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."

Comments

so.... MS was sick

[turkeydance]

when MS hired him?

Re:so.... MS was sick

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm surprised he doesn't appear to realize one of the reasons the PC market is declining is because there are people out there that are hanging on to their older PCs that still get the job done just to avoid Microsoft's flagship OS and it's spying.

You know, something that's entirely his fault that happened entirely on his watch.

Re:so.... MS was sick

[jellomizer]

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.

Re:so.... MS was sick

[jellomizer]

Do you mean designing Windows 10 specs to be nearly identical to the Specs of Windows 7? So older PC's and newer lower powered portable devices can use it?
Adding enhanced touch screen displays as this is the current trend.

What Microsoft is seeming to really miss is the change of the PC market to the Workstation market. The Personal Computer is now a Phone or Tablet. However systems built with Desktop Based technologies, are now used for either High End Gaming or Real work. It needs much more focus on Making Windows 10 a productive OS, that really gets out of the way on what you are trying to accomplish.

A case against Monopoly capitalism

[transporter_ii]

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.

Yahoo

[Paradise Pete]

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.

Stack ranking was the problem

[timholman]

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.

Re:Stack ranking was the problem

[Anonymous Coward]

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).

Re:Stack ranking was the problem

[Ukab the Great]

No. It's the process where you continue to have a job if you sabotage someone else's.

If you want proof they've changed

[DeplorableCodeMonkey]

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.

Re:If you want proof they've changed

[StormReaver]

[examples snipped]

All of those are half-assed, at best, and are carefully targeted to not overlap with Windows sales. In fact, they are targeted specifically to tie into required Windows licenses.

Also, it will take a century of full-bore apologizing to even begin to make up for Microsoft's past (and current) behavior.

NEVER trust Microsoft. EVER!

Re:If you want proof they've changed

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah Slashdot, where it is insightful to act like it's still the 90s!

You're right.

They're openly shipping a consumer OS filled with spyware. One they literally tricked people into installing, no less. And that's just for starters. They're worse than before, since they're trying to make up for lost time.

Thank you for the sobering reminder that Microsoft is worse than ever, and wants to reclaim what it views as rightfully its domain. Your comment should serve as a constant reminder that Microsoft can never be trusted. You are insightful in underlining their invasiveness and blatant disregard for its customers on top of general decency, using its monopolistic weight in ways that it could have only dreamed when Windows 95 rolled out.

Re:Nadella's greatest trick

[mwvdlee]

There are viable alternatives. For 99% of users (which includes me), Google Apps will do as well as MS Word. Especially since Docs learned to do TOC with page numbers. I have Libre Office to work with the occasional docx file sent by customers.
I used to do all of my documents on MS Office, nowadays I no longer even install the Word viewer.

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.

First step to recovery

[sjbe]

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.

Most people aren't surprised

[UnknowingFool]

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.

Re:Most people aren't surprised

[bzipitidoo]

What's with the management at big companies that so many could think stack ranking was a good idea?

It shows that management doesn't know the first thing about managing. How could they be so utterly incompetent at it? Did they skip business management in college, skip college altogether, think they don't need no book learning? How could such people be chosen for management? I can think of several ways: Nepotism, favoritism, Good Old Boys Club, and groupthink in mistaking clueless, pushy loudmouths as go-getters, and still adhering to the religion of The Stick, that is, trying to push people into being more productive with threats, employing slave-driving tactics. Yeah, that worked so great for the Confederacy. Memo to management: the Confederacy lost the war.