Microsoft's 'Cannibalistic Culture' 407
theodp writes "In the provocatively titled Microsoft's Downfall: Inside the Executive E-mails and Cannibalistic Culture That Felled a Tech Giant, Vanity Fair offers a teaser for a story that will appear in its August issue on Microsoft's Lost Decade, which promises an unprecedented view of life inside Microsoft during the reign of Steve Ballmer. 'Every current and former Microsoft employee I interviewed — every one — cited stack ranking as the most destructive process inside of Microsoft, something that drove out untold numbers of employees,' contributing editor Karl Eichenwald writes. 'If you were on a team of 10 people, you walked in the first day knowing that, no matter how good everyone was, 2 people were going to get a great review, 7 were going to get mediocre reviews, and 1 was going to get a terrible review,' says a former software developer. 'It leads to employees focusing on competing with each other rather than competing with other companies.' Also discussed is the company's loyalty to Windows and Office, which induced a myopia that repeatedly kept Microsoft from jumping on emerging technologies like e-readers and other technology that was effective for consumers. Having seen an advance copy of the full piece, GeekWire offers its take on what it calls an 'epic, accurate and not entirely fair' tale."
Re:With downfalls like that, who needs successes? (Score:4, Informative)
Go to
and set it to 10yr, Google even lets you compare it to the Nasdaq and Dow Jones averages (putting your money into a fund that tracked the Nasdaq over the last 10 years would have netted you 100% more money than MSFT stock).
Re:Microsoft is practicing "Decimation" (Score:4, Informative)
"... the Romans reserved this very harsh technique for unusual events. They were not dumb enough to do this to every unit on a routine basis!"
Neutron Jack was right about companies accumulating dead wood. They can and do. Used on a one time basis to get shed of non-productive workers, Rank and Yank is highly effective. But then they keep doing it on a routine basis. On subsequent iterations, they get rid of good people. They become so fixated on this process, it becomes an end in and of itself. I wonder whether Welch knew what he had set loose upon the world.
Re:"Microsoft's Downfall" (Score:5, Informative)
Right, but a lot of that android market is competing in a low value market that they don't care about. Microsoft was never bothered by sybian selling 10's of millions of phones even though it could do various office and web browsing task.
The chart I linked is illustrative. Just because people have android phones doesn't mean that's translating into usage share. If people who have linux phones still do 80% of their computing on Windows it's not really going to hurt microsoft any, in the same way that microsoft doesn't care what brand of refrigerator you own, virtually everyone with a computer also has a refrigerator, but they are not overlapping markets. Now, I grant you, I would have expected mobiles to be a much more overlapping market with PC's, but thus far that doesn't seem to be the case.
Also, your opening line
Actually for every 2 new windows 7 machines there is 3 new machines running Linux. Or about 600 thousand windows and 900 thousand Linux (a large part of that is android) every day.
Fails basic maths. There are 900k android activations a day, which is just under 30 million a month. So about the same as windows. Who are up in the 30-35 million a month range. So it's closer to 1:1. But a lot of those droid devices are cheap phones with a browser (not that there's anything wrong with that particularly, but there's nothing there really competing with windows market share).
Re:"Microsoft's Downfall" (Score:3, Informative)
If they do, corporate America is dead. MS is baked into its IT DNA. Competitors might score brand new technologies, but consumer tech is not going to replace the base IT infrastructure that supports 99.9% of all businesses. If MS mysteriously died, most IT divisions would collapse shortly thereafter.
I don't think you actually have worked in a large fortune 500 company. They use windows desktops but many have a lot of infrastructure running on various flavours of commercial UNIX and Oracle databases.
I work for a fortune 500 company.
Re:stack ranking sounds like the strict curve (Score:4, Informative)
Nah, there's worse.
remember Hawkins' Second Law: There is no lower bound to human intelligence.
I had a student a ew years ago who worked for a company that overdosed on 80/20. They ranked their customers by sales volume, and informed the bottom 20% that they could take their business elsewherere, as their orders would no longer be accepted.
Uhm, now how do you get new customers, since their starting volume will be below your threshold. And of your, uh, surviving customers, doesnt 80/20 still apply? So dump some more?
I wish I was making this up, but i spent a lot of time with this student.
hawk
Re:"Microsoft's Downfall" (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Microsoft is practicing "Decimation" (Score:5, Informative)
I think your parable is very apt. I worked for Microsoft for five years and for three of those I was put in the 10% bucket. The worst was not to be singled out as the poorest employee. The worst was not that it was totally unfair, fundamentally wrong and without any proper motivation. The worst was the bullying that ensued. The managers had nothing that they could motivate it with, since there was nothing wrong with my performance, so they reached for every straw that they could find to try to motivate why I was the bottom performer. Besides pinning other peoples mistakes on me the most popular blame was to give me a really hard time when I did my job really well. Since I worked as a tester (SDET) this was really easy. Every time I found a really good bug (you know, the ones that companies like Google now give out cash rewards for) I got blamed for finding it too late and that it fundamentally was my fault that the bug was there in the first place.
The absolutely biggest regret I have is hanging in there for so long. It is so utterly destructive on your motivation, confidence, happiness and competence to twice per year getting it on paper that you suck and being bullied in between. You can ignore it for a while but in the end it gets you deeper than you could imagine.
One thing that is a bit surprising is that Google evaluate its employees four times per year compared to Microsoft's two. I wonder what consequences that will have...