Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
Yes, However sometimes they hire people who they think are part of their culture, as it appears as such on paper, however after in the new position, really change things up.
I know myself personally seems to have surprised people, after I get into a different position. As my work ethic tells me to handle different positions differently. So when I was working a lower end position, where I followed order, they advance me to a different position. They will find that I ignore and work around stupid one, or where I was friendly to a department, they find I may become their biggest problem... Then when I get promoted again, I may become easy on that department and follow rules...
Different jobs requires different skill sets, and different sets of personal communication, as each position has a different sets of tools, bigger sticks or bigger carrots.
I expect Nadella, worked well with the Know it Alls, thus MS Hired him... However in the position he knows these know the faults of these people, and has the power to change this.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I worked at Ford Motor Company for a year and a half. I really didn't think that the "freakonomics" aspect of forced ranking would be so pronounced (having never worked somewhere that does forced stack ranking before or since). Oh. My. God. It is such and uncooperative atmosphere. People who have worked in the same building for 20 years sabotaging each other and hiding information. Credit theft and "kiss up, kick down" is rampant. Bad behavior is often rewarded or at least overlooked come promotion time because it's so prevalent and someone has to fill the new positions that open in the management hierarchy. A lot of the job is getting buy-in from other teams. One of the most common tricks (that takes a new employee about a year to learn) is for a stakeholder to withhold all objections until the 11th hour of someone else's project, then just dump them all out. We're talking about being on email chains and in meetings for months holding their tongue, and when the project is trying to finalize buy-in, coming up with a laundry list of of complaints that just slipped their mind for the previous 6 months, usually complaints that are difficult to impossible to resolve. At best, this can real fuck someone's project up (this happens a lot to the people in advanced or research by the people working on production technology) and at worst it will full-on kill a project. Many people who do this trick (narcissists mostly) are really, REALLY good at it. Their clueless peers and managers have seen it time and again and never quite picked up on it (because they are too busy with their own issues to pay enough attention to see it). I thought "no wonder the auto industry still can't build decent consumer electronics" at least every day (I worked in the "advanced" wing of body electronics in R&D, so understand that even the R&D organization is not immune to the effects of stack ranking). Thank God I left that shithole, and not only for my back's sake (the pricks don't even have office chairs with an adjustable back).
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.
Not completely and unquestioningly, but certainly there are some companies I trust more than others.
For Microsoft, it's worse than most. It's not just that I don't happen to trust them, I actively distrust them Or rather, I trust them to do bad things. They have a history of being hostile, controlling, and even abusive toward their own customers and partners. They've had a long-standing culture of being stagnant, and relying on market dominance and vendor lock-in to maintain their relevance. Their older solutions tended to be insecure by design. Currently, their solutions tend to have a design-by-committee feel as well as being overly elaborate.
There are some bright spots, but, they've generally been a bad company making bad products. Instead of using their resources to build better products that you want to use, they focus their energies on leveraging their market position to force you to use their bad products.