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Microsoft reorganizes

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Re: Microsoft reorganizes

#221

Post by seanmcdirmid »

Silhouette wrote: post #219
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not sufficient that the market still exists, but it is no longer growing much and is beginning to show signs of shrinkage. Ya, you can still make money there, but less and less overtime. Good to get on top of these things and find other cash pandas.

Finding new/growing markets is all very sensible, but prioritising doing so at the expense of an existing and much larger market seems an odd choice unless you're really sure you're onto a winner.

If your old market is tanking, you don't have much choice. PCs still provide income for Microsoft, but there are few or no opportunities for investment oriented around growth, and Microsoft ultimately wants to be seen as a still growing company and not as HP. So given that MS makes money on PCs, but can't grow this or invest in any interesting way, it makes total sense that their attention would drift elsewhere to markets where they can grow profit.

We aren't very far apart here. The PC market exists, MS will still make money on it, but the future is somewhere else and we need to be there, especially since we can leverage and invest the money we still make from the PC market today.

Re: Microsoft reorganizes

#222

Post by suprgeek »

I have much respect for a certain Mr. Tatarinov, who might be forgiven for dreaming about dotted lines all night long...From the Report

"Kirill Tatarinov will continue to run Dynamics as is, but his product leaders will dotted line report to Qi Lu, his marketing leader will dotted line report to Tami Reller and his sales leader will dotted line report to the COO group."

Re: Microsoft reorganizes

#223

Post by Silhouette »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #163

This is the change : "This means we will organize the company by function: Engineering (including supply chain and datacenters), Marketing, Business Development and Evangelism, Advanced Strategy and Research, Finance, HR, Legal, and COO (including field, support, commercial operations and IT). Each discipline will help drive our overall strategy. Each discipline will also be charged with improving our core capabiliti…

That makes them a lot more like Apple and really puts Dell and HP in a sticky place. One wonders what the world would look like if Apple embraced people making cloned hardware.

I'm not sure, but it could lead to some very interesting manoeuvres if the big PC vendors decided relying on Windows was no longer safe and building one or more freely available alternatives was in their interests.

People joke a lot about the limitations of desktop Linux and talk about how OSS business applications lag their major commercial/closed competitors, but these hardware giants could find a natural and shared interest in collaborating with the community and each other to fix those deficiencies.

At that point, you have some hardware heavyweights with the resources to make business gear -- whether traditional PCs or newer devices -- on a large scale and with the credibility to take on the likes of Apple and Samsung, now also collaborating on a new generation of business software built from the ground up and with all of their interests aligned in making it as good as possible and with little interest in charging a high or any price for it. In short, it could give a new lease of life to the struggling PC big hitters, and would be a very credible threat to the likes of Microsoft, Apple and Samsung. Now throw in the big processor manufacturers, some of whose fortunes are also troubled by the loss of PCs but who also have the potential to make huge deals for new hardware ranges, and you've really got a party.

This has the "it would never happen" feel about it as I write it, but even thinking about it for a while, it does make a lot of sense from a commercial point of view, and HP under Whitman has already started shifting its strategy in a way that might support this kind of move.

Re: Microsoft reorganizes

#224

Post by clauretano »

kenferry wrote: post #192
kyllo wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the TL;DR is that they are currently organized into (almost) self-sufficient business units by product category, but now they are going to switch to being organized into interdependent departments by job function category. This is a huge shift for MS.

This is very interesting to me, and I'd like to know more about what didn't work in the previous structure. I worked at Apple for a long time, and if I could have changed one thing organizationally it would have been to go _from_ the functional decomposition _to_ the product decomposition.

It could be a bit awkward at Microsoft, the way things were in the before time. You had things like a SaaS suite where one component was run by a service operations team under the Office org, but another component in the same suite being in the Server & Tools org. Oh, and then you'd have MSIT running those same services on their own data center infrastructure, with their own team of service engineers. You'd also have a "dedicated" version of that Saas offering, sold to huge corporations, where it was basically the same thing but on dedicated hardware and run by yet another team.

There was nothing unified about it.

On top of that, you'd have one or two competing products (usually via acquisitions, or one product would be positioned more toward consumers than enterprise), a legacy product, etc all with their own teams. The internal competitors were the enemy.

Re: Microsoft reorganizes

#226

Post by nitrogen »

mullingitover wrote: post #214
nitrogen wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The new Kinect, were it not locked into the new Xbox and used for creepy advertising-related purposes, would be an amazing product.

After the NSA revelations, the absolute last thing I plan to do is install a high-resolution, always online camera from Microsoft (or any major US corporation for that matter) in my living room.

No doubt. I am, however, interested in using depth-sensing technology for less nefarious, non-cloud-based means (see my profile). I like the technology, but I strongly dislike what Microsoft might do and is doing with it.

Re: Microsoft reorganizes

#229

Post by zmmmmm »

adamnemecek wrote: post #151
Metrop0218 wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you elaborate over what you find so wrong with that?

Probably the "with maximum return to shareholders" part.

It's a very odd phrase to stick at the end there. To make sense of it I think you have to link the end to the start:

We will allocate resources ... with maximum return to shareholders

You have to imagine the meeting where they discussed this and someone thought that this sentence was going to sound to investors like a giant money pit. So in true committee style, they voted for a camel and stuck this odd phrase on the end to satisfy that person.

Re: Microsoft reorganizes

#230

Post by jussij »

onedev wrote: post #175
Metrop0218 wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah yes, I see now. I definitely agree with you then. That line will most likely not sit well with employees that don't give a damn about the shareholders and would rather just create amazing products.

I'm curious what amazing products Microsoft is working on.

From all accounts their Office 365 and Azure platforms are doing well.

The say more than 50% of the Fortune 500 are now using Azure:

http://www.neowin.net/news/windows-azure-now-used-by-over-50...

These are fairly radical changes as they are getting off the desktop platform amd moving straight into the cloud.

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