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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.
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.
"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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
So just put it down? You'd do the same for your dog if it was suffering.