I had never been a fan of the company, and I didn't want to be sucked into that. The job I have now is just that - a job. I'm not doing anything I think is wrong, and I'm not changing the world. I'm simply making life easier for the small group of people that use my software. I'm happy with that.
For those wanting to discuss the article instead of Microsoft bashing...
I liked the insight into How to get ahead the best. - Maintaining skills, performing good work, meeting commitments, act on your ideas, no unnecessary gossip...
I would hire this guy if I could based on that one blog post.
Unless you have a time machine up your other sleeve, cutting the Xbox group now won't magically make the money invested before it became profitable reappear.
If that's basic accounting, then basic accounting is fantasy math.
Which would explain a lot.
I'm a die hard "drank the kool-aid" Mac person, but I'd work for Microsoft. I live in Seattle and have lots of friends that have and do work for them and it seems like a good place to work. The corporate culture on the tech side seems very nice: flexible hours, plenty of opportunity to work from home, no dress code, plenty of free drinks in the break areas, "beer fridays", etc. The company does seem to take care of the employees and their needs. There are metro bus lines that run from the various parts of the area to MS and back. The cafeterias are nice and have different stuff so you can head to a different buildings cafeteria if you feel the need for a change. The work doesn't really sound any harder than any other place I hear about, and if they have to let you go, they are usually really kind about it. One friend's group was dissolved but they basically kept her on for two months with the only job duty of looking for internal positions to apply for. There is some orange-blue badge issues between temps and perms but most people are in the position they want. There are plenty of permanent positions if you want to apply for them while a good number of people enjoy the three month break between contacts as a vacation and typically. Rehiring at MS seems to mostly be a function of if you did a good job or not. As a place to work, it seems to be one of the better places around and honestly, their ideology and methods probably aren't any worse than any other large companies.
I scoffed at Microsoft back when I had first graduated college. I got 5 or 6 recruiters trying to get me to interview with them, but I turned them all down because a.) I didn't want to live in Redmond, b.) I didn't want to work 60 hours a week, and c.) the salary was too low. Instead I took a job at a small company in Portland as their sole programmer. I had it really easy there. I had pretty much total creative control, and even spent several hours a week working through courses on MIT OCW, but my career has suffered for it. Now, 5 years later, I should be making about 50% more than I am, but I have to work my way up from the start because I never had any "team" experience.
12 years is a lot of time.
Enuff said.
Unless you have a time machine up your other sleeve, cutting the Xbox group now won't magically make the money invested before it became profitable reappear.
Over the course of the history of the Xbox, MS has placed it in different divisions but has never disclosed per product financials. Unless you have insider information about Xbox financials, that's as close as you can get. The OP and I referred to division in which it appeared.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
way to ignore the point. XBL makes money. This did not start last year, XBL has made money every year since 2002 when it was introduced. It does not matter how they classify what division can claim that profit, if the xbox did not exist no one would pay the subscription fee, or buy content on the marketplace. even if that profit cannot be claimed by the hardware division, it's still profit for Microsoft. If you look at it that way, I'm willing to bet the xbox project has broken even, if not made money, and will continue to do so in the future.
Way to miss the point. MS does not consider XBL to be part of hardware profit. Even if it did, unless XBL has made billions in profit each year since 2002 (which it didn't), it will not make up for the hardware losses each year. In the same industry, Nintendo has made profit on the hardware. Sony might have broken even on the PS hardware only because the PS and PS2 were profitable.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Well, technically, standing on a catwalk more or less above Mr. Ballmer...
You guys do realize these questions weren't spontaneous, right? Ballmer had a big television (or TV-sized display) on the floor in front of the raised stand where he was sitting. The question would pop up on the television, and so would the answer - he'd pretty much read it verbatim. He would occasionally expound on an answer - go "off script" as it were.
The thing that got me was how lackadaisical and boring a number of the answers were, given that his team had time to pre-write the answers. Even with lead time, they don't seem to know how to fire up people about their products anymore.
#DeleteChrome
If I didn't do my job here at MS, they would hire somebody else who would. It's a paycheck, and in this economy... It's certainly not the company I first worked at in 1995, but what is? I remember that at that time you could get s--t done. We were doing things that made the PC great. Great games and technology. We did a port of Doom II to Windows for id. It ran on Win32s, and used Dispdib for window/full-screen toggling. My boss got the Autorun feature in to the OS. We could and did change the world. Anymore, it's so fragmented, mobile, web-apps, cloud, search, online, we've forgotten our core mission. The company store had great PC applications and PC games because we used to make great PC applications and PC games. Monster Truck Madness, Combat Flight Simulator, Close Combat, etc. Anymore, all there is in Windows 7 and Office and XBOX stuff. There is so much enterprisey stuff that I can't relate to. I feel like we are Oracle or IBM. It's mainframes all over again, only smaller and in shipping containers.
Sunk costs. Yes it is never coming back. Yes they have a marginal income stream from XBL. Basic economics makes us ask about economic profits, given that same total expenditure could they have made more profit in the same time period doing something else. The answer is CERTAINLY yes.
Here's are teh REAL questions, are they going to blow another couple billion in unrecoverable waste on Xbox 720? Have they learned that they are woefully bad at diverging from their core business? Are they stealing resources and talent better used on their core business? The answer is certainly no, pride overcomes good business at Microsoft 9 times out of 10.
I'd rather watch another insipid reality TV show than listen to a Ballmer speech or interview.
Seriously Steve, hire someone to do all the speeches and interviews, it's the first of several things you could do to make MS interesting again."
make imaginary.friends COUNT=100 VISIBLE=false
iTunes profit would not have existed without the iPod yet Apple classifies iTunes profit separately from iPod/iPhone/iPad sales. IBM classifies software separately from hardware. So does HP. Every other company separates out streams of revenue according to their own guidelines. MS classifies XBL revenue separately from Xbox hardware. If you think this is incorrect, then you need to argue with MS about it. The main reason why MS separates the two is that XBL is a service that different MS products use. Originally you needed Xbox to use Xbox Live. These days you do not. You can access it via Windows or Zune or Windows Phone 7. So classifying it as Xbox hardware revenue attributes it to the wrong product.
And you keep missing the whole point. Even if you count the XBL revenue towards Xbox hardware, Xbox hardware will still be at a loss so your entire point is completely moot and irrelevant.
thus explain why microsoft has held onto a division that seems to cause a massive loss: it will directly make them profit in the future, and indirectly makes them profit now.
The only reason MS held Xbox is that they could want to dominate all aspects of computing. They saw the money Sony was making. They thought that a battlefront was going to be hardcore gaming and could not let Sony dominate it. They thought they might lose some money on the hardware and make more money initially on the gaming side. But there were many things they did not count on.
They didn't count on Sony not giving up. They didn't think that the bigger market was casual gaming which Nintendo exploited. They didn't foresee that the design and manufacturing compromises they made in the beginning with the 360 would cause so many repair issues. They foresee how console gaming (and general gaming) development would change.
So they either tough it out or quit; If they quit, they would never make the money back. If they tough it out for the next decade they make break even. However, at this point they've almost hit saturation. Everyone who wanted an Xbox probably has one. At this point hardware sales are going to replacements or second units. So they have to keep developing new things like Kinnect. But remember developing Kinnect was not free. MS will have to take a small loss for it in the beginning.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Seriously, if it were correctly translated to intended meaning verses word-for-word translation wouldn't the phrase be "begs the questioner"? Sounds like the meaning was lost in translation.