New Microsoft CEO Vows To Shake Up Corporate Culture

jfruh (300774) writes New Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said that he and his leadership team are taking "important steps to visibly change our culture" and that "nothing is off the table" on that score. While much of his declaration consists of vague and positive-sounding phrases ("increase the fluidity of information and ideas by taking actions to flatten the organization and develop leaner business processes"), he outlined his main goals for the shift: reduce time it takes to get things done by having fewer people involved in each decision; quantify outcomes for products and use that data to predict future trends; and increasing investment for employee training and development.

Comments

Manager

[tsa]

Ha, a real manager!

But seriously, hopefully Microsoft will benefit from him and become a bit more popular amongst nerds.

Re:Manager

[gbjbaanb]

yeah, because everything a nerd wants is summed up in the phrase "business process", flat or not.

Re:Manager

[Anonymous Coward]

EVERY new bigwig wants to play "there's a new sneriff in town!" and shake things up. They'll change things for no good reason for the sake of change, even if that same change was already tried three or four bigwigs ago. Imagine a cat or a dog pissing on their territory to make sure other cats/dogs know who it belongs to. That's all there is to see here. After that it'll be meet the new boss, same as the old boss because he'll have to deal with all the same pressures.

Re:Manager

[Teckla]

But seriously, hopefully Microsoft will benefit from him and become a bit more popular amongst nerds.

Why do you hope for that? Microsoft pretends to reinvent itself regularly, but one thing remains constant through the decades: Their goal has unswervingly been lock-in from top to bottom, while trying to nickel and dime you the whole way.

For nerds, this means locking you into their programming languages (e.g., VB or C#), or if not that, at least lock you into their APIs (so that you're as good as locked in, even if you're using C or C++). It means abandonment of entire domains that no longer suit them (look up how woefully out-of-date and ignored the C part of their C/C++ compiler is).

It means locking you into their platforms, whether that be the operating system (Windows) or the browser (Internet Explorer).

It means high prices (have you seen the prices on Windows Server and/or Microsoft Azure lately?), which is not-at-all nerd-friendly. It means guaranteed stagnation in those domains where they achieve dominance. It means product churn for the sake of profits. It means ignoring customers and forcing bad implementations on them (*cough*Metro*cough*) and then taking forever to admit it was a mistake and fix it (when is Windows 9 due out? Next year sometime?).

Just because some new-boss-same-as-the-old-boss is singing some unicorns-and-rainbows song doesn't mean the core of Microsoft is going to change. They're still after the same things they've always been after: Lock-in so severe that the pain of escape ensures most people remain slaves, and profits, profits, profits.

Re:Manager

[nabsltd]

USB sockets also lock you in to using USB leads.

You're missing that point that anybody can make both USB sockets and USB leads with a very minimal royalty payment.

What if only one company made USB sockets (Microsoft) and they charged $100 for it (Windows). Then, once you did pay and had your USB device working, they stopped supporting the current USB standard, which encouraged your device manufacturer to stop supporting it. Then, all new USB devices would only work on the new USB sockets, so if you buy a new camera/scanner/mouse/keyboard/whatever, you can't plug it in to your current USB socket, and need to pay another $100 to get the new socket. If Microsoft didn't see Windows as a profit center, but instead used it as a platform to get you to pay for everything else they do, 90% of the complaints about them would stop.

I didn't mind paying for the first versions of Windows, because they gave me something I didn't have: a windowed UI. Then, Windows NT gave us real multi-tasking and 32-bit code. Windows 2000 and XP were just more polished versions, although XP gave us 64-bit that wasn't supported much. Windows 7 finally gave us 64-bit with real support. Windows 8 is just a different UI. So, the reality is that over that span of nearly 20 years, I feel like I should have paid "full price" for about 3 versions (truly major upgrades), and some token amount (about 20% of the full version price seems right) for the "maintenance" releases.

Instead, if you wanted to play the latest games, you had to upgrade to XP (2000 was just fine for running productivity apps) and 7, and even before the end of support of XP, you had to upgrade to 7 if you didn't use an alternate browser (unless you like getting burned by the most common security exploits). Then, add in that the more recent OS often don't have drivers for older hardware and have a lot more system requirements, and you end up with Linux getting traction because of this endless cycle.

Although Linux is really hurting the inroads that MS made into the server market, it will never touch the desktop until it's just as easy to use. It will never be just as easy to use as long as there are 14 different Linux distributions with 43 different GUI implementations (numbers pulled out of my ass, but you get the picture). Until there is one GUI, no large percentage of companies will heavily invest in converting to a Linux desktop because they won't want to train every new hire in how the system works. And yes, I know that the vast majority of people don't do anything complicated, but things like connecting to a network share, changing the screen resolution, changing the GUI colors, playing a video, scheduling a meeting with co-workers, etc., are all things that real people do and which have to be easy and consistent. In addition, until all the standard software is available (no, Linux doesn't have to have Microsoft Office, but it has to have a package that does everything that Office does, and Open/Libre Office ain't it), there won't be a large shift, either.

I maintain Linux servers for a living, but I still use a Windows desktop (even though my employer does support Windows, Linux, and OSX for personal desktops) because it still is easier to get everything done using that. I have lots of options to get to a Linux system and run programs (both text and GUI), and not everyone in my office uses the same toolset as I do. But, the other direction is painful. Without Windows, you can't easily find out when everybody is available for a meeting, and can't stay logged in to your e-mail (OWA times out, while Outlook does not). I can connect to a Windows share from a Linux system, but I can't adjust the ACLs. With a Windows desktop, I can connect to both Windows and NFS shares and adjust the ACLs.

Re:Manager

[jbolden]

It means high prices (have you seen the prices on Windows Server and/or Microsoft Azure lately?

Yes pretty reasonable compared to Oracle, IBM and similar offerings. Higher than open source alternatives.

It means ignoring customers and forcing bad implementations on them (*cough*Metro*cough*) and then taking forever to admit it was a mistake and fix it (when is Windows 9 due out? Next year sometime?).

IMHO the mistake was not forcing it more by making touch and/or digitizer tablet mandatory for Windows 8. The problem with Windows 8 is that people insist on running on Windows 7 hardware.

Re:Manager

[Twinbee]

All fair points but...

so if you buy a new camera/scanner/mouse/keyboard/whatever, you can't plug it in to your current USB socket, and need to pay another $100 to get the new socket

Microsoft have done a lot to support backwards compatibility. Most software which works on WinXP will work on Win 8 and vice versa.

I don't think the price MS charges for Windows is amazingly extortionate, but I get your point.

As you semi-pointed out, if MS opened up Windows I fear we'd get the same fragmentation Linux/Unix has. That's the last thing we need. Standards are good, fragmentation is not. (As long as the product is mature/good quality, and competition isn't needed as much).

Re:Manager

[wiredlogic]

He had me at "crease the fluidity". OMG... *swoon*.

Re:Manager

[swillden]

Their goal has unswervingly been lock-in from top to bottom, while trying to nickel and dime you the whole way.

This is exactly the corporate culture shake-up that's required.

Microsoft has a lot of really smart people, and the financial and other assets needed to put them to work doing great things that can compete and win on their own, actually serving customers rather than trying to lock them in and then exploit them.

MS could be great. But they need a radically different internal dynamic to get there. Will this guy be able to do that? I'm skeptical, but I really hope he can.

Re:Manager

[raddan]

(disclaimer: I have interned at Microsoft for the past three summers; I do not speak for them)

I think your criticism against lock-in is fair, and this is clearly one of Microsoft's strategies, and I suspect that it will continue to be to some degree. But on the language front, you are wrong. Not only are Microsoft's newest languages open-source (F#, TypeScript), but they are also cross-platform and collaboratively developed with open source groups. And, of course, you can run all .NET languages on the Mac, Linux, FreeBSD, etc. with mono.

While it is theoretically possible that all of this is a deadly Microsoft-bait-and-switch just waiting to happen, having worked at Microsoft, I can say that doing so would fly in the face of a lot of hard work by many, many people there. I was as critical about Microsoft as you were (dig into my /. history and you'll see) until I worked there. Not only is it a great place to work, but the company really is committed to changing its culture. Use of open-source tools at Microsoft used to be strictly-prohibited. Now they have a fast-track process for working with them. Open-sourcing of Microsoft software was also a complete non-starter. Now putting Microsoft code up on the web is increasingly routine, and they even have their own open-source hosting ala GitHub that has git bindings.

Microsoft is a big company (the Redmond campus is mind-bogglingly huge to me) and they have a lot of corporate momentum. Despite this, in my opinion, I've seen my daily interactions with people do a complete 180 in the last couple of years. Microsoft knows that the era of selling boxed copies of proprietary software is coming to an end. So you're simply wrong about Microsoft not being able to change.

Re:Manager

[NortWind]

Microsoft does a good job of supporting backward compatibility because it has to do so to maintain lock-in. If things weren't very compatible from version to version, you might be tempted to try something else. That is how Microsoft rakes in their money for a product that is in many ways worse than a free product: lock-in.

Re:Manager

[swillden]

That's got nothing to do with talent, and everything to do with how the talent is employed.

Re: Manager

[cyber-vandal]

Apple aren't the only company who make Thunderbolt and it's a patented Intel technology anyway.

Re:Manager

[BadDreamer]

Monoculture is bad. What you call fragmentation I call a healthy diversity allowing security. Unfortunately Linux is heading away from this with things like systemd, which will create a new monoculture for no appreciable gain, but at least so far the diversity is working in the Internets favor.

And who says competition is not needed in OS'es, anyway? Why should we all settle for a monoculture and just placidly say "standards are good" without examining whether they actually ARE good?

Good call

[slashdice]

as a former MicroSoftie (research, don't be a hater) I can confirm that Ballmer was first and foremost a sales guy. He brought in the revenue but destroyed the culture and the company in the process. He was a corporate raider, he just did it from the inside.

Re:Good call

[AHuxley]

What culture? The only aim was to ship software at a price to win over a generation of customers and keep them consuming the next versions.
What changed? What was different from the early days? The productivity software runs, the games play, the cash flows.

Re:Good call

[MightyMartian]

Meanwhile some of us actually want to develop multiplatform software.

translation

[Anonymous Coward]

reduce time it takes to get things done by having fewer people involved in each decision = layoffs

quantify outcomes for products and use that data to predict future trends = every ms product will have facebook-like privacy-infringing malware

  increasing investment for employee training and development = get more h1b visas to replace us workers with foreign code monkeys

My last post was roundly criticised.

[queazocotal]

So, does 'crease' actually exist in this sense?

Re:My last post was roundly criticised.

[Virtucon]

"we mean to increase the synergistic use of buzzwords to drive shareholder value and customer satisfaction."

Seriously, there's a company I saw one time that had "We strive for our customer's affection." as their mission statement on the building. Nobody really listens to this shit. Net Net, he's going to fire a few talking heads, move some departments around and if you don't like it you can leave.

Re:My last post was roundly criticised.

[c]

I keep the following quote pinned in Google Keep to remind myself of what happens when corporate communications becomes completely divorced from reality:

In other words, better execution and innovation through strategy and goal and discipline and engineering coherence.

From the previous Microsoft CEO. Nice to see that Ballmer's ghostwriters are still with the company.

So...zero US employees?

[gelfling]

Sounds good. To Malaysia and Beyond!

Re:So...zero US employees?

[Virtucon]

Sounds good. To Malaysia and Beyond!

And to the bottom of the ocean, all at the same time.

Wha?

[GrahamCox]

crease the fluidity of information and ideas by taking actions to flatten the organization

What does that even mean? How can you 'crease the fluidity' of anything? Sound suspiciously like typical management-speak, and I don't think that's what MS needs at all.

Re:Wha?

[bill_mcgonigle]

Other sources have it as 'increase'.

Hey, knock off that fact-checking - people are incensed here!

Re:Wha?

[Rich0]

Flatten the organization is simple enough - fire or demote managers so that there are more people reporting to any particular manager.

Really this sounds like the kind of buzz-speak I was hearing at work a few years ago when the same sorts of things were done. The same Accenture consultant probably wrote the slide deck.

Fewer people = fewer people involved in each decision, etc. They always talk about changing the culture, because talking about layoffs doesn't exactly make people excited to go to work.

Why highly paid CEOs underperform.

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

This is precisely why higher the CEO pay results in poorer performance by the company. All that pay, blinds the CEO, makes them think they are invincible, if the market is shoving that many billion dollars their way, they must be doing everything right. It sets up the eco system where flatterers, sycophants and yes men thrive insulating the CEO from real news and real feedback.

To think one man, with some initiative can change the culture of a company the size of Microsoft, with entrenched interests, history of turf warfare and empire building is blowing smoke. That company went through spectacular expansion and growth in the 1990s. All those very capable people, the ones who have the vision and ability and the guts to skate too close to or even past the edges of legal behavior have all cashed out, burnt out or pushed out. As the able ones leave, the fraction of PHBs who are clueless when there is not a de-facto monopoly increases. They are playing the same game that used to be effective when there was a WinTel monopoly on desktops, and desktops had the monopoly on computing.

A truly visionary CEO will realize this, break the company into pieces that will once again compete or perish and resign. But Satya Nadella is no Michail Gorbachev.

Re:Why highly paid CEOs underperform.

[Anonymous Coward]

We are also under the delusion that the CEO's actions really matter. If you took the CEOs with the best track records and brought them in to run the businesses with the worst performance, how often would those companies become more profitable?.....the answer is roughly 60%. That isn't much better than the flip of a coin.

And I"m to find another stat that said that a CEO contributes about 5% to a company's bottom line.

There have been CEOs - Lou Gerstner's turn around of IBM in the early 90s comes to mind - that may have been worth it.

But all in all, they are over paid for what they do. Yahoo!'s new CEO, for example, is just throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks. Marissa was the great blond hope for Yahoo! but she is turning out to be mediocre - like most CEOs. But, regardless of what happens, she'll get her $60 million - remember that when you bust your ass to meet a deadline and during your review you are told you could have done more and therefore you are rated as only "meeting objectives" and you just get a cost of living raise (1.5% If you didn't bust your ass working 60 hours a week for months, you would have gotten a "below standards" rating, no raise and if lucky you keep your job until they offshore your entire department.).

Yep, we live in a meritocracy all right.

Re:Why highly paid CEOs underperform.

[jimicus]

This is a fairly common problem, and it stems back to one thing.

Finding staff is easy. You or I could place an advert tomorrow and we'd be snowed under this time next week. Problem is, drill through those applications and you'll probably find that 60% of the applicants couldn't even be bothered to make sure the job was vaguely appropriate for their skill set - and most of the remainder have such shocking interviews that you wonder why you bother.

Finding good staff - people who will turn out to be a real asset - that is damnably difficult. And it's a problem that gets worse the higher up the management chain you go.

I suspect that by the time you get to the very top of a huge organisation, you run into a problem: the number of people on the surface of the planet who have the experience, skills and ability needed are so few and far between that you'll be lucky if there's half a dozen potential candidates in the whole country.

Re:Why highly paid CEOs underperform.

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Pointy Haired Bosses. Dilbert reference.

CEO Madlibs?

[Snufu]

"crease the fluidity of information and ideas by taking actions to flatten the organization and develop leaner business processes"

It's a No Brainer Win-Win at the End of the Day

[rmdingler]

People who speak like this generally do so in an attempt to disguise a lack of communication skills and new ideas.

It may be the management culture he was raised in, and I had higher hopes for the Indian-born CEO (diversity, new perspective), but he was also reportedly emailing employees the company would reinvent productivity.

So, likely we'll get SSDD... and less entertainment value than Ballmer provided.

Re:It's a No Brainer Win-Win at the End of the Day

[Entropius]

I don't want them to "reinvent productivity" -- I want them to stop buying other people's things and making them suck (Skype) and stop working hard to make their own things suck (Windows 8).

Translation

[Simulant]

LAYOFFS

Fucking MBA Speak

[Pete Venkman]

MBA's have the amazing ability to fit a lot of words into very little meaning.

Re: Satya Nadella is not just anyone!

[Anonymous Coward]

Try getting a decent version of Windows out the door Nadella, THEN you can anonymously pat yourself on the back in the comments.

I guess "nothing is off the table" means that astroturfing on social media sites is fair game too, eh Microsoft PR?

Apache

[tepples]

Indians. Hmmm... So does this mean Microsoft is giving up IIS and switching to Apache?

Changing MS's corporate culture will be tough

[Streetlight]

Changing MS's corporate culture will be comparable to driving a fully loaded mega oil tanker through the same S curves as Formula 1 cars traverse. In another word, impossible. By the time any minimal action is started in this area, Nadella will likely be retired or fired.

Company grading system

[semios]

He could start by changing the company's grading system from an "individual selection" to a "group selection" system since the individual selection fosters competition and group selection fosters cooperation.

Corporate speak paradox

[kruach aum]

I don't understand how people with such a poor command of meaningful language are able to effectively manage and lead multi-billion dollar corporations.

I suppose it is possible that they are capable, secretly, of conveying meaning by the use of words, but then why would they hide this ability from investors? Surely a CEO who doesn't sound like a retard inspires more confidence than one who does?

Lion Food

[bmo]

Two lions who, escaping from the zoo, split up to increase their chances but agree to meet after 2 months. When they finally meet, one is skinny and the other overweight. The thin one says: âoeHow did you manage? I ate a human just once and they turned out a small army to chase me â" guns, nets, it was terrible. Since then I've been reduced to eating mice, insects, even grass.â The fat one replies: âoeWell, I hid outside the door at One Microsoft Way and ate a manager a day. And nobody even noticed!â

--
BMO

what should be off the table

[bzipitidoo]

Nothing is off the table? Does the table include lying, doublespeak, file format lock in, using proxies to sue Linux users, bribing and strongarming standardization committee members, the whole embrace, extend, and exterminate strategy that they tried with Java and IE, Windows Genuine Advantage, staying in bed with the copyright extremists of the entertainment industry, continued support of organizations like the Business Software Alliance? Is any of that off the table?

If MS's new CEO isn't acknowledging that they went too far with that stuff, and that the company will go in a new direction, stop being anti-social, stop being evil, then the new CEO represents no real change, just some minor adjustments.

Re:Satya Nadella is not just anyone!

[davester666]

That's the division that does UI design for Microsoft.

End users experience the products, not the culture

[dpbsmith]

I'd much rather hear him say:

"I use Windows 8.1 on a desktop and it sucks. Windows 9 is going to be good on desktops and we are not going to release it until it is.

AND, we are going to play fair with users and make sure that every security patch we develop for Windows Embedded Industry is also SQAed on and made available to all Windows XP users. It may not make us the most money but it's the right thing to do."

Corporate culture? I am an end-user, I don't care what Microsoft's corporate culture is, I care about its products.