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Microsoft's 'Cannibalistic Culture'
theodp writes "In the provocatively titled Microsoft's Downfall: Inside the Executive E-mails and Cannibalistic Culture That Felled a Tech Giant, Vanity Fair offers a teaser for a story that will appear in its August issue on Microsoft's Lost Decade, which promises an unprecedented view of life inside Microsoft during the reign of Steve Ballmer. 'Every current and former Microsoft employee I interviewed — every one — cited stack ranking as the most destructive process inside of Microsoft, something that drove out untold numbers of employees,' contributing editor Karl Eichenwald writes. 'If you were on a team of 10 people, you walked in the first day knowing that, no matter how good everyone was, 2 people were going to get a great review, 7 were going to get mediocre reviews, and 1 was going to get a terrible review,' says a former software developer. 'It leads to employees focusing on competing with each other rather than competing with other companies.' Also discussed is the company's loyalty to Windows and Office, which induced a myopia that repeatedly kept Microsoft from jumping on emerging technologies like e-readers and other technology that was effective for consumers. Having seen an advance copy of the full piece, GeekWire offers its take on what it calls an 'epic, accurate and not entirely fair' tale."
There's one number that isn't bigger than last time: the amount Microsoft is charging to upgrade to the new version of Windows.
What does that tell you?
...and it has the same results. Law schools grade this way. It simply adds a very real incentive to undermine those in your group. It forces competing against one another for individual gain, often to the detriment of group progress.
It sort of makes sense for law students whose focus will be litigation, since they are training for an adversarial environment. It also ensures that the lowest performers are consistently swept out.
However it rests on the assumption that the lowest performers are necessarily and always detrimental to a group overall. This of course isn't true, since every single group will have a highest and a lowest performer. The other downside is of course that it promotes individual interests over group interests.
Of course. People will always need Office just as they will always need film. Oh, wait. . .
"From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom."
We had something like this where I worked for a couple of years. It's gone now (at least, nobody talks about it), everyone hated it from the middle managers on down. It was based on the "lifeboat", which they mention briefly in the article. The term I got from the article "learned helplessness" is so perfect I wished I'd known it when this was going on.
The first year they ranked everyone in the same "grade" together. If your manager tried to do what HR said and rank people then there would be a few other managers who said everyone on their team was perfect, and therefore you'd get pushed to the bottom of the list for raises. Also, unpopular or inexperienced managers would get their entire team screwed.
The second year it was just among members of your team but the managers HAD to have some percentage who sucked (who would get the ranking you were normally given before you got fired). It didn't matter if that person was productive or not... their thinking was every team must have a slacker who can be fired. Small teams were the worst off here.
HR sucks everywhere.
As a former Microsoft exec, my observation was that most blue badges above level 62 spent 30% of their time on work and 70% of their time maneuvering
Steve Jobs led Apple in the direction he wanted. People can disagree with that direction but it was clear who was in charge. Ballmer manages MS so that it doesn't lose their monopolies. That's the big difference I see. If Jobs was in charge, I don't think the Vista Ready/Compatible disaster would have happened. The crux of it was a lower level exec made a decision to reverse course on key hardware requirements that left many consumers with PCs that were not really fully Vista capable but it wasn't clear to consumers what that meant. Ballmer just let it happen instead of stepping on someone's toes.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Yes, but look at the decline. It's shocking, especially if you factor in iOS devices. If you factor in Android, it's even worse.
We had the same at HP - if you got the bottom ranking twice in a row you were asked to leave. We had a stable team of 10 engineers, all of which were good at their job but one had to be ranked as incompetent.
We working through the list alphabetically, so everybody got it once in a while but never twice in a row.
Why is this funny?
It is exactly what is happening. Once consumers start buying more of these devices than PCs the software will start to be ported over and be gradually as good as the desktop versions. Then corporations will notice and leave ship too next.
I admit we are far from that at the office but businesses are 6 to 7 years behind consumers. The lockin is gradually going away and even if Windows 8 catches on MS will be screwed because they do not control the w3c standards like they once did and these apps can be ported over to Andriod and IOS fair easily.
http://saveie6.com/
It was great for five years or so, then the third generation of this family-owned started flexing their muscles, invoking a new unsaid policy that unless you could prove otherwise, the assumption was that you were a lazy goof-off who should be demoted or fired.
Thus was born the semiannual evaluations from hell process.
I would typically spend 20-40 hours applying loads of manure to my evaluation in an effort to be spared the axe. So would every other salaried employee in the billion-dollar company. This was time that could have been used in improving our production numbers via technology (I was an intranet developer). Instead, we had to slather our way though an incomprehensible eval process that forced us to make predictions based on absolutely no data. Basically, we had to try to read the minds of a couple of dysfunctional family members who now found themselves in officer positions.
They probably couldn't get warehouse worker jobs for Wal-Mart, thank God (for them) that they were members of the family.
I've been gone about a year now, others are going over the wall as other jobs make themselves available. The company has managed to grow in a bad economy, but when things get better, I predict a Microsoft-like turn for the worse, as folks who can afford Hostess or Dolly Madison snack cakes leave in droves.
I'm not saying that the psychotic salaried evals are causing the downfall of the company, but they certainly are a barometer of how things in general are going. Just like Microsoft.
According to Wikipedia: Decimation (Latin: decimatio; decem = "ten") was a form of military discipline used by officers in the Roman Army to punish mutinous or cowardly soldiers. The word decimation is derived from Latin meaning "removal of a tenth".[1] A unit selected for punishment by decimation was divided into groups of ten; each group drew lots (Sortition), and the soldier on whom the lot fell was executed by his nine comrades, often by stoning or clubbing
OK a valid if harsh form of management, but note the critical distinction that the Romans reserved this very harsh technique for unusual events. They were not dumb enough to do this to every unit on a routine basis!
The stack ranking wouldn't be a destructive process, if management used it correctly. It should be a template on where the team member is placed because they perform at a certain level of execution. Not a tool to make sure the list has a certain amount of 1s, 2s, ... 5s.
On my team there are employees who are there to collect a paycheck and coast; they deserve lower rankings because of their mediocre to poor performance. We have guys that do what they are told (and that's it), they get average reviews (3s). Sounds about right? It does work there. We also have politically savvy individuals that deliver nothing and guys that actually perform and do a lot of work. Guess who gets the higher numbers? Management claims it's not political; to the point where they have to have HR in the room to ensure it's not political. It doesn't, hasn't and never will work. (It really burns me when someone with a bunch of hot hair gets a 1; when you work your tail off and get a 2...)
The example given, 10 employees, and only 2 with awesome reviews creates a competitive atmosphere. Management is always on the look out for faults in an employee that have been used for years against someone. It kills moral, makes people self-pontificate way to much (and say nothing) while doing little to self promote how great they are. If they used the number system as a template to rank employees and not force a bell curve, Microsoft would have happier and more innovative employees.
If you are old enough to remember what Microsoft was like around the late eighties and up until about the early-2000's, you would realize that they are no longer the force to be reckoned with that they were back then. Yes, they are still a very wealthy and profitable company, and will probably remain so for decades more, but they are no longer the force to be reckoned with that they were in the time I speak of. Back in those days Microsoft inspired such fear into the hearts of those in the software industry that before beginning a software venture people would ask: "What would Microsoft do in response to this?" and even the vaguest hint that Microsoft was getting into some field would be sufficient to dissuade the faint of heart from even getting started and risking competing with Microsoft head-on. Those days are long gone, and now the companies that have sort of inherited that mantle are Apple and Google (but it seems that even put together they don't have even half of the kind of terrifying aura Microsoft exuded back in those days). Their loss of this kind of power does not mean that Microsoft will cease being profitable or even that they'll stop growing, far from it. It simply means that they've become irrelevant to the leading edge of the software industry, just another stable, stolid, boring company like IBM or SAP.
This is what Paul Graham meant when he wrote that Microsoft is Dead.
Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.
Who needs office anymore?
I need to create the odd document which I can do on the wiki we have at work.
I need to create the odd database report which I do with various database tools and then export them to html.
I need to send and receive email, again, a web interface seems to do the trick.
Sometimes I need to present something to a group of people. I use a whiteboard. (I tend to prefer the smart boards)
The reason people use Office suites these days is more from tradition than need. Microsoft will not die, but they will recede. Metro will probably speed up the process.
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English Haiku is
I work there, and I can tell you don't have a clue. The biggest problem MS has with hiring is competing for those few people that learned to program in C/C++ instead of Java, or some other interpreted language. We get summer interns that are good all the time, some get offers and work out well, other wash out in less than 4 years. Its not because of stack ranking though, its because of lack of desire or capabilities, Those that perform their job well and consistently get promoted quickly. Some long term employees get to a certain level and then stagnate, and when they're shown the door they blame the stack ranking process because their peers passed them by.
Also note the higher in level you are the broader the ranking becomes. Many of the people in the Vanity Fair article were stack ranked division or corporate wide, not within their own team. Then were let go as part of the dead wood trimming during the layoffs when the economy went south.
Back in their glory days, Microsoft was a very "Fast Follower", so while they were rarely the first with a piece of tech, they were very often right behind. They were very agressive at ensuring no market segment escape them, often using old IBM "vaporware" tactics to chill interest in the competition, as well as underpricing them. They were absolutely paranoid that someone was going to do to them what they did to IBM.
Compare this to modern Microsoft where Ballmer completely dismissed the iPhone and their mobile division sat on their thumbs for two long years.
When using a review system like this, few things are more valuable to a manager than some really terrible employees.
Imagine I have 2 amazing developers in my team and 3 very good ones, and the ranking system is going to force me to give one a bad review: It will not only make that one very good developer mad, but sour things for the other two, that have to keep beating the poor sob I randomly chose as the one getting the bad review. However, what if I transfer one of my very good developers to a different team in exchange for a worthless chump? Give the chump nothing important to do, and then the rest of your team can continue unhindered and unafraid of getting an awful review just because they are associated with a competitive team.
I used to work at a place like this. If a new hire was just way too good, he was moved to a different team that had lost a top performer, and team quality was kept relatively even: We had to protect the good developers we had. Any team that was too good just had to be split up, or they'd quit anyway.
Linux was slowed down in the desktop space mainly because of Microsoft's illegal monopoly control of OEM preinstalls. However notice that a number of the players that Microsoft was able to cow into dropping their advertised preinstalls are once against shipping with Linux preinstalled. When Microsoft's grip loosens just a little more the numbers will go exponential. Because there's no Microsoft tax, lowering the price of a typical desktop by 10%. Meanwhile, Microsoft never had a ghost of a chance to block Linux on phones and tablets once Google weighed in. Which helps a lot with Linux pentration on desktops: 1) customers get used to alternate interfaces 2) it's Linux 3) it weakens Microsoft 4) it's Linux. Next baby step is Android on desktops, after that most probably QT based gui on Android on desktops.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Excellent point, but the headline is not entirely inaccurate. As someone who worked there from 1998 through to 2004, and with a large number of friends still there, the company has gotten really bad. It has a shadow of the potential that it used to. Not because there aren't amazing elements in some of their products (Metro, love or hate, is a pretty remarkable UI evolution - Please, no posting to that retarded AOL image or whatever it is; plenty of other examples of good ideas surrounded by bad; Forcing metro by default in the desktop, for instance), but the company is its own worst enemy. VPs fighting VPs, a culture that started as productively competitive that has turned into destructively competitive - I'm not talking about the market, I'm talking about internal competition and non-stop backstabbing and product infighting.
To paraphrase the Joker, "This company needs an enema.". And the first step is flushing Ballmer. People often underestimate how much of the culture stems from the top down, even at a 70,000 person comapny, but Ballmer, despite being a brilliant business man, is a horrifically bad visionary and leader.
Actually for every 2 new windows 7 machines there is 3 new machines running Linux. Or about 600 thousand windows and 900 thousand Linux (a large part of that is android) every day.
So by beginning of 2014 there will have been more android sold then windows 7. Given that this continues in the long run it means that the domination of Microsoft in the home computer business is over. They will continue to be a big player but they will not be nearly as dominant as today
Of course Microsoft sees this and wants in on the smartphone market. They want to stop the trend. But I doubt they will succeed to squash the upstart this time like they done many times before. This will mean we will get real competion on the IT market and the consumers will be the big winners.
Just saying it like it are.
But somehow it just works here. This is probably because we rely heavily on peer feedback and tractable facts about employee performance (i.e. what the employee has actually done, as expressed in launched products, features, changelists, design docs and so on). And engineers participate in perf reviews to a much greater extent. And the lowest ranked person doesn't have to be fired, because as a rule Google's lowest ranked employees would often be superstars just about anywhere else.
MS review process, on the other hand, makes one feel that no matter what you do, you're going to get reamed in the ass anyway. And if you do well, it's often arbitrary and unexpected. I did not expect three out of my five promotions there, and was passed over for a promo once simply because I brought up some uncomfortable truths which made the product unit manager (PUM in MS lingo) look like a fool.
Disclaimer: I do currently work for Google (3 years), and I have previously worked for Microsoft for nearly a decade.
But...most people hate their Android devices, for instance their tablets are absolutely awful. Maybe Nexus will change the tide, but Google really has tons of holes in their strategy. They have royally screwed their phone market by having a skiddish ecosystem of phones that don't get updates, etc. People hate that. Talk to almost anyone who isn't just a Google fan and they will tell you that they'd rather have an iPhone. I remember when Apple was failing, but literally on the brink of bankruptcy (unlike Microsoft who has near all time high profits than at any point in its history, [especially if you exclude their entertainment division]) and now its market cap shadows over Microsoft. Microsoft is far from dead, I do think they have a shaky future ahead, but I laugh at the prospect of saying Android will be the thorn that destroys Microsoft. You can't really compared Microsoft to Kodak, that's just silly; Microsoft is potentially IBM though. They do make some good software, admit it or not, Microsoft has stuff to offer and a pretty diverse portfolio. Kodak had...film? Jumped into printers just a few years ago? No diversification at all. I want Balmer gone, I want Windows 8 to succeed, but I have my fears that it won't...and if it does fail I hope it's enough to take Balmer out. Just simple restructuring of Microsoft could put the company back on top. Their work with Metro is highly interesting, but there are some elements that are weak about it...and I think some of that is there to keep old management happy.
I think that it is YOU who doesn't know what they are talking about. IBM's internal politics started killing them in the 1980's. Their System 3x versus PC versus 43xx versus 39x versus 9xxx versus their office division (e.g. Displaywrite). I had IBM sales guys in my office trashing other IBM divisions for God's sake. They were a mess. Internal competition denied them the synergies they could have gotten if they would have worked together. Finally they brought in an outsider (Gerstner) who cut through a lot of that and saved their company. Their middleware still sucks and they ruin every product/company they buy, but they now market to the clueless suits as one company and do quite well financially.
Very often, people confuse simple with simplistic. The nuance is lost on most. - Clement Mok
Microsoft has never been an innovative company. Never.
They came up with AJAX and prior to that Iframes, maybe you've heard of those? .NET that when combined equal large cumulative innovation.
Microsoft had the first console to feature an internal HD eliminating the need for memory cards for save games among other things.
Intellisense is amazing (it's an example of auto completion done well).
The scroll wheel on a mouse. The first optical mouse.
The first mouse featuring backwards and forwards buttons.
First mainstream ergonomic mouse.
While not the first, they're responsible for ergonomic keyboards (due making them affordable, just like PCs)
Teraserver (1998 a precursor to Google Earth)
Involved in the creation of the browser useragent
Video codec innovations which led to VC-1 being the premier codec for HD-DVD and BR discs.
Helped establish TrueType
ClearType
The Taskbar
Ability to alter compiled code while debugging it
Dynamic HTML desktops
Lots of small innovations in
XNA
Alt tab to switch between applications
Photosynth
Microsoft OneNote
First OS to have a 3D Sound api for games
Shadow Copy
Certainly that should qualify as an innovation.
They won the PC-DOS contract in 1981, overlaid it with Windows GUI 4 years later...Apple that were doing the innovating.....
By giving Xerox a bunch of stock in their company for access to their GUI technology, essentially buying technology just like Microsoft?
Man blir trött av att gå och göra ingenting.
but the flip side is that all Windows and Office have done was allow them to piss away VAST quantities of cash not getting anywhere. Sure, it's nice to be able to LOCK business purchases into a guaranteed 15-20% purchase increase (to maintain licensing discounts) but what has Microsoft DONE with that money? Those divisions are 85 cents on the dollar PROFIT. Sure companies would kill for that kind of cash... they would also FIRE managers that only managed to eek out measly 20% or so they actually post each year.
Microsoft has VAST amounts of WASTE internally. They aren't growing their stock in the last 10 years. They could easily be posting several dollars a share every quarter dividend and be a value stock that puts that money into stockholder's pockets. Compare them to Apple sure, but Apple's headcount isn't spiraled out of control like Microsoft's. Apple has grown sales and profits but kept their headcount down (outside opening more retail shops) by ruthlessly nixing products that don't make the cut.
Microsoft philosophically CANNOT do that. They don't have expertise to separate the winners from the fluff like Jobs did. Microsoft operates more like a VC fund... throw money at a lot of things, try to have fingers in everything, and see what sticks. It's an OK model, but the customer end is tired of it. This is where if the court HAD broken them up, there would be one or two really strong companies from the "monopoly" and the others would have died and the tech staff would rebuild something new... without having to compete with Bill and Steve and the piles of money. The joke is that they have spent 10 years focused on dodging regulators rather than releasing new stuff (outside Xbox). Apple and Google cleverly "moved the cheese" and spent the last 5 years being laughed at... now the giant is going over the edge on it's own and it can't change course. It's own bags of money keep it from moving.
of course Microsoft isn't GOING anywhere. They need a serious overhaul. They would have had it if they were broke up, now they have to essentially do the same thing 10 years later and it won't be pretty. Somebody has to man up and break out the AXE. The problem is that the HEAD needs chopped off, so the baby chicks can do their own thing. Microsoft has soaked up 20 years of talent and done NOTHING with it.
The WORST part of all, when they start firing, they will create the biggest competitor know to the tech industry. If they slashed 20% those employees would be joined by a good share of Apple and Google workers that are also ready to do something GREAT again. The bloodbath of cash involved would ramp up some serious VC funding too.
To be fair to Microsoft, the "Cannibalistic Culture" is alive and well in many other corporations
However, this does not mean M$ does not suffer any damage because of it
I'll just take one example - Michael Abrash
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Abrash
He is the author of the book "Zen of Assembly Language Volume 1" published in 1990.
Mr. Abrash worked for Microsoft, twice - and at both times, had come face to face with the cannibalistic culture inside Microsoft
FYI, Mr. Michael Abrash is not a run-of-the-mill programmer
This guy is a super top notch programmer
He could have contributed much more of his talent to M$ had the cannibalistic culture is not so prevalent there
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Who needs office anymore?
...The reason people use Office suites these days is more from tradition than need.
Long time Microsoft enemy here, and I have to strongly disagree. There are few packages that do what Exchange does... which boils down to, apparently, integrating calendar and mail. You're thinking too individually... an individual can find software that they like better that works better than Office, but when you add 2K - 10K collaborating users to the mix, there's nothing competing with it (there are a few alternatives, Zimbra is one ... but Exchange doesn't seem to be going anywhere even with the few actually free alternatives, and the alleged popularity of outsourcing to Google apps). Exchange admins can fuck off all they want and never worry about losing their job, and if they do, never worry about finding work... there's always an Exchange server somewhere in crisis.
The reason people use Office is because that's what their company uses because there are few alternatives, and it came with their home computer. I have to give credit where credit is due... Exchange works pretty well, even with its lockout pitfalls and instability after not having any maintenance for a few months while corporate tries to find the rare individual that is competent at administrating the thing and isn't a complete jerk.
Windows might be the worst thing to come out of Microsoft, and Office is probably right there with it if you aren't collaborating (except, I think, for Excel 2003... Word and PowerPoint are crap, but I've never seen a spreadsheet application as nice as Excel, before all the new needless bells and whistles they added in 2009/11... so I don't think 2003 Excel is bad software at all), but Exchange sits up with the best of Microsoft's products, along with Active Directory and XBox (and someone told me they made a good mouse).
Whenever anyone asks me for something in a .doc format, I always ask if .txt or .pdf will do, because, I tell them, .doc is not a standard but a proprietary format, and I neither own nor use Microsoft products (unless someone is paying me to).
The Admin and the Engineer
Doesn't google finance already factor splits into the graph, though? I'm pretty sure that $30 share price right before a 2:1 split and a $30 share price after the split actually mean that the price was $60 right before the split - the price they show is, I believe, normalized to the current price and accumulated splits.
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I left a company in the UK becuase of this. I put together a team selected from the top IT professionals in the company and all of whom got top reviews and pay hikes. When I reviewed them 12 months later I gave them all top marks but the HR dept said I could only put 2 at the top, 6 in the middle and 2 at the bottom. They just could not see why this was wrong and said it was Company Policy...this was not an IT specific company btw. Anyway after a fuss I left and so did 7 of the others when they found out what was going on.
The problem MSFT has is it can't simply kill support to older titles and they have to give the OEMs and customers what they want NOT what MSFT wants to sell. Cases in point, Vista and most likely win 8, not to mention their recent failures to gain any share in mobile with Zune, Kin, and WinPhone 7.
Somebody at MSFT simply needs to accept that things will NEVER be as they were during the heady days of the MHz wars, where one had to toss a PC every 2 years because it would struggle to run the latest software. hell thanks to the consoles even games don't really stress the monsters we have now, my ancient HD4850 still gives me over 30FPS on modern games with plenty of bling so the drive to constantly replace just isn't there.
While they can coast for awhile what they can NOT do is piss off their partners like the AAA game houses and the OEMs because frankly without them most would be happy to stick with what they have. We may just get to see how far MSFT can push it with Win 8 but I have a feeling they are gonna get a wake up call and find out they simply can no longer lead and expect people to blindly follow. You'd have thought they'd have gotten that with Vista but I guess not.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
MS skunkworks is truly amazing! Surface (both the original table and the new tablet), Photosynth,... Some of that stuff is revolutionary!
But they seem to have this problem of bringing things to market. I don't know if you remember the number of features announced and then cancelled for Vista; WinFS, for example...
I think this article shows us why - the individual divisions are very innovative. But they compete with each other, distracting them from actually doing anything in the market.
Perfect example of why companies shouldn't be allowed to grow into obesity! It's interesting to note that breaking up MS would probably have been a good thing for the market.
Actually the chart is telling, but not in the way you think. Look at the peak, between 2004 and 2006, what happened then? The end of the MHz war because of the thermal barrier and the rise of the multicore, that's what.
I know plenty of folks and even plenty of businesses on first gen Phenom Is and Core duos, are they poor? Nope there is just nothing they do that stresses those chips which are now over 5 years old. look at that chart again and see how quickly it was climbing when AMD and Intel were topping each other in speed with every release, then look at how much faster it drops around 2007 when multicores became cheap for the masses.
In the end the reason why those numbers simply aren't keeping up with Apple is there is no reason to replace PCs anymore whereas Apple is going through their OWN MHz race in the mobile sector. Also thanks to the switchover to intel nobody has to choose "either/or" anymore so they can just pick up a copy of OEM Windows and run bootcamp (which your chart doesn't figure in, only new PCs sold) while still having the hipness of the frankly nicer looking Apple hardware.
Mark my words if you produce a chart for ARM 5 years from now you'll see the same thing, as i predict they will run into their own wall in less than 3, only instead of thermal it'll be battery life. Then just like with PCs people will simply keep them until they die, although naturally their sales will be a little higher as its easier for your dog to eat your phone than your desktop.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
What? Sarcasm? Most people I know love their outdated android phones. I run a Symbian Nokia, but I made the mistake of buying an iPad. It good hardware, but the app store is hopelessly crippled in my country. All the interesting stuff requires me to be be in America with an American credit card. I would never buy an iPhone for that reason alone. Bottom line; consumers will only tolerate lockin if they can get what they want, and apple is in the business of screwing their non US customers. Also the ui sucks. I think based on this, outside of the US, apple will lose a lot of ground.
I have determined that my sig is indeterminate.
Writing computer software and doing things in the computer business has a huge labour content. It has been really difficult (in the past) to figure out how long a software project would take. Projects have been repeatedly dumped because there have been volcanic explosions as new, startlingly cheap and stunningly attractive technologies have replaced the beautifully crafted heavy metal business machines and software of the last decades.
Stack ranking is an ugly way to force employee turnover.
So I propose what is going on at Microsoft is that Stack Ranking is Microsoft's way of forcing employee turnover. The business idea is "manage the company to reduce costs before the employee has a future interest or stake in the company".
There is a theme of love-it/hate-it between American big businesses and American workers. Consider General Motors. In the late 1950's General Motors began paying a pretty good wage to it's unionized labour force. By the 1990's the result was a lot of automobile workers that needed their benefits (working on an assembly line is physically demanding, over 20 years) and an entire manufacturing and marketing structure that spiraled downward when gasoline prices went past what was it ... $2 dollars a gallon?
The shifts in market are much faster in the computer software and hardware business. There is no union and no guarantee of continuing employment these days. So in this setting, labour is a commodity but what the labour produces is extremely difficult to measure. Into the fog of software and support Stack Ranking is not-unfair to the lucky 9/10 of the employees.