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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.
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.
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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...
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.
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.
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.
Well, Windows 8 is such a train wreck because they wanted to exploit the "synergy" between your PC, tablet and phone - even if/though your tablet runs iOS and your phone runs Android. This "re-org" is just more of the same kind of thinking.
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.
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.
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
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.
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You don't lead customers, you lead followers.
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.
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.
Which is why Apple's strategy works so well for them, but won't work for Microsoft. Apple has followers, Microsoft has customers.
exploit the "synergy" between your PC, tablet and phone
That is a great idea IMO, they just got it backwards. Dev tools that would let me write against one system library and have something that runs with a device-appropriate UI on PCs, phones, and consoles? Huge win. Forcing the same UI on all, but having different system libraries for each? Not so much.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
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
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
"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
...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.