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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."
Yeah Microsoft will be like all those big brands like Nokia and Kodak and live on forever.
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.
Oh, "Downfall" is more accurate than you think. Microsoft won't last unless it changes significantly. There are several things working against it: Programmers hate Microsoft. Every university, every professor, everyone works on a unix-based system. This leads them to Linux/Unix. Ballmer then slams those and calls them parasistes (look up his views on the GPL). So where do these really talented programmers go? Unless they can't help it, not Microsoft! So now you have unskilled workers. The best go to Google, then facebook, then amazon, then startups, etc, and Microsoft gets whatever is left. Is it any wonder their technology isn't as good as Google's? It's gotten so bad that even their own employees notice. Do you know what a Microsoft employee uses at home? Linux/Mac. Do you know what they use to listen to music? Maybe a Window's Phone but just as likely an iPhone. What do they read their books on? iPads. How do they send their personal emails? Gmail. An employee at Google would take a bullet for the company. An employee at Microsoft is wondering how long until the next iPad comes out. This might not be a completely fair review on my part, but it sums up my views. And the way I see it, a company like this just CAN'T compete with the rest. The only thing they have going for them is that mixture of Steve Ballmer's bottomless money bag and the fact that the average computer user will just use whatever OS comes with their box and that's going to be Windows. But that's not a solid business plan and they need to change.
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
Yeah it would be more accurate to say "Microsoft's Stagnation". They were the #1 desktop/laptop OS in the 90s and still are today. The problem is that they didn't expand beyond that paradigm, and missed the boat on the cellphone and MP3 player OSes (currently dominated by Google and Apple respectively).
Oh well. BTW Microsoft has never been an innovative company. Never. They won the PC-DOS contract in 1981, overlaid it with Windows GUI 4 years later, and that was about it. It was other companies like Atari, Commodore, and Apple that were doing the innovating..... constantly pressing forward with new ideas like music-quality sound, video-quality graphics, multitasking, mouse-based interfaces, and portable computers. MS just say by and watched.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
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/
Your odds of surviving thirty years of this is approximately zero. Everybody has an off year eventually. Once people realize that, their commitment also goes to zero.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
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.
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.
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.
That joke keeps getting told, and it has been a fair jab so far. It also is not entirely impossible. 2013? Probably not. 2014? Maybe. Android is advancing fast. On average Google is releasing 2 versions of Android per year. Tablets are already powerful enough to run 90% of the software that 90% of the users need. When Google decides to release a version of Android that works as a desktop, Linux will be showing up on a lot of desktops.
If you will accept the dropping of the word "desktop", we are already way past the 'Year of Linux'. Most people have more Linux devices in their homes than Windows devices.
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.
Most companies would beg to have 1/100th of Microsoft's revenue stream, and that revenue stream isn't going anywhere fast. If MS fails absolutely everything, it will still be 20 years before it's actually losing money.
There is no other tech company even a quarter as secure as MS. Apple is exciting, but it's a consumer electronics company now, and their longevity is.... questionable. Apple's been able to throw many cards in the air and have them all turn into aces, and I am in awe of them, but a few big missteps and Apple's 1/10th its current size.
Windows and Office, on the other hand, are a license to print a steady stream of money. Not stock-market exciting because revenues aren't doubling every year, but rock steady.
I'd buy MS an income trust, no problem. It just needs to realize it's Exxon, not Apple.
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.
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.
I think your parable is very apt. I worked for Microsoft for five years and for three of those I was put in the 10% bucket. The worst was not to be singled out as the poorest employee. The worst was not that it was totally unfair, fundamentally wrong and without any proper motivation. The worst was the bullying that ensued. The managers had nothing that they could motivate it with, since there was nothing wrong with my performance, so they reached for every straw that they could find to try to motivate why I was the bottom performer. Besides pinning other peoples mistakes on me the most popular blame was to give me a really hard time when I did my job really well. Since I worked as a tester (SDET) this was really easy. Every time I found a really good bug (you know, the ones that companies like Google now give out cash rewards for) I got blamed for finding it too late and that it fundamentally was my fault that the bug was there in the first place.
The absolutely biggest regret I have is hanging in there for so long. It is so utterly destructive on your motivation, confidence, happiness and competence to twice per year getting it on paper that you suck and being bullied in between. You can ignore it for a while but in the end it gets you deeper than you could imagine.
One thing that is a bit surprising is that Google evaluate its employees four times per year compared to Microsoft's two. I wonder what consequences that will have...