Microsoft's office: Why insiders think top management has lost its way • Hacker News Board

Re: Microsoft's office: Why insiders think top management has lost its way

#61

Post by kkshin » Thu, Apr 07, 2011, 8:38 PM UTC

MartinCron wrote: post #39

kkshin wrote: post #21

One of Microsoft's biggest problems that contributes to their insular view is that they are located in Redmond. They're insulated from the rest of the highly competitive technology field (except for Amazon). This works out great for them when it comes to retaining talent in Redmond as employees are usually not willing to uproot their lifestyle to head to 'greener pastures'. Contrast this to how Google handles compens…

I'm not going to claim that Microsoft isn't too insular (it is) and I live and work in Seattle on purpose, so I'm a little biased about this, but I don't think it's just about the location. Besides Amazon being a huge presence, more and more established tech companies are opening development offices here (Google, Facebook, Zynga) just to take advantage of the talent that's here. Not to mention the fairly healthy star…

I guess what I meant was that the geography factors heavily into the culture, which feeds heavily into the leadership.

Even though large technology companies are opening offices, like you mentioned, the difference are that these are satellite offices. Your career potential will be limited, its just an unavoidable fact of the current corporate world. Its a very different scenario to move from the center of the solar system to Pluto.

A self feeding startup culture is not a healthy startup culture, at least imo.

Re: Microsoft's office: Why insiders think top management has lost its way

#62

Post by steve-howard » Thu, Apr 07, 2011, 8:40 PM UTC

bad_user wrote: post #58

A survey of more than 1,000 Microsoft employees conducted in October by Glassdor.com showed that only 51% of them approved of Ballmer's performance as CEO. I'm familiar with these types of corporate surveys -- the questions are more likely phrased with bias, like "Do you agree that Ballmer is a good CEO?" (careful, he's watching your answers). And then they do an all hands in which results are discussed with team-lev…

Glassdoor.com is supposedly anonymous; the Microsoft employees surveyed would have been self-reported.

Re: Microsoft's office: Why insiders think top management has lost its way

#63

Post by ibdknox » Thu, Apr 07, 2011, 8:58 PM UTC

maxxxxx wrote: post #60

ibdknox wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) I agree. It's probably one of the best IDE's out there and C# is undoubtedly a fantastic language. 2) In what ways is C# ahead of its peers in the industry? I think Async is a great step forward, but it's been in other languages for a while now. 3) He could and he has no impact on VS whatsoever. Scott is essentially a community PM. He talks for a living about stuff. He's a great guy and he's done some good on the…

While VS is good I think they made a huge mistake pricing Team System to up to $10000 per developer. The Express versions are nice but they don't contain a profiler for example. I don't think it's smart trying to make money from developers. Apple made the same mistake with the Newton when they priced the dev kit at $800 (not sure if that's accurate but it was expensive) while the Palm dev tools were free.

fwiw, I agree and actually fought to try and get a lower priced VS out there.

Re: Microsoft's office: Why insiders think top management has lost its way

#64

Post by metageek » Thu, Apr 07, 2011, 9:00 PM UTC

>its people knew the competition so intimately that the best product managers could rattle off the birthdays of the CEO's kids.

That's not competitive research, that's stalking.

Re: Microsoft's office: Why insiders think top management has lost its way

#65

Post by contextfree » Thu, Apr 07, 2011, 9:03 PM UTC

danilocampos wrote: post #26

michael_dorfman wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, come on. How about F# and Kinect, to name but two?

They bought Kinect from another company – the hard work of getting approvals and resources and everything else to start on it had already been done outside of Microsoft. It's definitely an impressive bit of tech, but would it have been possible were its genesis subject to the byzantine internal politics of Microsoft? I dunno. I wouldn't put money on it. Meanwhile, consumers don't buy functional programming languages.

the hardware was licensed from another company, but the body-tracking software was developed in house (by a small incubation team in Redmond working with researchers at MS Research's UK office). the whole product definition as well.

Re: Microsoft's office: Why insiders think top management has lost its way

#66

Post by dasil003 » Thu, Apr 07, 2011, 9:03 PM UTC

protomyth wrote: post #52

dasil003 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

iOS is based on OS X though, but anyway the technical distinction is irrelevant to my point. The point is that Apple integration is very tight across devices, in a way that must be very appealing to Microsoft from a business perspective. But Microsoft has it's own strengths, such as catering to the support and feature needs of the enterprise. In a way it mirrors Apple's strategy of targeting the high-end consumer mar…

The difference between "based-on" and "Windows everywhere" is subtle, but makes for a huge difference. Apple is willing to fit the right parts in place where Microsoft has made some truly bad and confusing technology selections (e.g. full Windows on tablets instead of a grown-up phone OS).

The difference is the quality of execution. I don't think "Windows everywhere" implies the crap they've been putting out. I chalk it up more to incompetent middle management.

Re: Microsoft's office: Why insiders think top management has lost its way

#67

Post by Lazlo_Nibble » Thu, Apr 07, 2011, 9:20 PM UTC

slackerIII wrote: post #27

The fundamental problem at Microsoft is that building your career is a better (more lucrative) use of your time than building your product. You can be successful there without ever making a successful product. Microsoft acquired my startup and I spent 2 years there wondering what the hell was going on until I came to that realization.

Yup. You get the behavior you incent, and my impression is that the incentives to play politics at Microsoft are far more pervasive nowadays than the incentives to build good product. In fact, one of the biggest incentives to build good product seems to be the additional leverage it gives you politically...

Re: Microsoft's office: Why insiders think top management has lost its way

#68

Post by MartinCron » Thu, Apr 07, 2011, 9:34 PM UTC

potatolicious wrote: post #50

MartinCron wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not going to claim that Microsoft isn't too insular (it is) and I live and work in Seattle on purpose, so I'm a little biased about this, but I don't think it's just about the location. Besides Amazon being a huge presence, more and more established tech companies are opening development offices here (Google, Facebook, Zynga) just to take advantage of the talent that's here. Not to mention the fairly healthy star…

I agree leadership, culture, and politics are bigger problems than geography, but it's still an issue. Sniping younger people from MSFT is sometimes trivially easy because of its remote location in Redmond - surrounded almost exclusively by nice, quiet suburbs. I know a lot of MSFTies braving the commute across the lake daily (1-1.5h each way!), but people get tired of it fast , and by and large the young want to liv…

I totally agree with the East-side West-side thing. I commuted across Lake Washington once and I'm never going to do it again. In fact, I turned down what seemed like a promising position at a cool startup because they were threatening a move from Fremont(!) to Bellevue(!?).

Of course, two years later, they're still in Fremont.

Microsoft has done some good work with their connector shuttles. I could actually take a little shuttle van from my neighborhood straight to Redmond if I worked out there, and spend the commute time playing Tiny Wings on my iPad instead of driving.

Re: Microsoft's office: Why insiders think top management has lost its way

#69

Post by stevenj » Thu, Apr 07, 2011, 9:42 PM UTC

kenjackson wrote: post #19

rbanffy wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, but Apple has Steve Jobs. Microsoft has Ballmer. There is a difference. ;-)

But the name of the iPod originally came from a freelance marketing guy, not Jobs himself. After the success of the iPod, the iPhone name was pretty easy. With that said they could have called it the Apple Phone and probably not lost a sale.

"Good artists copy, great artists steal."

-Picasso

Jobs is an artist. Ballmer isn't.

Re: Microsoft's office: Why insiders think top management has lost its way

#70

Post by Aaronontheweb » Thu, Apr 07, 2011, 9:53 PM UTC

justanotheratom wrote: post #45

kenjackson wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The open question is whether Google and Facebook will also end up in this same spot. As you said, everyone will end up here. There's virtually no way a rational company can avoid it. It's textbook Innovator's Dilemma. Eventually you're faced with a situation that there is a new product/service that is cannibalizing your product. You can hasten the cannibalization of your cash cow and maybe succeed in this new space (…

But Apple in contrast has turned out to be surprisingly nimble and my impression is that their employees are quite happy.

I credit Apple's nimbleness with the way their product design teams limit the scope of what they're working on at any given time - they fight project creep, focus on creating a great user experience, and get the 10% of the product that users use 90% of the time right.

Microsoft, on the other hand, tries to be all things and spreads itself out like crazy. It's easier to be nimble when you're more focused.