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

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

#71

Post by stretchwithme »

lukev wrote: post #57
justanotheratom wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I imagine Apple as an absolute monarchy, with Jobs handing down dictates from on high. If I imagine decisions at MS, I imagine a committee process. I think the results the companies are having bear out those impressions.

Its interesting to me that one of the most successful absolute monarchies, Great Britain, in the end became ruled by committee.

And eventually lost its empire, with the next great power ruled a committee constrained by a constitution. And that constitution eroding away has led to the committee pretty much pissing it away.

So, yeah, committees are not good. A system governed by sensible rules that rewards smart action, punishes bad actors and forgives errors is better.

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

#72

Post by alexqgb »

simonw wrote: post #9

""" Yet Ballmer & Co. remain in denial, they say, because the great gushers of cash Windows and Office generate means they don't feel the urgency they otherwise would –shielded from the pain of its many disappointments by two of the more successful franchises in the history of business. """ That reminds me of an article about Pixar (which I can't find now) which talked about how the management team are especially car…

I believe Ed Catmull refers to this as 'keeping your crises small.' That is to say, it's much better to actively surface problems before they leave the shop than it is to ship with issues, and try to deal with implosions after the fact (ahem, Vista).

Here he is, giving a really good talk at Stanford Business School, in which he covers this (among other good ideas). About an hour, but worth much more.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2h2lvhzMDc

Interestingly, an ethos like this suggests that the fate of Microsoft is NOT inevitable. It's only becomes that way when you no longer care about shipping garbage. Exhibit B: Detroit in the 70's and 80's.

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

#73

Post by alexqgb »

lotusleaf1987 wrote: post #44
g123g wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

xPhone would have been nice, reminding people that they also created something as cutting edge as XBox which gave Sony and Nintendo a serious run for their money.

That would just remind people of the iPhone every time they mention an xPhone .

Which reminds me, Apple doesn't sell an iBox.

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

#74

Post by blacksmythe »

kenjackson wrote: post #16
DanielBMarkham wrote: post #6

This is the natural end-game of being a hugely successful company: you box yourself in. You make so many rules about what can happen and how it all has to work that nothing can escape. They have to break up. I just don't see any other way around it. Each little new idea that might help somebody competes with dozens of special interests all looking out for some little fiefdom or concern that may or may not be importan…

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 (…

  >> If you do the math its almost always better to 
  >> NOT hasten your own demise for an uncertain future.
In the short run it is always looks better to not cannibalize your products, and managers are driven mostly by short term objectives.

  >> for an uncertain future.
If you don't cannibalize your products what is almost certain is eventual failure:

http://www.economist.com/node/14248815?story_id=14248815

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

#75

Post by mkr-hn »

Aaronontheweb wrote: post #70
justanotheratom wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Microsoft's software runs on a billion computers. The alternative is to choose whose money they're going to reject in the next version.

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

#76

Post by woan »

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.

I think the original Team System pricing which was probably there to compete against IBM Rational in the enterprise ignoring they had a much broader customer base.

They eventually folded it into most of the MSDN freebie programs for partners and startups...

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

#77

Post by contextfree »

kenjackson wrote: post #33
ibdknox wrote: post #25

As a recently departed (read 5 months) ex-PM at Microsoft, I think MS's problems, at least in my division, stem from three things: a lack of vision/leadership, too inward of a focus, and the ridiculous bevy of meaningless communication. I think the article touches on each of these in a certain way, but not exactly in the same way I mean them. One thing I noticed about the middle management at MS was that they never d…

The article makes a point of MS being focused too much on itself, and I wholeheartedly agree. One of the things I was praised for was knowing what the rest of the tech world was doing (I worked on VS). I have to admit that I find this odd for a few reasons: 1) VS is one of the best products MS ships. And its probably best in industry. 2) VS has done a fair bit of really good work in the past few years. The work in C#…

I like VS, but I'd say VS has a lot of great stuff in it, but "VS as a whole", if you could somehow abstract away what it contains, is actually pretty shoddy. i.e. VS is less than the sum of its parts, although the sum of its parts is great enough that VS is, despite that, still pretty good.

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

#78

Post by mattmanser »

kenjackson wrote: post #46
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…

I think in general we agree -- you just have an insider perspective so you can see some of the strings that I can't. The only big contention is "In what ways is C# ahead of its peers in the industry?" This comes down to a language war where there is no winner, but the way C# has put together great feature sets around key scenarios. Generics done right, much improved co/contravariance, nice lambdas, dynamic support wh…

There's a big difference between the c# language team and visual studio. The c# language has left java for dust, they are doing a bloody brilliant job but on the other hand were essentially playing catch up with python and ruby until 4.0. The dynamic CLR stuff has really changed the game.

VS, on the otherhand, has stagnated, between 2005 and 2010, apart from integration with the new hotnesses like Silverlight, MVC and LINQ, I can't really point out any improvements. While I must admit I love MVC over ASP.Net (keer-spit), even now you feel the meddlers interfering and making it do unnecessary magic.

Its javascript integration is still shockingly bad. It doesn't even highlight brackets or braces and the auto-indenting is erratic. Javascript is so key to web programming these days and yet for the first time I find myself juggling VS with Notepad++ because that free open-source program is actually a lot better.

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

#79

Post by archangel_one »

stretchwithme wrote: post #71
lukev wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I imagine Apple as an absolute monarchy, with Jobs handing down dictates from on high. If I imagine decisions at MS, I imagine a committee process. I think the results the companies are having bear out those impressions.

Its interesting to me that one of the most successful absolute monarchies, Great Britain, in the end became ruled by committee. And eventually lost its empire, with the next great power ruled a committee constrained by a constitution. And that constitution eroding away has led to the committee pretty much pissing it away. So, yeah, committees are not good. A system governed by sensible rules that rewards smart action…

True, but there is no evidence that such a system can remain for any significant length of time (or in most cases even come about in the first place) in practice. If you look at any country of significant size they mostly appear to be ruled by a committee or an absolute dictator. The committees could be said to generally be doing a bad job but nowhere near as bad as the worst cases of the dictators, but nobody has this ideal system governed by sensible rules - possibly because when you get enough human beings together in the first place they can't agree on what any sensible rules would be.

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

#80

Post by ootachi »

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.

"Meanwhile, consumers don't buy functional programming languages."

Unlike Apple, Microsoft is also interested in business models that aren't B2C.

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