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Say What? Wading Through the Nonsense In Microsoft's Re-Org Memo
curtwoodward writes "Steve Ballmer's attempt to reorganize Microsoft into a more focused company will define his legacy as CEO. So you'd think the wordsmiths in Redmond would take a little time ensuring their message was crystal-clear, right? Not exactly. Ballmer's big, gung-ho memo to Microsofties, posted on the company's website, is chock full of nonsense and corporate executive doublespeak — or, as Ballmer might say, `high-value experiences' that will `involve repartitioning the work' and `drive partners across our integrated strategy and its execution.' Huh?" Honest language in corporate communications is a rare quality. I suspect there's a special language-butchering training course that most C-level executives enthusiastically complete.
http://www.dack.com/web/bullshit.html Easy, no need to hire copywriters anymore.
ralphbarbagallo.com
This shit is just like the bullshit out of that : http://cbsg.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/live
Ballmer will make you want to take back those nasty things you said about Bill Gates in the late '90s.
Have you ever watched an interview with Ballmer and after thought to yourself "Did he actually answer any questions?" /Ballmer smiles.
Ballmer: "We pass the TCP/IP stack into a business flow analysis helping our customers make better decisions!"
Interviewer: "Wow, you guys are busy. Way over my head."
Ballmer: "Just look for it this fall on stores. You'll be pleased we fixed the UDP experience problems with VB."
Where is the actual story?
D'OH!
For both Microsoft and C-level execs.
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
Ostap Bender lives!
If you can actually parse the bull, it does have some actual meaning underneath it, and what it says isn't necessarily a good thing.
"We will pull together disparate engineering efforts today into a coherent set of our high-value activities. This will enable us to deliver the most capability—and be most efficient in development and operations—with the greatest coherence to all our key customers.”
This says that smart people won't be able to work on small, high functioning teams like they need to. Instead, itsounds like they're going to break up teams and pool their people. This will have the effect of making everyone equally mediocre, which is not what they need.
“Some of these changes will involve putting things together and others will involve repartitioning the work, but in all instances we will be more coherent for our users and developers.”
"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." What value does he deliver if everything is the same? This squashes out room for innovation.
This memo is not only gobbledygook, it's hiding some really bad practices.
John
How wonderfully appropriate.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Every person who lived in soviet block remembers similiar slogans. It was everywhere: in communist factories, on the streets, everywhere. For me current form of corporate capitalism is very similiar to old communist system. These are two sides of the same coin: centralization. Corporate central planning masquerading itself as "free market" (which it isn't) with almost the same side effects, parasites (party comrades in old system, corporate CEOs in new system) and inefficiencies. This will fall sooner or later in the same way old soviet system has fallen.
Microsoft can't seem to do anything right on the consumer front, and while pushing customers into the cloud may get them a nice reliable monthly subscription from a lot of shops, it's also a dangerous gambit, as it increases the odds that shops will abandon the Windows desktop OS or eventually move their services to another provider.
It's a very dangerous time for Microsoft right now. They'll still be selling a whole fark ton of software/services, but if they don't grow at the rate that Wall Street expects them too, their stock will start taking a beating and then the spiral starts.
I was in times square yesterday, the news ticker said "Steve Ballmer re-asserts direction of Microsoft". I am beginning to believe you're right.
sysadmins and parents of newborns get the same amount of sleep.
Scott McNealy was well known for this.... at Sun, "put all our wood behind 1 arrow" was one of his favorite phrases.
Microsoft's market cap is 299B; Oracle's is 144B, so at least they aren't destined to be purchased by Oracle yet...
Shaka. When the walls fell.
I agree with you and with Curt Woodward's final summation, "It makes sense, if you can stay awake." There is some meaning behind the catch phrases. I also agree with you that it about putting the overall company goals above the idiosyncratic.
I disagree that this is necessarily bad or means removing small high functioning teams. The ability for a developer to create an application that functions is different environments, such as desk top, cloud and tablet is significant. What is means for Microsoft is understanding requirements, a high level vision, and how to generate a standard across team. This is the kind of thing a large company can do. They can make their own de facto standard and stick to it. Sometime that means their engineers can't do things the most natural way for a specific environment, but being intuitive for the internal engineer is not the most important element of the product. How it suits the customers, such as an external engineer and end users is what matters.
Sure their needs to be tailoring by the external engineer so that the application would suite a give format. But this is a lot different than having to retool the whole thing because each technology from the same company is fundamentally different.
We will be replacing all of the employees with small shell scripts. The ones we can't, we will be outsourcing your
jobs to Elbonia, until there are no employees remaining that are not upper management.
Then we will declare bankruptcy, pocket all the profits until we re-emerge as a shell company sellining
rights to our name.
Oh and XboxOne.
Ballmer's big, gung-ho memo to Microsofties, posted on the company's website, is chock full of nonsense and corporate executive doublespeak — or, as Ballmer might say, `high-value experiences' that will `involve repartitioning the work' and `drive partners across our integrated strategy and its execution.' Huh?"
Relax. I'm sure Ballmer didn't write anything. Rather it's the work of market-droids trying to justify their MBAs with buzz words - anything to keep the chairs on the floor and not in the air. I will comment on one quote, however:
“We will pull together disparate engineering efforts today into a coherent set of our high-value activities..."
So when will this start? :-)
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
I'm not sure Balmer realizes he is no longer in B-school. He seems to like to surround himself with like-minded B-school buddies, and runs Microsoft like it's the fraternity Mu Sigma Alpha. This kind of bizarro, "in"-group lingo doesn't actually fly when you're the CEO of a Fortune 500 company in what appears to be a consolidation/contraction phase and a profit-taking decline. This buddy mentality is the last thing "MS House" needs.
Plainspoken English matters in business when there is a crisis at hand. This kind of platitude laden memo belongs in a company that is not hungry and is cruising along with a high-quality, high-growth business strategy. Then you can talk biz-orgs theory all you like, however you may please.
My 2 cents. That penny is depreciated to the inflation standard of the year 2500, I would guess, but I find this kind of gamesmanship worrying.
I want MS to adapt and succeed. It has every reason to. It doesn't seem to be doing so. It seems to be resting on its laurels, and has been for a decade.
"We have powered devices for many years through Windows PCs and Xbox."
What the heck is that actually supposed to mean?
#DeleteChrome
What people fail to realize is that these memos are poetry; they're meant to be poetry and are to be poetry and nothing factual at all.
Their meaning is designed to be interpreted by the mood of how the reader feels about their position in the company. This is a taught
skill. Anyone expecting to gleam facts is seriously barking up the wrong tree.
I though everybody knew this?
Well what is he gonna say? "Hi, I want Wall street to kiss my behind and love me like they do Apple so I'm gonna burn the company to the ground by being MORE expensive, MORE cellphone like (since iPhone is kicking our behinds) and with more walled gardens and even higher apps! What could possibly go wrong, it works for Apple right?"
I wonder if in 5 years we'll take of "The Ballmer Effect" where a CEO has such a disconnect from reality that he'll torch the company trying to make it something it isn't. if Ballmer reads this let me make this perfectly clear, okay? Hey Steve...if I wanted a tablet I'D BUY A FRICKING TABLET so stop trying to jam a tablet UI onto my PC, okay buddy? And we sure as hell ain't paying apple money for Windows Steve, that plan is as retarded as Walmart raising prices 5000% and thinking that means they can compete with Macy's, its a different demographic dude and you can't slap a coat of paint on a Pinto and sell it for Porsche money, its just not gonna work, its a giant bloated failwhale on the beach of life.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Here's something similar that you can tweak:
http://cmorse.org/missiongen/
Table-ized A.I.
(Oops). ... Did untold damage. Operating overheads went through the roof, and it is now virtually impossible to do small well focused work (at least in many divisions). CSIRO has seen it' 80th birthday, but unless things change I won't be holding my breath for a centenary.
So, if we want a roadmap for Microsoft....
From my own observation of MS there are no "small high functioning teams" there for very long. Any truly effective small team gets snapped up by an ambitious manager higher up the corporate pecking order, it gets re-directed (generally on a task unrelated to whatever their previous focus was), and then the team is either bloated by unnecessary personnel being added or it fragments.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
MS is trying to follow in the mistakes made by Sony. I wouldn't buy Sony DVD players for many years. Why not? Because they wouldn't play VCD or DivX. And why wouldn't they? Because the division of Sony that produces films made sure that wouldn't happen, as VCD and DivX were often used for piracy. Thus the hardware was crippled as a result of the overarching strategy of the company as a whole. They compromised in one area with the theory that somehow the other part of the company would profit more (which is of course incorrect in this case).
The more a diverse company attempts to function as a single entity, the less flexibility the divisions have to compete on a level playing field with companies that aren't so encumbered. It's clear that Sony is finally waking up a little, as they have been quick to point out how the new PS3 allows offline gaming and resaleability of used titles. It's very, very rare for Sony to come across as an advocate for consumers' rights, so that was quite a big change for them.
So in other words, I think this philosophy is going to hurt MS in the long run.
Better known as 318230.
Dear business community:
Please pay no attention to the news that we are sending pretty much everything you type directly to the NSA in exchange for buckets of cash and favors. Especially you, China! Losing our entire strategy for southeast Asia would probably hurt the stock price. Hah! If those idiots knew!
Also, for those of you who like Windows 8 except for the forced UI change, you're shit out of luck. It's a thing I've said is good, therefore it is good, and the millions of customers desperately fleeing the platform have no effect on how I view that decision. Because I'm a really smart business guy. Look, I'm in a suit and tie!
All the best,
Steve Ballmer
... in three big dimensions: strategy, capability, collaboration, agility, common goals, divisional strategies.
Did Steve also head up the Spanish Inquisition?
Thanks but as a grunt in the trenches this REALLY pisses me off, they have this beta program, we all happily do their damned job for them and tell them what's wrong and what do they do? throw ALL THE INFO they gained in the fucking trash because ballmer has a stiffie for the iPhone yet doesn't have a damned clue about what makes an iPhone an iPhone! News Flash, Jobs spent more than 3 decades slowly but surely building up Apple to be a high end boutique brand, refused to cut prices even in the 90s when they were on the ropes, because for his entire strategy to work it NEEDED to be expensive!
A perfect analogy would be slapping a new coat of paint on a Pinto and expecting to get Porsche money for it, because MSFT slaughtered the competition precisely because they were NOT expensive, they were the Walmart to Apple's Macy's and there is NO WAY IN HELL they are gonna suddenly flip that and get people to pay more than for an Apple to buy WinPhones and Wintabs, its NEVER gonna happen, it will NEVER work, the MSFT stores are ghost towns, all the little shops like mine have "Yes we have Win 7!" signs in the window, he is burning the damned company to the ground trying to force a strategy that has less of a chance of succeeding than Heaven's Gate II has a chance of being made!
Those of us on the ground could have told them that and saved the company billions, but as long as Steve "I'm duh big cheese, herpa de derp!" Ballmer is in the seat the company is gonna keep tanking. Its business 101, give the people products they want to buy or they'll go somewhere else. sinofsky knew that, he wanted Win 8 to be Win 7.1 and got fired for it, now there is nobody to rein in the sweaty one and he is gonna trash their remaining businesses by ignoring the numbers and shoving a "We're a more expensive Apple clone!" strategy on the company. If the people want an apple they'll BUY an Apple, they sure as hell ain't gonna pay Apple money for a Windows device, its doomed to fail.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
But I don't think that's fair at all. The reason Microsoft can't be Apple is that they have earned a reputation for not sweating the details. Windows Explorer still hangs periodically, even in Windows 8, when you're looking at a big directory tree or accessing a network share. Too many updates require a system restart. The user interface for the control panels isn't consistent. Navigating the legalese to figure out licensing if your company is too small to just throw money at the problem is a nightmare. Navigating the documentation as a home user to figure out which version of Windows you want is a nightmare. As recently as last year I had Windows Update break with an obscure error message and I had to spend hours entering a DWORD into search engines before I gave up, wiped the entire machine, and started over. When a program does hang, there is no "stop immediately option" unless you bring up a command shell and use Taskkill, you are always forced to wait even when you know from the first second that you just want to exit the program completely.
Apple has the love of millions because they sweat the details as much as they can. They still screw up - see the Apple Maps fiasco - but they try very hard to make everything clean and consistent. Microsoft has an install-base of millions because they sweat the details just enough not to lose the customers, and don't seem to care if what remains will annoy the customer as long as they keep getting their money. That attitude works fine for keeping Microsoft where it is, but it won't help them take marketshare in phone or tablets from Apple, and it won't help them get nearly the fanatical loyalty that Apple has.
I hate Apple. I hate Microsoft. But I think it's easy to see why Apple's fans are fanatics and Microsoft fanatics are comparatively rare.