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Microsoft 'Was Sick', CEO Satya Nadella Says In New Book (intoday.in)
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has just published a new book called Hit Refresh: The Quest to Rediscover Microsoft's Soul and Imagine a Better Future for Everyone. An anonymous reader quotes India Today:
Nadella's push for cultural shift -- and hiring "learn-it-alls" instead of "know-it-alls" -- is largely meant to jolt enthusiasm for a new era of innovation at the company. Microsoft had long depended on the success of its flagship Windows operating system and the royalties it gets for each PC sold with it. But the global PC market is declining, and Microsoft fell behind as Apple and Google led the shift to smartphones. Nadella doesn't take any shots at Microsoft's co-founder and first CEO Bill Gates -- who wrote the book's foreword -- or Ballmer. But he's frank about their disagreements, especially over Ballmer's disastrous $7.3 billion acquisition of Nokia's phone business in 2014.
Nadella also refers to the company's previous organizational structure as a "confederation of fiefdoms" and recounts negative feedback received from employee surveys and emails. "The company was sick," Nadella writes. "Employees were tired. They were frustrated. They were fed up with losing and falling behind despite their grand plans and great ideas. They came to Microsoft with big dreams, but it felt like all they really did was deal with upper management, execute taxing processes and bicker in meetings..." He promises not to squander the new energy felt by employees after years of frustration. So far, it seems to be paying off; Microsoft shares have doubled since he took the top job in early 2014, and the company is attracting buzz for its work in AI, augmented reality and a new effort in futuristic computing.
A former Microsoft board member says Nadella "has made people believe in the future of Microsoft in a way that neither Bill nor Steve really did."
Nadella also refers to the company's previous organizational structure as a "confederation of fiefdoms" and recounts negative feedback received from employee surveys and emails. "The company was sick," Nadella writes. "Employees were tired. They were frustrated. They were fed up with losing and falling behind despite their grand plans and great ideas. They came to Microsoft with big dreams, but it felt like all they really did was deal with upper management, execute taxing processes and bicker in meetings..." He promises not to squander the new energy felt by employees after years of frustration. So far, it seems to be paying off; Microsoft shares have doubled since he took the top job in early 2014, and the company is attracting buzz for its work in AI, augmented reality and a new effort in futuristic computing.
A former Microsoft board member says Nadella "has made people believe in the future of Microsoft in a way that neither Bill nor Steve really did."
when MS hired him?
I think this is a clear example of why we should be against monopolies. Microsoft didn't change out of the goodness of its heart. It got where it is now kicking and screaming. And yeah, I still don't trust them, but everyone has to admit, they have taken some steps to move in the right direction. But only because they were forced to by some real competition.
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
...will turn out to be tricking its customer base into renting rather than owning its software. He bought off the fiefdoms by picking winners and turning them into rent-receiving franchises.
As long as few viable alternatives exist for Office and Exchange and Windows remains their nearly exclusive platform and all turn into a rent-seeking business, Microsoft will continue to make a lot of money.
Long before Nokia, Microsoft also tried to acquire Yahoo for a tidy 45 billion dollars They were extremely lucky that Jerry Yang was even more stupid than they were and blocked the deal.
A few month ago Verizon snapped up the "core Internet assets" for less than 4.5 billion.
No more sales on Desktop and Laptop OS, better to just shift to smartwatches or gadgets of tomorrow. Close the OS department and just open source windows, at least that would be a good contribution to mankind. The earlier they do this the better, since MS still has some spare cash at the moment to focus on newer stuff not OS related.
Before Nadella breaks a rib patting himself on the back, it should be noted that Microsoft abolished stack ranking of employees just before he took over as CEO. If you want to know why Microsoft employees were at each others' throats, and why morale was so low, you need look no further than Ballmer's favorite process for "improving" employee performance.
Microsoft could have hired a tree sloth to replace Ballmer, and employee morale would still have improved. It had nowhere to go but up after years of stack ranking.
Exhibit A: .NET Core.
Exhibit B: VS Code
Exhibit C: SQL Server for Linux--in a Docker container.
Exhibit D: Ubuntu for Windows.
Exhibit E: Microsoft happily sells well-supported Linux to cloud customers and contributes back to ensure Linux provides what their customers need.
10 years ago, Ballmer would have probably fired an executive who proposed this plan. Today, being a second coming of Gates or Ballmer would probably be a "career limiting move." Microsoft has pretty much "gotten with the program."
I just wish that Nadella would aggressively pursue the phone market again, but this time by making Windows installable on Android phones a la Sailfish X. Unlike Jolla, they have the resources to pay and/or strong-arm most Android vendors to permanently unlock their bootloaders. And what's the government going to say to that? It's bad for consumers to have Microsoft aggressively pursuing opening up the hardware? A federal judge would look at Microsoft's opponent like they're nuts.
Microsoft is going down and fast, this is just posturing to try to make people believe there is hope left for the corrupt company. Its core business is dying fast, it has failed to reinvent itself, and it has failed to make late inroads into future revenue opportunitites. This is the exact definition of a walking dead company. Sure it may take quite a few years but the panic is starting to set in and employees are walking away slowly for now but this too will get faster. In a few years time you will look back and say, yes it started late 2000's but most at the moment are blind to this.
"Hit Refresh: The Quest to Rediscover Microsoft's Soul and Imagine a Better Future for Everyone."
The title is enough to make me puke up my lunch.
"Save us, Satan Nutella, you're our only hope!"
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
is getting sick. The usual monopoly in some category illness. Sigh.
Any other company that put something like Windows 8 on the market would have been bankrupt by now. Wrapping Cortana into Windows 10 and making it difficult to remove is yet another big mess. I've got a pile of PC's at my house, and only one runs Win10... and suffers for it. Here is a concept... turn out good products.
"Microsoft shares have doubled since he took the top job in early 2014"
And so has almost every other share. This could be due to the flawed computer trading programs that are now grossly over rating the stock market.
Behind the scenes, MS still is under the influence of the same guys as usual. MS is just riding the storm and biding its time, until it can show its true colors again. Trust MS at your own peril.
At M$ the new boss will not be any different as the old bosses such as Sweaty B. The new boss will still use the old tactics such as embrace, extend, extinguish to get rid of said competition. M$ even instructs their astroturfers such as transporter_ii to even somewhat acknowledge that a monopoly existed only to say "they're not as evil" when in fact M$ is still just as evil and manipulative just as they always have been.
--
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk
Friends do assist M$ addicted friends in committing suicide
They do that? I thought they hired "do-the-needfuls", "make-it-ups" and "sod-it-we'll-fix-it-in-the-next-service-packs".
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Microsoft is no different... IBM, XEROX, the U.S. Automobile corporations, Apple... When you get "big", sometimes the "top" has NO IDEA what the "bottom" is going through. The top will say we want X, and the bottom will say how the hell are we suppose to do that? And the top "suits" just say do it.
when MS hired him?
Probably something like the first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem...
Microsoft is a company that found two of the most amazing cash cows of all time and rode them hard. The problem is that the market started to move on without them as markets are wont to do to companies that are too busy milking their cash cows to be bothered worrying about finding the next one. Microsoft's business tactics made sense during Gates era as CEO but about 10-15 years ago they should have been moving onward to the next thing while Balmer was CEO. Microsoft could possibly have dominated mobile but they were too busy protecting Windows and Office and built a toxic company culture to protect those products. The good news for Microsoft is that they have SO much cash that they can screw up a lot before it becomes an existential problem. They could even just buy their way into another industry wholesale if they had to (they have enough cash to buy both Ford and GM) so that hides a lot of flaws that would otherwise have investors screaming.
Seems to me like Nadella is not really any different from other corporate CEOs in that he really likes to take credit for when other people's clear mistakes are overturned and it's just the results starting to come in when they're in charge.
After Ballmer, who I don't think ever actually got the hang of running a post-90s tech company, there really was no direction but up. Balmer still thought that their brand carried way more value than what it actually did and thus ended up squandering huge amounts of money on projects like WP7 and WP8 that never really went anywhere because of simply being too little, too late. The man clearly thought that they were going to be able to repeat what happened with the original PC, i.e a "too little - too late" platform that otherwise should have failed turned into a success because of who was behind it. The way I see it, Microsoft would probably have seen the exact same results had Nadella just let the company do whatever it wanted.
In all seriousness, any real assessment on Nadella's performance should start roughly around now, when the taint of Ballmer is (mostly) gone, and continue until he resigns himself or if he's made to resign for one reason or another.
"Why should I want to make anything up? Life's bad enough as it is without wanting to invent any more of it."
It's a much better company since the guy from India started running it. When asked for details of Microsoft's sickness, Nadella described it as a particularly virulent form of Ballmeritis.
Finished reading "Hit Refresh" by Satya Nadella. On the one hand, learnt that Hololens had difficulty getting funding for some time, with the dev team renaming it as "Project Baraboo" as a piece of gallows humour. It's a town in Wisconsin, home to a Clown and Circus Museum. OTOH, lack of lifetime learning opportunities, the pervasiveness of zero hours contracts, trade deals up in air and rent seeking serves only to undermine our future as a nation (i'm in the UK FWIW). Politicians of all stripes should read the last two chapters; probably the best articulation of building for the future since Eric Schmidts interview with the Queen of Jordan. Good read.
If Windows 10 represents Microsoft's idea of what a "better future for everyone" looks like, that's an excellent indication that Microsoft is still sick.
Who knew?
They're laying off tens of thousand of people in the USA while bringing in tons of L1 visa holders from their Vancouver office.
Was sick. Heh.
If Microsoft was sick back when they got Nokia I'd still rather have the lightly sick Microsoft than the pestilence ridden with Windows 10S bullshit, "telemetry" pile of crap with weak excuses that Microsoft has become.
Windows Phones are dead now, XBox One is a weaker platform than XBox 360 was, the entire Surface line is either a continuation of past products or new models that are not selling well, the company is losing evangelists as a whole in recent years.
If your fucking grand plan for Microsoft's future is to continue insisting on the piss poor Microsoft Store, on overpriced devices with half backed OS ideas, on privacy erosion, opaqueness, aggressive anti consumer practices for updating to Windows 10, and more of that crap, the only people "believing" in the future of Microsoft are your board members Nadella.
For the first time in my entire Windows based computing life I decided to delve a bit deeper into Linux, keep a secondary device with Ubuntu, and move most of my stuff to NAS storage devices. It's the one era of Microsoft that is truly making me consider switching to something else.
I'm not seeing anything in recent years that came close to what Bill or even Ballmer did. Their eras might have had several misshaps, but they all had very strong accomplishments. Keep in mind that Windows 7 was from the Ballmer era. All the crap that came after it was Nadella. He might have created an internal culture of happy people living in a bubble who cannot see the needs and interests of their clients, but that's all that is.
Augmented reality, which for some stupid reason Microsoft decided to call Mixed Reality when it's really not, is late to the game and has a very weak showing. It's not competing with anything that's out there right now, be it on price for AR in smartphones or in capabilities with Oculus Rift or HTC Vive for PC. It's as late to the game as Windows Phone was, and it'll eventually die off in the same way.
The stuff that sets it apart from the competition is priced so high that no one can afford it - Hololens. It was the first to show up, and it's still at prototype stage.
AI talks are coming mostly from Google these days, and "futuristic computing" is just a blanket term that has no concrete feel for the vast majority of consumers.
But indeed, it's to be expected from the current CEO to think so highly of himself while failing to see what the company had best in the past. It's showing on Microsoft software and products. And if things keep going this way, it'll be the whole reason why I'll quit being a costumer once and for all.
Whatâ(TM)s next in next yearâ(TM)s Windows 10 update? Lots of user friendly and productivity increasing features!
Want to install chrome? Get ready for your computer to growl at you anytime you try and switch from Edge.
Sick of trying to decide whether you need to buy a shitty phone game that doesnâ(TM)t make sense to play on a desktop? No worries, itâ(TM)s mandatory to enter your credit card info just to set up a user account on a pc. Weâ(TM)ll just purchase all these phone games for you that youâ(TM)d never play and fill your start menu with them despite a sane person only owning computer for A. Doing legitimate work or B. Playing legitimate games.
Tired of having only one control panel? Not to worry, weâ(TM)ve added a second one and we plan on adding a third thatâ(TM)s even less functional and more confusing than the last! Be prepared to have no idea where to go to make simple changes that were a no brainer in windows 7!
Do you like lugging around an ultra book and using it for things that a phone is clearly better suited for? Well guess what, we fired all of our UI designers and hired a team of interns with cool haircuts to design all these modern features that you will never conceivably use and serve no other purpose than to make you feel cool while everyone around you thinks youâ(TM)re a gigantic ass!
I thought Microsoft has always been and always will be "sick". It certainly isn't healthy right now.
You have to be smarter than the machine you're working with.
There are viable alternatives. For 99% of users (which includes me), Google Apps will do as well as MS Word. ...I have Libre Office to work with the occasional docx file sent by customers.
I have Libre Office to work with the occasional docx file sent by customers. ...YMMV, but I think viable alternatives already exists and have existed for a long time.
The problem is people insisting on needing a specific WordArt effect or other feature which would take slightly more effort to do in the alternatives. Few people actually require all the power features, they're just used to them.
MMDV (MM Does Vary.) In an attempt to escape the Microsoft tax, and OS spyware, I have made extended attempts to use Libre Office. It simply doesn't do things I need or does them wrong. E.g., Excel gave me different answers for how much tax I owe per the wonderful Glenn Reeves Federal income tax spreadsheet template. (Libre said $1,300 more.) Granted, many of my applications are esoteric, but the tax spreadsheet issue demonstrates Libre Office is a landmine for all, not just a Word Art diddling issue.
Is he stacking M$ with H1-B's ?
For anyone who was following MS then, it's not a surprise. The stacked ranking system created so much in-fighting and division, it's more surprising that anything got done. It also set up a system where division was favored over cooperation. One of aspects of it was that you could only have a person graded as an "A", two "B"s, and the rest of the people were "C"s on any given team. So good employees avoided working with other good employees because they would get mediocre or sub-par reviews even if they did stellar work. Also teams actively sabotaged each other.
Case in point: The Kin. When MS bought out Danger, the company had a loyal following of phone customers for their Sidekicks especially among teens for texting. Originally Danger's plan was to incrementally update the OS and phones when they were bought out. That would have taken 6 months.
However, Danger OS used Java which would never be allowed at MS. The entire OS had to be replaced with Windows CE. The project was independent of the Windows devices division who felt they should have had control of it. Rumors are that they openly refused to assist and actively sabotaged the project. So Project Pink had to redo the whole OS and any apps in a platform without the benefit of the platform curators and creators. Delays turned the 6 months into 18 months. Because of the delays, deals that MS made with carriers were no longer honored and MS had to make new deals. Also at 18 months, most of the formerly loyal customers had moved onto other phones.
The result was the predictable disaster that was the Kin. It was buggy. It was missing features that other phones had that were deemed vital. It required an expensive data plan. It was pricey. Few teens (which was the targeted demographic) wanted it. The rumor is that only 500 phones were sold before MS killed the project. It cost MS $1B to buy Danger and develop the Kin.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Irrelevant, Microsoft cannot be trusted, regardless of any other company.
It can be both.
...they STILL can't produce a product that will properly and reliably update itself when defects are identified and updates issued. The persistent internal corruption of it's own code/data arrangements are legendary. Without third-party programs for repair (e.g., those at Tweaking.com, including "Windows Repair"), I'd've had to give up many good end-user applications and migrate to Liniux...and my family would have to start all over, learning the ideosyncracies of a FREE product.
This book, and the companion "interview tour" is nothing but TRUMP -level self-aggrandizement, trying to convince people of things that simply aren't true. Simple example: I called Microsoft tech support last week to find out why Outlook was hiding my Appointments (but the calendar showed, with bold letters, the appointments were there to be viewed!). I asked the agent, politely, to transfer me to someone who could speak English...his was broken, and deeply accented, and I had to keep asking him to repeat himself. He promised to have someone call me back in 10 minutes. Needless to say, of course, I never got any callback; he just blew this paying customer off.
Microsoft is STILL broken, Mr. Nadella, and you're trying to convince us you're better to salve your own ego. No, you're the same "better than thou" company you've always been since Balmer destroyed your culture!
The one that says "blame predecessor".
I give him half a year to a year to the "reorganize" one.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Satya is sorely mistaken if he thinks he righted the ship.
They're just dog whistles for age discrimination.
When MBAs say "learn it alls", they mean "young people with no life commitments outside the office"; when they say "know it alls", they mean "middle aged and older people".
So just put it down? You'd do the same for your dog if it was suffering.
Not sure how they were "sick" when they were dominating the world, and employees were "tired of losing". Meanwhile, they haven't had a true success in ages. I plan to keep shorting them just as I keep shorting Apple, because neither are actually innovating anymore.
For being a critical thinker
> "Microsoft shares have doubled since he took the top job in early 2014"
> And so has almost every other share.
Not by a long shot.
The Dow was at about 17,000 in early 2014. It's now a bit below 23. Nasdaq went from 4,300 to 6,600. Microsoft went from $38 to $76.
So Microsoft has significantly outperformed other companies generally.
Compare Microsoft to the other leaders of the PC industry from 2014. The top three PC makers in 2014 were Lenovo, Dell, and HP. Lenovo has last half it's value. Dell went private to deal with "significant issues", and HP Inc dropped from $29 to $20.
But they're fine now, sure.
What in the hell did I just read.....
In addition, they expect developers to covert all their apps to UWP with no real benefit seeing as how non-PC windows devices are pretty much a failure
Microsoft's history is filled with abuse:
... CenturyLink (CTL) customers trying to access particular sites from 9 p.m. to 10 p.m. will have unbearably slow speeds."
One fact about Microsoft under Satya Nadella gives a useful overall view. Windows 10 is possibly the worst spyware ever made. Quote: "Buried in the service agreement is permission to poke through everything on your PC." Nadella has been CEO of Microsoft since 2014.
The management of Microsoft by Satya Nadella seems, to me and many others, UTTERLY incompetent: CNET Editor Rails Against Non-Consensual Windows Updates.
Possibly Satya Nadella was chosen as CEO of Microsoft partly because he was the least socially annoying manager.
Microsoft has a long history of being abusive to everyone, not just customers. Microsoft Is Filled With Abusive Managers And Overworked Employees, Says Tell-All Book.
Ballmer was worse?
Satya Nadella is apparently not as destructive as Steve Ballmer. Ballmer was rated the worst CEO in the United States.
Quote from an article in Forbes Magazine about Steve Ballmer: "Without a doubt, Mr. Ballmer is the worst CEO of a large publicly traded American company today." Another quote: "The reach of his bad leadership has extended far beyond Microsoft when it comes to destroying shareholder value -- and jobs." (May 12, 2012)
Bill Gates still manages Microsoft:
See the Jan. 27, 2017 Charlie Rose TV interview, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett. Quoting from the transcript:
08:40 Charlie Rose: How much time do you spend at Microsoft?
08:42 Bill Gates: I'm there about 15 percent of the time. And I get to work just on the R and D part.
Part of "R and D" at Microsoft is Windows 10 putting ads on screens while people are in their offices trying to work. The Microsoft managers who participated in that are amazingly lacking in social ability, in my opinion.
Microsoft's primary location, Seattle, is a miserable place:
Traffic: Seattle one of the worst U.S. cities for traffic congestion, tied with NYC (March 31, 2015) Quote: "An additional 23 minutes a day spent in traffic may not sound like much, but when it adds up over a year it becomes 89 hours." (Whoever wrote that must be accustomed to Seattle misery. An additional 23 minutes a day spent in traffic sounds HORRIBLE.)
Slow internet: Many areas of Seattle have poor internet connections. See the article, These places have the slowest Internet in the country. (June 25, 2015) Quote: "... Seattle
Google is also badly managed.
To me, the management of Google seems less and less competent. Wikipedia says Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google was given that position in October 24, 2015. The reorganization of Google into Alphabet was completed on October 2,
Microsoft has been a sociopath for so long that it's going to take time without vile actions before I'll trust them. Public speeches don't do anything for me, because they've outright lied too often in the past.
Maybe after a decade of good behavior I'll trust them. But actions speak a lot louder than words. And corrupting standards is nearly unforgivable.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Innovate through other brands. Buy or build, but don't risk your Mainstream brand on the 80% failure that are new product innovations. MS destroyed their brand a long time ago. Uneducated children won't change that, because MS is still hell bent on innovating, something it has a poor record of doing.
that was the entire point of Windows 8 + Windows Mobile: To get back users flocking to Android and iOS. The idea was to lock the user in with a single familiar interface on all their devices, including their workstation PCs. They just failed. Rather spectacularly.
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they spent billions on a push into mobile, tablet and even console gaming. The trouble is nobody liked the Win8 UI and even if they did developers didn't trust the Windows Store (why should they give Microsoft a 30% cut like they do with Apple if they don't have to?).
Microsoft is aware they're getting their rears handed to them on phone/tablet. They're just not sure what to do about it.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
but I do care about compatibility. When I send my resume to somebody in *.docx format I know for sure it's properly formatted. The world's a ridiculously competitive place. Having my resume be a little less readable can be the difference between me getting the job and somebody else.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Microsoft was pretty much leading Mobile OSs till 2007. When the iPhone came out with capacitive touch if Microsoft had quickly launched a capacitive touch phone they would have kept on top and Apple would not have taken off. Instead they hired Rubin to create a whole new OS Windows Phone 7. He wasted 2 years in which iPhone took off and then he left to go found Android. And he stole stuff he developed at Microsoft in Android. There is a reason that Microsoft gets paid 5 dollars for every Android phone that is sold (In fact Microsoft makes more money off Android than Google does)
So not only could they have dominated Mobile they WERE dominating it. But Ballmer was an idiot who gets distracted by Shiny stuff.
Even after the Rubin debacle there was a chance to catch up but instead Microsoft wasted their time buying and destroying Nokia. One more of Ballmer's cockups.
Basically from the time Bill Gates left to Nadella took over its been one disaster after another.
**Life is too short to be serious**
Facebook carries out mass psychological experiments aimed at finding out, among other things, if they can make people depressed. Google is now accused of trade secret behavior on par with Microsoft back in the 1990s. Apple has now pioneered turning expensive computers into unfixable appliances. IBM, among other things, has basically gutted its American workforce and keeps a token presence stateside so they can avoid political pressure to delist their federal services component.
And Oracle? If you feel that way about Microsoft, I suspect you think nothing less than ordering STRATCOM to carpet bomb Oracle's campuses with tactical nukes is appropriate for how they behave.
This isn't the 90s. An entire generation has come and gone at Microsoft since the anti-trust trial. Give it a rest.
Unless you are an openly racist company , it is natural that Indians will rise to Upper Management given that more than 50% of the grunts in the engineering department are Indians. An Indian rising to the top is statistics. No Indians reaching C level positions when most of your on the ground workforce are Indians (both immigrants and US born) is clear sign that your company has a problem.
**Life is too short to be serious**
A shift from know it alls to learn it alls... Sounds great on paper until you realize its not entirely true. I am a "learn it all" who has over a decade of experience as a developer who was completely self taught and now hold a software management position at a medium sized business. Yet every single job I have applied for at Microsoft, including one which I had a direct referral from a good friend failed to receive even a single call back.
Choosing someone who is a good manager is choosing a person who, partly, is good at resolving conflicts. Often cultural pressures limit a person's abilities. Sometimes a person is able to avoid cultural pressures. One example is Dorsa Derakhshani, an Iranian Chess Grandmaster.
Fill company with Pajeet, put Pajeet in charge, 50% chance Windows shits in the street every time it decides it must update. Sexy Daddy.
Enough with the Microsoft slashvertisments :)
Google? Their whole MO is to sell your information.
Samsung? They won't update their Android versions and leave them insecure so you have to update to newest hardware.
Apple? Well, you can trust them but you also have to deal with a stifiling walled garden.
Oracle? C'mon.
Microsoft? Of course not.
... you see it as a way to keep a team moving forward and tailor it to your team needs. It is no substitute for leadership. I was assigned as the product owner to start a long-term project without the concept being finalized because the market was huge and we needed to get customer input right way. I asked the team to adopt Agile, set up Rally (have since moved to Jira at IT's request), set up a 3 month goal to get to a certain level of maturity for first customer test and two years to ship.
Every other new product done using a waterfall methodology had taken 5 years, so naturally people thought I was crazy. The thing I remember about the early days of Agile and the project was that I was sweating bullets trying to stay ahead of team and figuring out the essential features we needed (and which scaffolding was throwaway) for that first customer test. We beat every other team by 3 months to first prototype, with a higher quality of code.
During this time, we focused heavily on continuous improvement and modified the sprint format a little at a time at every retrospective. Now, we don't have daily scrums but have ad-hoc tiger teams. A demo includes the full extended team (cloud, desktop, app, embedded). We recognize people at the demo. There is a weekly all-hands meeting (separate from the demo) to share communication up and down. There is a regular leads meeting which focuses heavily on team obstacles.
Interestingly, we give up some Agile elements during a certain phase and then readopt them after. For example, we gave up all Agile elements during a huge refactoring where we basically put a big chunk of the team into a conference room for two weeks and eliminated all distractions. The team made tremendous progress but after they surfaced, the developers wanted to go back to the original format. The ad-hoc tiger teams was one such "innovation". The team wanted no daily scrums in general unless there was a critical issue, and then 15 minute scrums weren't enough and then team took as long as necessary in each meeting to get everyone on the same page.
TL;DR: We had a much faster start as a new team using Agile than other teams at my company and on average are still 2x faster than other established teams.
... and it works when it is a guide and not a mandate. I'm a manager who hires aggressively and am willing to take risks to get non-cookie-cutter engineers because it takes all kinds to build a high-performing team. I accept that I have a 5-10% failure rate because I am here to help a growing company staff up and give people an opportunity. Early on, I was too conservative and had a 1% failure rate but hired at half the rate.
Anyway, when someone is not performing or a good fit, I give them many opportunities but eventually have to put them on a PIP because there are other candidates out there and I should to spend my time with my starts, not my poor performers. Besides, if I don't have a high-performance culture, the jobs will be shipped to India or China so everyone needs to deliver.
Anyway, I had been operating this way for a few years and had built up a good department of 35 or so engineers that were split into 5 teams. Along comes a new GM and imposes a quota system on performance evaluations. I get a target of 5% of folks that have to be worked out of the company, and there is no credit for exiting poor performers earlier in the year. WTF? I didn't have 2 people who were poor performers because they were already gone.
And that's when I figured out that this happens in environments where senior managers are pussies and clueless. They don't push back against the mandate, and can't tell that some teams have more talent vs. someone else's team. Anytime a senior manager peanut-buttered the mandate down to every sub-team, it was clear sign that the manager was ineffective.
schools especially. Whether they should or not I'm in no position to tell them. At least until I'm actually hired.
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by making the company become user-hostile.
All the spying aside (in W10, back ported to W7, Office, SQL and now freaking Skype). What's evil? Needing a Microsoft account to activate your Office. Went through this, created an account, redeemed my office and was about to activate Office when poof! the Microsoft account was locked! They now held hostage the product I just paid money for. Figured I'd try it before upgrading thousands of users. Given this experience, we are holding off.
Microsoft has becoming untrustworthy and we are looking in to other products (While there are few, we have found 2 that will work for us).
they spent billions on a push into mobile, tablet and even console gaming.
They did spend billions. Some of it was even spent sensibly. The problem was execution and the fact that their need to protect Windows slowed them down too much. I think Microsoft's attempts to integrate the PC and tablet (and smartphone) markets were sensible in principle but they flubbed the execution and took too long. Prior to the iPhone they were in the driver's seat for mobile but they didn't react fast enough to the changes in the mobile market post-iPhone. Console gaming is a decent business but they spent WAY too much money to buy their way into that business and it's a business that isn't likely to get much bigger than it currently is.
The trouble is nobody liked the Win8 UI and even if they did developers didn't trust the Windows Store (why should they give Microsoft a 30% cut like they do with Apple if they don't have to?).
I don't think Microsoft's problems stem from the interface in any meaningful amount. Yes there were issues but both iOS and Android interfaces have similar issues if we're being objective about it. I think people would have gotten over it in time if there weren't alternatives. The problem Microsoft ran into is that they were late to market and ecosystems had already developed around iOS and Android by the time they got a viable product out for sale. Once Apple dropped the iPhone they set the template for pretty much every smartphone since. Microsoft's real competition was Google and Google got Android in the hands of handset makers first AND more importantly Google doesn't have to make a profit on Android (they make their money in advertising) so it was both cheaper and more easily adapted to the needs/desires of phone makers and customers. Microsoft then had to try to convince customers that a third ecosystem was worth their while or that they should dump either Android or iOS and that was always going to be a tough sell.
Microsoft is aware they're getting their rears handed to them on phone/tablet. They're just not sure what to do about it.
That's approximately my point. They had their window of opportunity and they seem to have missed it in mobile. They were too busy at the time trying to protect Windows (and Office) to do what they needed to do to get into the driver's seat for mobile. There are plenty of smart people at Microsoft and they know the score but that doesn't make the problem any easier to crack. Apple and Google have similar mountains of cash and breaking into the consumer mobile market at this point against those two is going to be tough for anyone. Google is playing the role in mobile that Microsoft played in PCs. Apple does their walled garden thing and Google serves those who want something else. It's unclear how Microsoft will displace either one at this point.
There are no "cultural pressures" which prevent Indians from making decisions. You don't launch (successful) missions to Mars , by not being able to resolve issues. India is an old civilization. Its people have lived in cities since before USA was settled . Cities are crowded and people have to be polite to their neighbors and colleagues as there simply is not the millions of acres of wilderness to go blow off steam like in the US.
So Indians may be more polite than Americans. Doesn't mean they cannot resolve issues and make decisions.
There are many different ways to resolve issues and not one perfect way.
Thinking your own way is the correct way and everyone else's is "cultural pressures" is idiotic at best, racist at worse.
**Life is too short to be serious**
Now I am counting the days until this dinosaur of a company dies... their Windows 10 OS has pissed me off to no end, and their recent changes to outlook have broken it. Nope I cannot wait for this company to die under it own idiocy. They have ignored IT Administrators and our needs at their peril. Goodbye you asshats.
Adaptec - Indian CEO Subramanian Sundaresh fired.
AIG (signed outsourcing deal in 2007 in Europe with Accenture Indian frauds, collapsed in 2009)
AirBus (Qantas plane plunged 650 feet injuring passengers when its computer system written by India disengaged the auto-pilot).
Apple - R&D CLOSED in India in 2006.
Apple - Foreign guest worker "Helen" Hung Ma caused the disastrous MobileMe product rollout.
Australia's National Australia Bank (Outsourced jobs to India in 2007, nationwide ATM and account failure in late 2010).
Bell Labs (Arun Netravalli took over, closed, turned into a shopping mall)
Boeing Dreamliner ES software (written by HCL, banned by FAA)
Bristol-Myers-Squibb (Trade Secrets and documents stolen in U.S. by Indian national guest worker)
Caymas - Startup run by Indian CEO, French director of dev, Chinese tech lead. Closed after 5 years of sucking VC out of America.
ComAir crew system run by 100% Indian IT workers caused the 12/25/05 U.S. airport shutdown when they used a short int instead of a long int
Dell - call center (closed in India because Premji's conmen don't even know how to use telephones, let alone computers)
Delta call centers (closed in India because Premji's conmen don't even know how to use telephones, let alone computers)
Fannie Mae- Hired large numbers of Indians, had to be bailed out. Indian logic bomb creator found guilty.
GM - Was booming in 2006, signed $300 million outsourcing deal with Wipro that same year, went bankrupt 3 years later
HSBC ATMs (software taken over by Indians, failed in 2006)
Intel Whitefield processor project (cancelled, Indian staff canned)
Lehman (Spectramind software bought by Wipro, ruined, trashed by Indian programmers)
Microsoft - Employs over 35,000 H-1Bs. Stock used to be $100. Today it's lucky to be over $25. Not to mention that Vista thing.
Microsoft - Lian Yang, Microsoft-Contracted Engineer, Arrested in Smuggling Plot After Another FBI Sting in Portland in 2010
MIT Media Lab Asia (canceled)
PeopleSoft (Taken over by Indians in 2000, collapsed).
Qantas - See AirBus above
Quark (Alukah Kamar CEO, fired, lost 60% of its customers to Adobe because Indian-written QuarkExpress 6 was a failure)
Rolls Royce (Sent aircraft engine work to India in 2006, engines delayed for Boeing 787, and failed on at least 2 Quantas planes in 2010, cost Rolls $500m).
Skype ( Yarlagadda fired)
State of Indiana $867 billion FAILED IBM project, IBM being sued
State of Texas failed IBM project.
Sun Micro (Taken over by Indian and Chinese workers in 2001, collapsed, has to be sold off to Oracle).
United - call center (closed in India because Premji's conmen don't even know how to use telephones, let alone computers)
Virgin Atlantic (software written in India caused cloud IT failure)
Visium Asset Management - Sanjay Valvani Insider trading
World Bank (Indian fraudsters BANNED for 3 years because they stole data).
Casteism
In India, I talked with many people about cultural pressures there. They were happy to talk about that and we had almost no disagreement. I learned a lot.
I often talk with people about cultural issues in the U.S. and in other countries.
When I want to learn about America I dont speak to tele-evangelists or multi-level-marketers. Nobody said there are no shysters in India who will pander to your prejudices while taking you for all you got. Some of these shysters wear suits and some wear saffron robes. Keep imagining Indians cant make decisions and watch your business and professional life burn down.
**Life is too short to be serious**
"Keep imagining Indians cant make decisions..."
Every culture has typical cultural limitations. Some people in a culture teach themselves to avoid the typical limitations of their culture.
I have, for example, taught myself some of the typical advantages of the Brazilian culture.
Being CEO of Microsoft is extremely challenging both socially and technologically. It seems, from what has been made public, that Satya Nadella is not good at dealing with the immense social challenges of managing Microsoft.
Possibly some other person originally from India could be a better manager for Microsoft. That person would, of course, have to know the U.S. culture since so many people who work for Microsoft are part of that culture.