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Former Microsoft Exec: Microsoft Has "Become the Thing They Despised"
zacharye writes "Microsoft has a long and storied history of leadership in the tech industry, and the company has driven innovation for decades. In recent years, however, Microsoft has fallen behind the times in several key industries; the company's mobile position has deteriorated and left it with a low single-digit market share, and Microsoft won't launch Windows RT, its response to Apple's three-year-old iPad, until later this year. In a recent piece titled 'Microsoft’s Lost Decade,' Vanity Fair contributor Kurt Eichenwald analyzes the company’s 'astonishingly foolish management decisions' and picks apart moves made during the Steve Ballmer era."
It's been around for about 100 years. It's been a good magazine on and off, sort of a proto-Esquire.
I think it was originally called "Dress and Vanity Fair". I got on some list some years ago and the magazine showed up at my house for a while. There was some decent writing, a lot of fluff, George Clooney always on the cover, shiny, glossy, typical Conde Nast high-toned puke for people you don't want to know. Think Wired magazine without the tech and ads. Lots and lots of ads. You can't tell where the ads end and the articles begin. In fact, if you start from the front, you can flip pages for half an hour without getting to one bit of editorial content. Or maybe I couldn't recognize the editorial content.
And perfume samples, at least when it was coming to my house. My wife, who picks up the mail usually, used to stack them on my desk so my office smelled like my Aunt Lena's underwear drawer. She'd plop it down and say, "Your Vanity Fair is here, Evelyn" (my name is not Evelyn). Then she's snort with laughter. It was bizarre, hearing a woman with a heavy Eastern European accent try to imitate a high-end London swell.
They make a good sturdy surface to roll joints on. I imagine.
You are welcome on my lawn.
In many ways Apple had it easier. The state they were in, the board was willing to try anything and Jobs had free reign to make major changes.
And why was the board so willing? Anybody remember their history?
No, of course not, this is IT ;-) Everybody talks about the iMac as being what Steve Jobs did to start turning Apple around, but in reality it was secondary. The single most important thing Steve Jobs did was convince the Apple board of directors to resign so that he could replace them with a board of his choosing.
Press and financial analysts at the time went nuts over this move, because clearly Jobs' ego was out of control, and now having padded the board with people who would not exercise adequate oversight, he was free to run the company into the ground...
But a fact that was not known to most at the time, was that the prior board had long been convinced that Apple could not survive on its own. Many of the seemingly strange decisions by prior CEOs had been because the board was pushing them to position Apple for sale, thus instead of building the brand, they were pursuing short term strategies to pad the bottom line at any cost--including chipping away at their reputation for superior products.
You are correct! John Sculley nearly destroyed Apple. I remember reading that at the time of Steve's return to Apple, he was actually using a Windows machine. It took new vision and new leadership to turn Apple around --Microsoft needs to do the same and get rid of Steve B -- Why do they keep him around? Can someone please tell me what he has done to advance Microsoft?
An increasingly common quote I've been hearing from the consultants of technology giants recently is that "product enhancements" are only considered if they can be demonstrated to be critical to closing a sale.
It's absolutely asinine.
For example, paraphrasing somewhat, I once found a missing function that made an entire API useless. It was designed for manipulating objects, and there were functions for adding, changing, and deleting objects of several types, except one that could not be deleted. It's a simple mistake that can be quickly rectified with a hotfix. Nope. Sorry. We don't have any sales that would be affected by this. Err...
Microsoft products are riddled with abandoned, half-complete, and archaic code that nobody will ever improve or fix, because either no customer wants it desperately enough, or no manager within Microsoft cares, so nobody will get any gold stars for fixing it. Code that does boring things -- no matter how important -- gets no love. This is also where all those security vulnerabilities come, from ancient code that hasn't been modernized or even just looked over in a decade.
Don't believe me? Install Windows 8 Release Preview, and create a new ODBC connection using the control panel. That dialog box hasn't changed in something like 15 years. It's like a museum piece. The "Add new performance counter" window is the same story. You still can't resize it, even though many of the counter names are longer than the available space and can't be read.
This short-sightedness leads to products that are just layers and layers of ancient cruft that no current employee understands or is willing to even touch any more. Eventually the entire product becomes unsellable and has to be scrapped. With something as enormous as Windows, this could very well lead to the end of Microsoft as we know it. Of course, none of this is relevant to sales this quarter, so it doesn't matter...
Some time in the 1980s the corporations realized the efficiencies of using office computers. But it was an esoteric and complex device and it required lots of training to use, and the top managers did not fully understand how easy/difficult it would be. I have seen highly intelligent relatives of mine who were totally flummoxed by the PC. So they were desperately looking for ways to reduce training costs and to get some kind of predictability. They wanted interoperability and portable skills for their work force. They picked on Microsoft as the common thing. Once enough corporations picked Microsoft, probably because of strong recommendations by IBM and its association with IBM, Microsoft became the de-facto monopoly. Food will appear magically. Not at random but at predictable intervels in a torrent.
Microsoft managers, like the pigeons in the random reward Skinner's box, started believing it is their action that had resulted in this huge torrent of cash. This torrent cash masked the incompetence of managers, the mediocrity of the products, the lack of innovation, the corrosive work culture, abusive customer relations, etc etc.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Meh I'll get hate for saying this but fuck it, truth is truth. Ya wanna know what is REALLY sad? All the Win 8 apologists have damned near copypasta'd their apologies word for word from the more militant members of the FOSS community. You get the classics like "You don't need that" (except if we didn't we wouldn't be asking for it ass), "Our way is better" (without any concrete reasons WHY of course), "Flash is proprietary crap, all must embrace HTML V5" (while ignoring the creation tools aren't there and it still is used by millions daily), its a hit parade of excuses.
In the end while I have no doubt some will like Win 8, after all i know a couple of old folks that actually liked WinME, I'd say that the way to spot either a batshit softie or a paid shill is anybody that defends Ballmer. I mean look at his track record folks, he has blown, what? 20 BILLION on bad deals that have gotten MSFT exactly nowhere? Hell what has he done that wasn't at least a partial failure? you can't even count the X360 because he rushed that out with a fatal flaw that cost them 2 billion bucks! When you look at the man's track record, Zune, Kin, killing playsforsure which had actually given them an inroad into the media market, the X360 flaw, Vista, blowing shitloads on companies that he knew fuck all what to do with, if you would have taken a chimp and left it to fling its own poo at the stock page and then bought major amounts of any stock whose listing was heavily covered in monkey shit I have NO doubt you would have made more money for MSFT than the man who has led the company for the last decade!
So lets make this dupe into something worthwhile, how about it? lets here from all the guys inside MSFT, are you as fucking frustrated at this lame "Me too!" half ass Apple ripping off by your employer? Is the culture there so filled with PHBs and bullshit you wanna puke? What about Ballmer? Does his direction in any way inspire you, or are you like the rest of us and just wishing he'd go away?
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
When I interned at Microsoft, I talked to some guys at MSR once for my project. They'd developed a dataset that was slightly better than current state of the art in the field. I distinctly remember saying "Oh that would be useful to have, are you going to publish the data?", to which they responded "Well you know, it's just data, takes a lot of effort to publish, who has the time?" while looking guilty.
So yeah, MSR is a gilded cage for people who might otherwise be out there starting competitors, or publishing papers thatwould lead to competitors. It's really only in the tools and programming languages divisions that MS lets MSR's freak flag fly (the next version of the .net languages are going to natively support continuation passing style, for goodness sakes, and they're essentially releasing the C# parser as a library)