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."

Comments

Fixed that for you

[tom229]

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.

Re:Fixed that for you

[ackthpt]

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.

To be fair, the company once had a rather singular approach the the market, but through expansion and growth it ended up looking like bloated octopus.

Expect some housecleaning to be a part of this re-org as redundancy is cut out, empires reigned in.

Re:Fixed that for you

[Samantha Wright]

I wouldn't be so sure—Microsoft's terrible internal organization and infighting have been discussed at length in the past, and it's quite reasonable to say that this is the exact problem that makes their products what we despise. One tiny example: PowerShell was supposed to be an update for the Command Prompt, but because the group that wrote PowerShell wasn't the group in charge of the core system, it had to be shipped as a separate product. The fiefdom regime essentially makes it difficult or impossible to contribute to projects that aren't your own, creating huge barriers to contributing bugs; everything is its own little cathedral. Here's a more detailed rant on the technical consequences from an anonymous MS employee.

Re:Fixed that for you

[Dcnjoe60]

I wouldn't be so sure—Microsoft's terrible internal organization and infighting have been discussed at length in the past [slashdot.org], and it's quite reasonable to say that this is the exact problem that makes their products what we despise.

Except that Ballmer has been at the helm for most of that time and ultimately responsible for the organization and infighting as it is part of the corporate culture at Microsoft. That is why most boards bring in a whole new management team when such a top down re-organization is required. Most boards realize that you only get one chance to get it right. That's why you don't let the fox who has been raiding the hen house be the one who reorganizes the hen house. Leaving Balmmer and the rest of the management team in place means that board believes that management isn't the problem, but the workers are. That doesn't bode well for the future of Microsoft as the workers aren't the ones who have created the corporate culture nor are they the ones who have made the company a shadow of what it once was or could have been.

We know what that means?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Good

[hsmith]

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.

Developer collaboration

[jeff.keenan]

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?

Go buy a boat and retire.

[Picass0]

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.

Re:start with kicking out Ballmer

[RichMan]

If they were not MS with a huge pile of cash Xbox would have been a failure. The initial hardware failure rate on shipped product was staggering. A lesser company would have been destroyed by that.

Xbox should have been a hard lesson that MS management did not know anything about shipping physical units instead of software. Instead they learned "hardware reliabilty is important". They did not learn the marketing and usability stuff that Apple has hands down.

Microsoft is so big it can bull through mistakes which lead to the Windows 8 "issue". Which is about 3 or more problems all in one.

Re:Ignoring customers is not a winning strategy.

[Nerdfest]

You don't lead customers, you lead followers.

Re:Executive summary.

[Austerity Empowers]

And I am thrilled that he's running MS. If they had someone smart in there, things would be really horrifying in computer-land.

SharePoint

[dosun88888]

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.

Re:Sounds like a plan

[lgw]

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.