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.

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: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.