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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.
Unless you are Apple.
Fantastic, because what I really need from Microsoft is more synergy between my office applications and the Xbox.
"Ballmer also wants to knock down the walls"
Nah, too easy.
I was going to say "Steve Ballmer Reorganizing Microsoft ... he's starting with the chairs"
"Ballmer also wants to knock down the walls"
Nah, too easy.
Well, I don't know 'bout that. After all, if there are no walls, why do they need Windows?
you mean c:\ cause
based on Marketing department... WINNNNing
If this Dilbert cartoon does not hit the nail on the head, I don't know what does.
what SQL server needs is more tiles
Maybe MS is doing the same thing as BlackBerry?
BlackBerry's "engineering culture shift" has folks moving into "open concept collaboration spaces."
These consist of 6x6 desks arranged in a quad facing inwards, so you're always staring at 3 other people. The workspace dividers are 6" high, no shelves, no personal space. Chairs are back-to-back, so if you and Joe lean back at the same time you'll concuss each other.
Employees are being instructed to not voice their opinions on the move or they'll face discipline. I have heard everyone is very excited and energized by the new collaborative environment that's being shoved down their throats.
Hard to get rid of a guy who's fired or run-off all his potential replacements.
The big omission I noticed in the article was any mention of changes to the annual review process. Their current curved review approach does no encourage cooperation between employees, much less between divisions. The one-team approach needs to be supported from the bottom up, not just dictated from the top down.
- tensions in our lives that are attacking our minds, unite themselves together to make our consciousness blind - op'ivy
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.
Brings forth the mental image of Ballmer looking critically while interns strain to hold up a couch, saying "Two inches to the left. Hrm, ok, now two inches to the right. Now another two inches to the left..." for an hour before having them set the couch back down exactly where it was.
I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it!
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.
They've been quite busy destroying Windows so they will no longer be needed. Tearing down walls is just the next logical step.
I think they should outsource the CEO job. I hear Carly Fiorina is looking for a new challenge. :)
If I were God, wouldn't I protect my churches from acts of me?
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.
I found a quicker fix for my dad's poorly performing new laptop. I removed the Norton virus. I did something similar with McAfee for a friend when it decided that the best way to protect her from the dangers of the internet was to disable her networking stack.
I did something similar with McAfee for a friend when it decided that the best way to protect her from the dangers of the internet was to disable her networking stack.
Well... you've gotta admit, it has a point there...
he did, in 2001
Vista SP2 and later is a whole new kernel that had been in development since 2001. smaller and modular unlike the bill gates throw everything into the kernel strategy
Windows 7 is exactly what you wanted. a new OS with backward compatibility. that's why its 20GB of disk space to install it. there are multiple versions of almost every file for backward compatibility
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.
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.
Ballmer might be a horrible CEO (I don't really care enough to know), but you would think a CEO should have some idea of what parts of the company are "important", and "important" should not be a matter of opinion, but of objective profit measurement.
Books have been written about why companies that focus do better than companies that try to get their hands into everything. PepsiCo owns everything from Frito-Lay to KFC to East Side Marios restaurants, but both Coca Cola and McDonald's each have PepsiCo beat in terms of net asset value despite each corporation focusing tightly on only beverages or a single fast food chain.
It's not against anyone's best interests for Microsoft to cut the fat and sell off divisions and brands that aren't integral to it's core focus. What the core focus is, if it has one, I don't know. My guess is it should probably be Windows and related products like Office. XBox should at the very least drop the Microsoft brand and be treated as a separate company, if not actually spun into a completely separate company. There's really no reason not to. The shareholders can spin off divisions or brands held by Microsoft corp into completely new companies and still retain ownership in those new companies. They would just elect a new Presidents for those new corps, hire a new executive team (preferably by promoting experts within those divisions who know what they're doing), and let them be run as tightly focused companies that don't need to compete for capital and resources with all of the other divisions under the currently bloated umbrella corp that is Microsoft. The shareholders continue to profit from their holdings as long as the new company is profitable, and the employees working in those divisions benefit from working for a company that is dedicated solely to achieving the success of the products they actually work on, rather than being treated "unimportant" compared to the other divisions (i.e: no more infighting). As long as there is any hope for those products they stand to do much better as stand-alone companies.
Another reason defocused companies are at a disadvantage is that often they need to sell to their competitors. Pepsi actually outsells Coca Cola in super markets, but in restaurants Coca Coca destroys them, and as a result Coca Cola wins in terms of net profits. The reason is because McDonald's and others don't want to buy from PepsiCo when Pepsi owns Taco Bell, KFC and other competitors.
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.
"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
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.