Slashdot Mirror
Steve Ballmer Reorganizing Microsoft
Nerval's Lobster writes "Microsoft's big reorganization has begun. Rumors had persisted for weeks that Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer was planning a massive, once-in-a-lifetime reorganization of the company he's been running for quite some time. Now the plan is out in the open, and things are going to change in huge ways. Microsoft will coalesce around 'a single strategy as one company,' CEO Steve Ballmer wrote in a really lengthy memo posted on Microsoft's Website,
'not a collection of division strategies.'
The company's product portfolio — from Windows and Xbox to enterprise applications — will be regarded and operated upon in a holistic manner. Ballmer wants this
'one company' approach to extend how Microsoft handles its advertising, marketing and consumer-service operations. Ballmer also wants to knock down the walls that have slowly grown between Microsoft's various divisions, at least as far as engineering's concerned. The new 'engineering culture' will apparently facilitate collaboration 'across the company,' with an emphasis on cross-group contributions (and maintaining secrecy, of course, for the giant projects). Read on for much more on how Microsoft is reorganizing all its internal groups, as well as a rundown of who's in and who's out on the executive level."
Microsoft's big reorganization has begun. Rumors had persisted for weeks that Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer was planning a massive, once-in-a-lifetime reorganization of the company he's been ruining for quite some time.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
He's an idiot.
n/t
"Ballmer also wants to knock down the walls"
Nah, too easy.
...thing to do. The last time a bunch of people were clumped together under a single umbrella, the ship hit an iceberg.
On the other hand, the stock price seemed to do well on the details of the reorg...I'm sure it would have gone another point higher if Ballmer had left. Sadly, the shareholders will have to do without that extra buck-o-share. :\
More tablet interfaces on the PC, more attempts to lock on the tablet as TV, more stupidity around attempting to turn a Gaming Console into a Media Center that replaces the tablet, the PC and everything else.
Or does he surprise us? Nope. He won't. We have seen what the plan with Windows 8 and instead of understanding that move was stupid they are going to attempt to force it in with all the power they can muster.
.
Unless and until Mr. Ballmer is shown the door, he will just continue re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, and Microsoft will continue its slow voyage to the bottom...
They can start by firing Ballmer. That's the only reorganization they need.
Unless you are Apple.
Fantastic, because what I really need from Microsoft is more synergy between my office applications and the Xbox.
.. that would be a good start. He is the one running the company into the ground with fiascos like the metro-shit interface and then adding start button again, restrictive drm, the windows phone failure, RT tablet failure. Don't blame organization or engineering for that!
Its like crashing your car a few times and then blaming the manufacturer.
I distinctly hear the sound of swirling water
"Ruh Roh"
Ballmer wants this 'one company' approach to extend how Microsoft handles its advertising, marketing and consumer-service operations.
Ballmer showing what parts of the company he thinks are important is what this looks like to me.
I rag on MS a ton, sometimes unfairly, but even they don't deserve to be stuck with Ballmer.
based on Marketing department... WINNNNing
I spent an hour transitioning my brother-in-law from Windows 8 to Ubuntu on Sunday. His non-functioning, brand-new desktop went to lightening fast like that. Suddenly he could play all the games Windows 8 couldn't. He could use Steam, and interact with the OS and not have it hang for a minute with every click. I have never encountered such a grateful human in a like situation in 15 years.
Microsoft has stumbled very, very badly, and it is the moment for those of us who champion FOSS to pounce. If you know FOSS, do what you can now to liberate all those in your life who still beat on the ramparts of the Walled Garden. It might be the most significant thing you can do to advance the cause of freedom in your life.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
If this Dilbert cartoon does not hit the nail on the head, I don't know what does.
Julie Larson-Green, also in charge of Surface and games.
Mother of Metro.
Champion of Ribbon.
what SQL server needs is more tiles
The following image came to my mind: a huge zeppelin, quickly losing height, desperately but uselessly releasing ballast: you know - and they know - it is doomed to crash and you keep staring at it waiting for it to finally meet its doom. People inside are panicking, restlessly shuffling around, trying their best to save their asses in the upcoming crash.
Most of the posts are hate, but good for Microsoft. It is a step in the right direction. Anyone who works/worked there will tell you the organization is very segregated. Business units fight one another and things aren't done in a cohesive manner.
But, Apple is very segregated as well and they seem to do alright. Perhaps it is just the culture at Microsoft that is the issue.
Perhaps they will finally end their silly employee review process as well - as people I know at MS absolutely hate it.
If they want the "engineering culture" to "facilitate collaboration across the company", they can start by getting rid of the Stack Rank review process. Why would I want to collaborate with someone who I'm competing for a top spot on the review chart with?
I know it's popular to predict doom and gloom for Microsoft but I really don't understand what Balmer is thinking.
If they are transitioning to a devices and services company that kind of means they are transitioning away from the things that have made them successful.
I'm actually kind of giddy at the thought of some real competition in the corporate arena, seeing as how Microsoft continues to drop the ball.
What doesn't kill you only delays the inevitable
Knocking down the silos in an organization is generally a good thing. That said I doubt Ballmer knows what to do next. The smartest thing he could do is choose a successor.
Ballmer doesn't have vision. He doesn't understand the mobile market. Windows 8 was a disaster and MS continues to lose ground to Apple. The introduction of XBoxOne couldn't have been worse - great hardware crippled by licensing BS. Surface is overpriced and underselling next to Ipad and Android tablets.
I'm only suprised he hasn't been forced out.
Operating Systems Engineering Group. Terry Myerson will lead this group, and it will span all our OS work for console, to mobile device, to PC, to back-end systems. The core cloud services for the operating system will be in this group.
Devices and Studios Engineering Group. Julie Larson-Green will lead this group and will have all hardware development and supply chain from the smallest to the largest devices we build. Julie will also take responsibility for our studios experiences including all games, music, video and other entertainment.
Applications and Services Engineering Group. Qi Lu will lead broad applications and services core technologies in productivity, communication, search and other information categories.
Cloud and Enterprise Engineering Group. Satya Nadella will lead development of our back-end technologies like datacenter, database and our specific technologies for enterprise IT scenarios and development tools. He will lead datacenter development, construction and operation.
Dynamics. Kirill Tatarinov will continue to run Dynamics as is, but his product leaders will dotted line report to Qi Lu, his marketing leader will dotted line report to Tami Reller and his sales leader will dotted line report to the COO group.
Advanced Strategy and Research Group. Eric Rudder will lead Research, Trustworthy Computing, teams focused on the intersection of technology and policy, and will drive our cross-company looks at key new technology trends.
Marketing Group. Tami Reller will lead all marketing with the field relationship as is today. Mark Penn will take a broad view of marketing strategy and will lead with Tami the newly centralized advertising and media functions.
COO. Kevin Turner will continue leading our worldwide sales, field marketing, services, support, and stores as well as IT, licensing and commercial operations.
Business Development and Evangelism Group. Tony Bates will focus on key partnerships especially our innovation partners (OEMs, silicon vendors, key developers, Yahoo, Nokia, etc.) and our broad work on evangelism and developer outreach. DPE, Corporate Strategy and the business development efforts formerly in the BGs will become part of this new group. OEM will remain in SMSG with Kevin Turner with a dotted line to Tony who will work closely with Nick Parker on key OEM relationships.
Finance Group. Amy Hood will centralize all product group finance organizations. SMSG finance, which is geographically diffuse, will report to Kevin Turner with a dotted line to Amy.
Legal and Corporate Affairs Group. Brad Smith will continue as General Counsel with responsibility for the company's legal and corporate affairs and will map his team to the new organization.
HR Group. Lisa Brummel will lead Human Resources and map her team to the new organization.
Any reputable consulting company would start with the suggestion that Ballmer fire himself.
Microsoft has been technically stagnant for most of the thirteen years since Ballmer took over (which is reflected in the company's flat stock price since 2002). The string of product failures under Ballmer is cringe worthy: Vista, Kin, Zune, Windows 8, Windows phone, Surface, never-ending security problems, etc. Almost every major computing trend during that time (portable music, phones, tablets, social media, etc) under Ballmer has been mishandled. About the only thing the company has done right is the Xbox and I don't think that makes them any money. It's only the legacy of the corporate purchases of the Windows OS and Office that keep the Microsoft going. And that trend was started long before Ballmer ever took office.
So Ballmer wants to knock down the walls between rthe divisions. But weren't exactly those walls always Microsoft's best defence against antitrust accusations that the applications division was using knowledge about Windows which is not available to the competition?
They are going to start using Bitkeeper or what?
Not at the slashdot post but what Ballmer said and executive did. Customers (other than programmers) don't care of the code bases are the same for windows phone, surface and xbox. They don't care if the hardware side has synergies either. They care about cost and functionality.
This was not about customers as much as trying to alleviate pressure from money managers, fund managers and big investment houses.
I've always said English was my second language. Had Romeo and Juliet been written in C, I might have understood it.
...rearranging the deck chairs. Don't make fun of his methods! Some people slide or carry them around whilst Steve likes to throw them.
Ein world, Ein company, Ein Steve Ballmer.
Did anyone else gag when office was referred to as an "App"?
Microsoft will consolidate all its major operating systems, including Windows, Windows Phone and the software that powers the Xbox, under Terry Myerson, who handled engineering for only Windows Phone before.
I wonder if this will lead to any significant rethink of things on the desktop side. Windows 8 has a bit of an identity crisis going on; perhaps Win9 or whatever they decide to call it will solve that problem now that all of the OS design groups are under one tidy grouping.
"Iceberg Reorganizing Titanic"
People who are left behind all came of age when Microsoft had almost mythical powers. It could squelch competition by FUD, All it took was an announcement of vaporware and the funding for start-ups who could compete would just evaporate. These guys simply are not capable of competing on a level playing field. And the playing field is tilted against Microsoft now. The earlier era minions of Gates have earned the enmity of vast sections of the computer professionals. And so many of their partners fear them and do not trust them.
Unless it is something radical like splitting the company into an OS division, a consumer products division, corporate server products division and all competing at full throttle it is not going to work.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Nowadays, most of the software industry works together in open technologies that are widely used, like Linux, BSD, Apache, Webkit, Firefox, LLVM, PHP, OpenGL, Freetype, Android, etc. This is one of the reasons about why we've seen so many amazing products come out in such a short time the past decade.
Microsoft still believes they can do everything by themselves and they are starting to really fall behind. They were never a very efficient company, as their products reached maturity by iterating several years over several versions. Now, instead of accepting that the world has decided to embrace open technologies as foundation to most products, they are desperate to find ways to stay competitive with their current business model, and aggressively go after those who use open technologies to get patent money.
Why is it so difficult for Ballmer and Gates to admit that they can't compete anymore, no matter how many times they restructure their company? It's one company vs the world at this point.
As some who needs to deal with this periodically - does this mean Outlook might use IE's rendering engine for HTML email, instead of Word's?
What a brainfck that is.
One of the most intelligent things I've ever heard attributed to the man. Guess even a blind squirrel finds a nut every now and then. I'm sure a chair will fly, and we can return to normalcy soon.
Windows isn't done until Lotus won't run.
Expect to see more undocumented syscalls for Office Apps, IE, SQL Server, SMB, etc, etc.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
From the reorg'd groups:
"Applications and Services Engineering Group: Led by Qi Lu, and tasked with handling broad applications and services core technologies in productivity, communication, search and other information categories.
Cloud and Enterprise Engineering Group: As the name suggests, this group will concentrate on datacenter, database, and other enterprise technologies."
----
I could see it fitting in to both sides. Clearly with Office365 they are making a big push for Exchange-as-a-service and short-sighted VARs like mine are happily turning over meaningful service revenue on Exchange for the pennies per month spiff we get for Office365 just to be cloud-mumble-mumble-mumble.
It seems to me, though, that there's a fair amount of overlap and obvious opportunities to create conflict here as the line blurs between hosted/service/cloud systems (like email) and traditionally deployed systems (like email).
Ballmer's grand vision is for every employee to 'squirt' in unison.
Taking a different approach from most of these comments, I think a reorganization is exactly what Microsoft needs. It has long been known that the individual departments of Microsoft rarely communicate well between themselves and often seem actively hostile towards one another. I remember reading an article (when Office 97 came out, so this shows how far back this problem goes) about how the OS team was upset that Office utilized a goodly number of non-standard tricks rather than using the standard APIs. Thus, moving forward the OS team had to add in shims into their OS to ensure that its Office suite would continue to function in later versions of Windows. Or years later, how PlaysForSure didn't, on the Zune. Each division had its own methods and goals and rarely would they consider the needs of the other divisions. So a re-organization that helps solve some of these issues is probably long overdue.
(incidentally, a telling graphic of this problem is the following cartoon)
On the gripping hand, I have to wonder if Balmer is really the best person to enact these changes; he hasn't inspired confidence with his recent (or any?) decisions. Similarly, I suspect that this "one company approach" is less to solve internal problems and more to officially shift the whole company from product-based development (e.g., write a program and sell it to the customers) to a service-based company (e.g., continual subscription-based access to its portfolio of services). , which is a direction Microsoft has been edging towards for over a decade.
it will all suck. total reorg with the same CEO who fostered the cluster? -- yah, sure, ya betcha then. Sven. so put some gas on the wood chipper and let's get it ready.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
My Buzzword Bingo card was completed in the first 3 paragraphs of Ballmer's memo. By the end, I only had a few unmarked spaces on each card.
make imaginary.friends COUNT=100 VISIBLE=false
FTFA: "launching Windows 8 and Surface, moving to continuous product cycles, bringing a consistent user interface to PCs, tablets, phones and Xbox "
I've never heard so much Fail mentioned in one sentence before. If those are supposed to be the largest representative of Microsoft's successes in the past decade, they are really, really, really screwed.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
I'm looking at this and figuring out what part of it really changes anything. Lumping together gaming and hardware is silly, for example. I remember a hiring freeze at MS Gaming Studios across the entirety of their projects, regardless of whether specific groups were turning a profit. An easy metric to examine when your teams are scattered across the nation (world?), but they didn't bother.
Now MS Gaming Studios is lumped in with the group responsible for Zune and Surface? and presumably Windows Phone? One more reason to go PS4 if you really need a next-gen console.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
One more to go....
A fellow had just been hired as the new CEO of a large high tech corporation. The CEO who was stepping down met with him privately and presented him with three numbered envelopes. "Open these if you run up against a problem you don't think you can solve," he said.
Well, things went along pretty smoothly, but six months later, sales took a downturn and he was really catching a lot of heat. About at his wit's end, he remembered the envelopes. He went to his drawer and took out the first envelope. The message read, "Blame your predecessor."
The new CEO called a press conference and tactfully laid the blame at the feet of the previous CEO. Satisfied with his comments, the press -- and Wall Street - responded positively, sales began to pick up and the problem was soon behind him.
About a year later, the company was again experiencing a slight dip in sales, combined with serious product problems. Having learned from his previous experience, the CEO quickly opened the second envelope. The message read, "Reorganize." This he did, and the company quickly rebounded.
After several consecutive profitable quarters, the company once again fell on difficult times. The CEO went to his office, closed the door and opened the third envelope.
The message said, "Prepare three envelopes."
Rule #1: Listen to your goddamn customers. We don't want the stupid metro interface or 24/7 DMCA crap. Get rid of them. Rule #2: Go to #1
Once-in-a-lifetime, meaning "right before death".
`echo $[0x853204FA81]|tr 0-9 ionbsdeaml`@gmail.com
Sure, he could have fixed the security problems but it would have been costly and risky and meant sunsetting the Windows OS as we know it.
He *could* have setup an OS skunkworks in some other city, given them talent from the Windows division, all the Windows source code and documentation, a couple of billion dollars and told them to write a new version of Windows with no strings attached and the only limitation being that it had to run Win32 applications and be much more secure.
No consideration need be given for upgrades in place, other MS divisions or products, and borrowing ideas from Linux, BSD and Apple would be encouraged (aka, Not Invented Here Not Allowed).
Hopefully we would have ended up with a singular (ie, no bullshit server/desktop differentiation) operating system with in-built virtualization like VM/CMS, security and flexibility and none of the bullshit that holds back Windows because some wanker with stock options in another division won't play along.
Did the re-org have anything to do with them canceling technet?
I would have thought that Microsoft's biggest problem at the moment is that all the different divisions are not separate enough. The biggest thing holding Microsoft back is their seemingly inexplicable need to make everything run on Windows only (Office is the notable exception).
This blind adherence to making everything run on Windows may have been a strategic move in the 90's but it's really doing them no favours today. Take SQL server for example. It's a very good database product, but it only runs on Windows. While Windows has a large share of the server market, Linux (and other flavours of *nix) is just as large if not larger. If they were serious about pushing SQL server, they'd do what other database companies do and release their product on multiple platforms. Oracle/Postgres/DB2/etc all run on Window and common flavours of *nix. It makes no sense to hold SQL server back unless it's to give Windows a unique selling point.
The same can be said of a lot of their other products. Visual Studio is IMHO the best IDE out there, yet it's Windows only. MS Office is the standard office suite, yet it's not available on the major mobile operating systems (Android and iOS). Not releasing MS Office for iOS/Android is as ridiculous as not releasing it for the Mac. They've clearly decided that the Mac market is targeting and it's worth noting that Microsoft's Mac Business unit is doing well financially.
Making their other products run on non-Windows platforms may jeopardise the sales of Windows licenses, but it's almost certain to improve the sales of everything else. The question is whether the increase in sales will offset the loss of Windows licenses, and I'm in no position to answer that. My gut feeling is that it will be better for the company in the long run as they will no longer be tied to the fortunes of Windows. This separation may also benefit Windows in the long term as it won't be able to use the other MS products "exclusives" as a crutch and will have to stand on its own merits.
This is the sort of shake-up of Microsoft that I think is necessary. Anything else is just a waste of time and akin to rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic, as others have alluded to.
Since this should indeed be news for nerds, I actually read not only TFA but also the linked Balmer article.
Whilst it is popular to rubbish the guy on only flimsy grounds here, reading that memo an eye-opener.
Inspirational leaders formulate a clear, federating vision, which they articulate with passion and in few words.
Their subordinates, if aligned and competent, require no clarification before setting out the revised strategy for their teams, and then getting things done.
I see none of this in the memo. For example...
Going forward, our strategy will focus on creating a family of devices and services for individuals and businesses that empower people around the globe at home, at work and on the go, for the activities they value most.
Seriously, does that actually mean anything, to anyone here? MS is a hardware and services company now?
You know when I'll believe things have changed at Microsoft? When Raymond Chen is put in charge of the Windows division (or better yet, the whole company). More than anyone else I've heard about, he actually understands why people use Windows and stick with it: because of the consistent focus on backward compatibility at all costs that was the hallmark of the pre-Ballmer era.
Legacy compatibility is the #1 thing keeping Windows alive. But if the Ballmer/MSDN camp keeps winning victories over the Raymond Chen camp, that will continue to be eaten away, and Microsoft will one day wake up to find that no one needs them any more.
Embrace, extend, extinguish... pick one?
Shows how clueless Ballmer is they need to break it up in to smaller companies for the good of the shareholders. But he's far to egotistical to realize that. One giant bloated infighting company is not the answer. And even though Ballmer said the divisions should play nice that won't make it so.
This is definitely a faster and more efficient way to run MS...in such a way that Europe can sue their asses off and all their products get ruined by linking to services and products nobody has any interest in.
If you care about providing value to your users and generally kicking ass you draw aspects on technical rather than political boundaries and you include structural elements to promote internal competition and synergies.
What Steve has done shows he only cares about political concerns and Microsoft will continue to play games extracting maximum value they can get away with to maximize their dollar rather than providing maximum value to the customer. Ultimatly this behavior is corrosive to consumer loyalty and will lead to the downfall of the company as others deliver value MS is no longer capable of providing.
I once noted at an Exchange demonstration (put on by a professional Microsoft Evangelist) that not all of the new features in Exchange were supported in the new version of Outlook, which seemed odd. He confessed that the two teams are not allowed to talk to each other during initial development because of NDAs. The two divisions of the company are kept in the dark from each other, even though the two products are designed to work together.
I think many large companies suffer from their size.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
does this mean I still have to call India to get customer support?
I love reorganizations. They're often the kind of fundamental shake-up that make sleepy bureaucracies wake up, and shock companies into better performance. Ballmer's definitely right that Microsoft needs big changes.
That said, Ballmer's f*cked up basically everything he's touched in the past 10 years I've been paying attention. So I will pour myself a cold beer and enjoy watching him fubar this too. Knowing Ballmer, the new "one company, one strategy" mantra will coalesce around the WRONG strategy, and he'll drive Microsoft off the cliff (while BillG, still alive and watching, quivers in anguish from the wings).
Gentlemen, start your flamethrowers: it's about to smell like flamed-out monkey-man!
If this were Usenet, I'd killfile the lot of you.
This joke is entirely apt and inaccurate at the same time.
Microsoft keeps losing market share in every key market and their rate of growth keeps slowing.
But yet they are growing still none the less with record profits.
There are some who feel Balmer needs to go to save Microsoft, yet how do you kick out a CEO delivering record profits?
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Government needs an operating system (and office, database, etc) deployed worldwide owned by a company that fully cooperates with them on planting backdoors or just delaying fixing remote vulnerabilites. In the worst case can always bailout them, no matter how much losses are getting, anyway would be peanuts compared with the banks one.
My employer started a massive "one company" (using that exact phrase) push about two years ago.
It's a great idea...if you are small, or if you wish you were small.
The problem comes in when you serve different markets. If you have, for analogy, a group that makes airplane engines and another group that finances retail car sales. Or a group that makes developer tools and server software for professional users, and another group developing games and game hardware targeted to 14-35yo males who want to be entertained. Those markets simply don't reconcile well in the real world. That's why companies like GE, Toyota, GM, etc. have structures that allow the division that makes missiles to act like a different company than the divisions that make semiconductors, medical imaging devices, car parts, etc..
In my employer's case, it has not solved any problems but has created new orthodoxy an individual can be guilty of violating. It fuels inter-departmental ill will (each side accuses the other of not being "one company" enough) and has destroyed morale and caused employees to leave because product group (especially those that are different from the main products) employees realize that their efforts to bring success to the company, by serving their customers, will be viewed as rebellion against the "one company" edict.
I wonder if this means anything for native code vs. managed. One of the ways they seemed divided was between people who think .NET is the answer for everything and C or C++ people.
"E Silos Pluribus, Unum"
"From many Silos, One"
Aside from Windows itself, I'd offer SharePoint as the most wide-reaching product that the company produces. To deploy and work with a SharePoint installation crosses all boundaries between servers to end-user software.
This being the case, a brief examination of a few pieces of it can illustrate the walls between the various groups.
Firstly, there are around 6 distinct People Picker controls in use through the product. That's the dialog where you pick a user from AD or whatever authentication provider you're using to either give them rights or attach them to something. All do exactly the same thing, some look exactly the same, and some look different. But there are 6 of them.
Interface customization in SharePoint is a huge mess. You can create an application page and deploy it to the server. You can customize other page types with SharePoint Designer. You can use InfoPath to customize list forms. Now you can even take some random HTML you made in a text editor or dreamweaver and run a process to create a new layout from that as a template. I could keep going about the various customization vectors (if you can think of another manner, I've probably done that too). Even the pages making up the functionality that ships with the product don't follow any sort of reasonable pattern. Sometimes you're looking at an InfoPath form, and sometimes an HTML form, and sometimes you're kicked to an application page that looks distinct from other application pages doing the same thing for other services. Some functionality is in web parts, and some are in delegate controls.
Go to the administration settings for PowerPivot, and you get something that looks different than the settings for Excel Services. Then look at PerformancePoint. All are serving very similar functions, and providing very similar settings, but it's like learning Mandarin and then needing to also pick up Cantonese to set up the next thing that is ostensibly part of the same product.
They've taken some steps to unifying parts of the product in SharePoint 2013, but there is still a long way to go before it can be called cohesive. If they can break down some of these walls for Microsoft as a whole, then maybe it'll make SharePoint more solid as an offering.
Then again, if it wasn't a mess and made sense I'd be an order of magnitude less valuable as a SharePoint guy.
We trained hard ... but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form up into teams we would be reorganized. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganizing; and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency, and demoralization.
--Gauis Petronius Circa 50AD
Nothing says "We are a Windows Company" than Balmer trying to do anything. WHEN is the board going to fire his ass? Do they not understand, he has been what is wrong with Microsoft for a very long time, and they have only survived in spite of him?
I've been saying that Microsoft is done as a major player for a long time, because they are a "Windows" company. Now that the world is Unix/Linux world they are screwed if they continue down this path.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
What was it like before? How is this different?
That's what I'm wondering. I have read that M$ suffered from a 'feifdom' culture as a result of weird upper management that resulted in neglect. Then the 'feifdom' forms, usually as a result of one or a small group saying, "This is Bullshit, x person is crazy, but we can make *our department* not suck and be a shining example of how to do things right to the industry..." then you have internal anarchy. Like Mad Max. Mad Max combined with Truman Show.
In regards to 'marketing'...ugh...I didn't really expect any better, but seeing this in a formal document still gave me a dead feeling inside
Thank you Dave Raggett
Actually, I think you are right.
MS has been the desktop Meta-Game for decades, so if in fact they officially folded, aka the entire Windows empire is officially lame duck, *that* would go all Hurricane Sandy all over the IT world!
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
My manager is an absolute bitch, caring only about her piece of the BU's budget and benefit. If I want to integrate some code from another BU, or even bring that code to a higher TRL, she'll try and convince me that I am her soldier, and should for her piece of the cake only. Steve Ballmer and his approach could do a lot of good where I work.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
I've been through enough reorganisations myself to know one thing:
Changing the labels on the executives doors doesn't change a fucking thing, and neither does painting a new org chart.
The really important things are all in the implementation. Putting people into the same division doesn't mean they magically start working with each other. Announcing a vision or strategy doesn't create it.
So, as far as I'm concerned, nothing interesting has happened - yet.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
A new incoming CEO found three sealed letters in his desk drawer numbered 1-3 with Open in case of emergency written on the envelopes.
Several months pass and there is an emergency so the CEO opens the first letter.
"Blame it on the previous CEO." The letter reads, so he did so and all was well.
Several more months pass there is another emergency so the CEO opens the second letter.
"Re-org" the letter reads, so he did.
A few months later another emergency occurs so the CEO opens the third and final letter.
"Re-seal these envelopes and leave them in your desk drawer for the next CEO" it reads.
I hate the 'ribbon'...
Metro and Windows 7 were "Her idea" as well...
Her career represents all that causes otherwise good developers to make total crap and eventually quit the industry in disgust.
She's the Sarah Palin of computing.
Thank you Dave Raggett
http://www.bonkersworld.net/organizational-charts-update/ ;)
"important" should not be a matter of opinion, but of objective profit measurement.
But what if you have something that is making good money now, but another division that could be making an amazing amount of money if managed differently?
If you just base things on objective profit measurements, you'll never undertake the risky projects that can also have order of magnitudes better reward.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
We trained hard ... but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form up into teams we would be reorganized. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganizing; and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency, and demoralization.
...because organization is not the problem. Microsoft has operated under the 'look out for number 1' principle for so long that it permeates their culture. Every employee, manager, executive, and group ruthlessly guards their own self-interests at the expense of everything else...corporate goals, customer needs, company reputation, and so on. The general company principles appear to be a) gouge customers, b) drive competitors out of business, and c) undermine partners. These are the principles that built Microsoft and they probably can never be changed. Operating in this way has smothered innovation to the extent that computers pretty much operate exactly as they did 20 years ago other than being faster and more powerful (thanks to hardware innovation out of Microsoft's purview). If it were not for Steve Jobs and Apple, we would still be using cellphones that made calls and played simple games, we would be listening to music on CDs that had to contact a central server run by Microsoft before they could be played, and laptops would be the size of a countertop pancake griddle and put out about the same amount of heat.
Re-orgs are done by managers who have nothing better to except twiddle with org charts. I see them all the time is companies that are poorly run.
or else by 2020 when Win 7 reaches EOL it'll see MSFT reach EOL with it
I doubt even Microsoft would have made it to 2020 on its previous course, mostly because it didn't really seem to have one, so it's not surprising that things are changing.
Whether things are changing in a good direction is a different question. Microsoft have, with some justification, dominated business desktops for decades, and they have a serious presence in the server room/back office as well. They appear to be almost throwing that away and betting the farm on mobile and clouds with this new strategy.
If I were a betting man myself, I'd wager that the current cloud/software-as-a-service trend is going to overstay its welcome long before 2020. Objectively, there just isn't enough in it for the customers and it's being sustained more by groupthink than actual merit. When CIOs stop being cool just because they're moving everything "into the cloud", they'll start evangelising the security and reliability and performance and financial benefits of having everything in-house, under their direct control.
If I were in Microsoft's position, I'd be tempted to build a client/server model based on "private clouds" for business, probably with a three-way split between back-end tools, portable devices, and less portable but more flexible/multi-purpose devices. I'd want a unified set of ideas in the software and I'd want silky smooth data sharing and real-time collaboration and easy software management around the network, but I'd expect a different presentation style for the software in each of the three cases. They've got the war chest and continuing revenues to wait out the current cloud boom. They could be better placed than anyone else in the industry to lock up the business market for another generation, if they could just offer the right balance between cloud/mobile flexibility and depth/power of traditional business computing, without the cheap-and-nasty feel of most cloud and mobile experiences today.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
They could even bring back a former executive.
What, India doesn't call you?
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
There's a lot of "fourth monkey" dynamics that goes into it. It's especially hard to stop infighting when you've spent decades selecting employees to be, what's a polite word, "competitive".
no matter how you reorg a funny farm, it's still a funny farm.
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
Tearing down walls worked in Europe - Germany is now one country. Keeping competing divisions within a company is a very stupid thing to do. Reorganizing the company is thus a good idea - and it is about time. The big question is execution - can they pull it off? To reap the benefits of a "one company" strategy they need to change the internal culture of a very big organization - that is very, very challenging. Hopefully they succeed - Microsoft needs an update to stay ahead of changing trends and the silos they have been operating have not been able to do this. PC sales are in dramatic decline - innovativeness and adaptability will be crucial for the future of the company. Many of the challenges they will face in the big change program they obviously will need to initate will look like challenges in big M&A deals. They need their entire management to be trustworthy, understanding and loyal to both the company and the employees. A typical problem with large change processes is too much focus on measurements, target numbers, etc and too little focus on running the core business as well as taking care of the people working there. Hopefully they will manage - Microsoft have been bragging about their positions in lists like "100 best places to work" etc. I wish them luck, because I really do not want to see an iPad-ification of the entire consumer market. That is no better than the MS monopoly we had in the mid 90's on the desktop.
Need to understand managers? http://www.supersjefen.com/project-management-crash-course-english.html
Well, having her in charge of Surface/Xbox is better than her being in charge of Windows...
One little-noticed aspect of this is that Steve Ballmer is changing his last name to "Jobs".
Seriously, it sounds like he's trying to change Microsoft into Apple.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
MS has a lot of Apple envy, as one can see by its most recent strategies. I can't help but feel that they are making this move to more closely emulate Apple's corporate structure. They're doing a lot of imitation while trying to be distinctive.
...practices now come to Microsoft's internal divisions. The irony.
I fear this reorganizing is actually mostly due the an aged Ballmers need to make things simpler and less complex.
The 'single strategy' they should have jumped on was dismissed as a 'fad' by Gates. So does this new strategy mean I can log on to my Outlook server from Halo and check my email from a virtual HUD (within the game) and use hand gestures to navigate the inbox via Kinect? Cross-group collaboration (while maintaining secrecy on big projects) and 'holistic' sound like buzz-words that are supposed to generate confidence for shareholders. While their value is nearly half that of 2000, the dividends have continually risen, so I don't see a shareholder revolt. If the reorganization isn't well-thought, it could spell disaster, possibly forcing a split of the company to several, specialized units. Personally, I think that's how they should have organized from the start.
No sig for you! Come back one year!
How many of you developers out there have maintained an aging codebase that was becoming crushed under the weight of its own complexity? Think of how changes become impossible to make because of the number of side effects that need to be considered. Compatibility is the anchor around their neck, it keeps them married to this complexity. .Net was the perfect chance for them to create the new seed for their windowing interface. Preferably on a linux or freebsd core.
They also need to stop dumbing down their interfaces. The person responsible for the ribbon interface needs to be shown the door, it removes the factor of abstract intelligence needed and places the emphasis on memorization. Clearly it was done for user education lock-in. The old Access interface was enough to teach a new user about databases. Now it is just awful.
I've seen a number of executives 'shaking things up' and 'changing the paradigm' of their respective companies. More often than not, the aftermath is not particularly different.
Large companies like microsoft are nearly certain to demonstrate some severe dysfunction. Even if the execs say there *should* be synergy and such, the fiefdoms just reform (at some point, there is unavoidably a reckoning of who gets thrown under the bus for whom).
An example of 'NIH' After years of people pretty much wanting a damn bourne shell, they... made something totally different. People wanted nicely interopable ssh access, they got the hellish monster of powershell remoting over WebServices.
Now if you are a *pure* MS shop, then *anything* but cmd was a great help and the extraordinarily complex nasty crap underlying all their remoting and WMI is tucked away so you can't see just how much it is terrible.
Now MS recognizes that most datacenters are hetereogenuous. What is their answer? Linux should just start acting like Windows: http://blog.serverfault.com/2013/06/03/cross-platform-configuration-management-is-hard/
Seriously, in their efforts to be more 'friendly' in a mixed datacenter, they decide the answer is the world would be so much easier if they can continue to ignore decades of established behaviors of others and just get those competitors to simply change their mind.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Thing is, these CEbimbOs ruin things for competent women by reinforcing stereotypes. I genuinely feel bad for women in the IT workplace. There are virtually zero role models for the big crop of younger woman techies to follow.
Shut your filthy mouth if you were thinking of that CEO woman at Yahoo!...same with Cheryl Zuckerberg or whatever her name is...they are icy-cold ladder-climbing company-killers. Stuck in the same management style that ruined Microsoft....
Thank you Dave Raggett
Clearly, you are an idiot.
What a concise and thoroughly cogent argument you have there.
You can pick up your "I won! I won!" badge from the counter as you leave.
I think it's wrong to cease to listen completely just because it's been over a decade since a company did a single thing that positively impacted your world. In the case of Microsoft I've reached a pragmatic compromise: I read until the first use of the word "innovation".
The reason that "innovation" shows up in the memo title is so that everyone at Microsoft knows that nothing will really change as a result of what follows, no matter how drastic.
Xerox Parc in the 1970s: the kind of core technological innovation most companies claim to do, but actually don't
Apple in the 1980s: paring down true innovation hoovered from Xerox to make it marketable under the "one size fits all" reality distortion field
Microsoft in the 1980s: business tactics for gaining control of the "air supply", which has always been Microsoft's core area of innovation
Apple in the 1990s: black turtle-neck saviour boomerang (makes for a better opera than a business model, but hell, it worked)
Microsoft in the 1990s: extended legacy compatibility through virtualization and non-existent application security model
Apple recently: small form factor integration and aesthetics; walled gardens that actually work
Microsoft recently: cleverly cooked TCO studies to continue locking companies into Exchange Server and the rest of the office documents ecosystem
Google 1995-2005: extracting relevance signals from the web page graph, delivering search results at extremely low marginal cost, underlying mechanics of the AdSense auction (these being the closest to true innovation in the Xerox tradition)
Google since: ripping off Java from Sun (via the open source Dalvik project) for use in Android/Linux; becoming more like Facebook
The reason companies keep repeating the word "innovation" is because they so rarely do it on the product development side of their business (innovation in revenue extraction tends to have longer legs).
Wow, talk about being responsive. Kind of like bailing the titanic out with shot glasses.
Short of gutting the company and starting over (Windows 8.x, REALLY) that's about all they can do.
Actually that would be a good plan, fire everyone and hire back who you need.
The "bloatware" aspect of windows no doubt reflects the company to a large degree.
The "nepotism" factor has also likely run it's course by now. Remember Microsoft has been around in some form since 1980, so 40+ years of "good old boy network" can wreak havoc on a company.
If XBOX 720 / one doens't REALLY take off HUGE, then Microsoft is looking at a grim future.
Frankly this is the first "smart" thing I have seem Balmer do, and I hope it works for them.
Lots of jobs at stake. I think this is somewhat too little too late, but time will tell
In 1995 when I worked for "the last American car company" there was a massive reorganization. One of the things it (the "reorg") did was standardize IT throughout the company (at least the company minus the Finance and Legal) to reduce duplication of effort in this otherwise "overhead activity".
Within "the last American car company” and perhaps other companies the term "chimney" was used to describe the scope and scale of organizations within the company. The staff and resources being "the bricks". Well, as you can imagine, the more "bricks" a chimney had the more power and prestige the manager had.
The "reorg" was intended to "level the chimneys" (except ours of course which was the model) and build a single "large chimney" which would include IT for the entire company based on our divisions IT model.
In any case, the net result was the biggest "turf war" I have ever seen in my career. Resources (people, projects, hardware, etc) were hidden, artificial conflicts created, feet were dragged, hair was pulled. Suffice it to say, change was not embraced by all.
The idea (standardization) was a sound one, and had all involved cooperated, the strategy would have worked and "the last American car company" could have had an integrated IT department across all divisions and plants worldwide.
BUT, due to the infighting and chicanery the net result of this was that the entire IT function was eventually outsourced to IBM.
Many jobs were lost, and IMHO the entire company suffered from the loss of internal control of IT resources and programs.
Fortunately, "the last American car company" is not a computer or software Company, so overall the net effect to "the last American car company" was probably negligible or perhaps even good by reducing staffing costs.
Microsoft on the other hand manufactures nothing, so they are wholly dependent on software. This "reorg" could potentially be catastrophic for Balmer and Microsoft. Perhaps good for consumers and employees of Microsoft (who may form their own companies specializing in what they did fin Redmond), but for the company, not so much.
word to the wise, "reorgs" don't often work as intended, this should be very scary for the Shareholders.
should be the first thing to go.
You mean like what I get told about 50% of my Linux problems? Oh you need that to work or you wanna change that setting? All you have to do is recompile the kernel....... Does that response also offend you? It is one of the big reasons Linux is still not ready for the desktop!
...with the Windows phone honcho now in charge of the operating system it doesn't look good for future releases of Windows. Also, if becoming a "device and services" company means what is says, then it would seem that Microsoft obviously wants to become Apple and concentrate on hardware and apps which also doesn't sound good for the OS. Looks like in the future if you want to run anything but apps on your computer your choice of OS will be limited. It seems since the Desktop PC won't die a natural death quick enough, Microsoft has decided to hurry its demise.
For me, I almost exclusively run games on my PC and have no use for social media, apps, or music/videos on my PC. Looks like I'll be running Win7 until I die. lol.
(Captcha: Scoffs)
Nobody gives a fuck about your goddamned captcha.