Birth and Death of Microsoft Bing

Microsoft has always been good at the pivotal turnaround. Recognizing when a key moment was on the wind, mustering together a tremendous effort, making a good number of smart decisions and putting out a solid anchor product that (re)cements their position in the industry and reinvigorates the brand in doing so. Windows 95 and Windows 7 are perfect examples. IE4 (yes really), Bing, and Windows Phone 7 are also good examples. One of the big problems with Microsoft is that its organization and its culture are extremely tied to the traditional 3-ish year ship cycle. A hugely successful diving catch every other ship cycle or so is rapidly becoming less and less feasible as a means to hang on to or acquire a market. Microsoft does not seem to get the web at a fundamental level, it doesn't seem to have the capacity to release software at a pace of yearly, monthly, or continuously.

And that will ultimately be the undoing of Bing and the Windows Phone. The only way MS knows how to crank out releases faster is the deathmarch, and that is a certain route to doom.

Worse yet, since Gates left MS has no real technical or managerial leadership, it's bureaucracy all the way up and down. This has been affecting the culture at Microsoft little by little, also partly coupled to the stock price having plateaued. More and more talented devs are finding that MS lacks the excitement and the reward of cutting edge development, so they are moving elsewhere. Also, without that talent around fewer good projects are pushed forward, fewer projects succeed, people become less satisfied with their jobs, etc. (think about the movie "It's a Wonderful Life" only translate the bad stuff, on a corporate level, to hundreds and then thousands of George Bailey's going away). This makes the environment that much less rewarding for everyone else who remains, so yet more people leave. And slowly but surely the creep of a more rigid and bureaucratic corporate culture and organization fills in the gaps left by the people who had the most clout in the company, causing yet more and more talent to evaporate away.

It's a self-reinforcing cycle that will lead to the rapid diminution of the company and its prospects over time and the examples the article provides of the process as it happened at Bing have played out throughout the company. Nobody young with high prospects seriously considers Microsoft as a destination anymore, and increasingly the older devs are either retiring on their massive earnings from the glory days or they're just looking for somewhere else to be that's a better use of their time and talent.

MS continues to make a crap-ton of money from its core products, but it will be institutionally ham-strung in responding to the threats that will steal away that revenue (such as mobile-heritage operating systems). Because those threats will grow at a rate MS is incapable of competing with.

So they agitate for (wait for it) maximum budget and minimum feature set. So that success is assured and their metric is optimized.

Unfortunately those things are exactly contrary to company goals. Why does this happen?

{opinion} Middle managers are too remote from either customers (financial goals) or top management (company goals). They're in the middle, right? With layers between them and either end.

And when you try to optimize any process with too many degrees of freedom, you have too many variables and get to choose which ones to look at. So middle managers look at their own career and ignore the rest.

My suggestion: line up all middle managers in the parking lot (important), stand at the end of the line, and put one bullet through all of them (optimizes cost in bullets).

If my company Ever has middle managers, its time to call it quits.

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> I don't know that Bing has "failed" yet

Microsoft doesn't either. I have no doubt Google's search will be superseded by an even more competent product. I just doubt Microsoft is able to deliver such thing. To go against Google you either need infinitely deep pockets or a technology so disruptive that it effectively neutralizes the size advantage Google has or turns into a disadvantage. Microsoft will go head-on with Google until it acknowledges failure, rename the product and try again. Much like the Black Knight on Monty Python's Holy Grail, they just won't quit. And, when they do, they'll claim victory.

> Microsoft has always been good at the pivotal turnaround. Recognizing when a key moment was on the wind, mustering together a tremendous effort

I remember it happening once - they went against Netscape. They could outspend Netscape 100 to one and bundle/force bundle their competitor with their OS and that's why they could crush Netscape. They can't outspend Google two to one.

Note: I remember how they took the air out of Netware with Windows for Workgroups. They recognized there was a market below the one Novell had nearly monopolized and took it before Novell could launch a competitor (something hard because it came - again - bundled with the client) and provided a smooth upgrade path to Windows NT. But that's not the same as with IE vs. NS - they had Lan Manager for eons before they realized they had a niche they could expand. And, like with IE, they could rely on bundling with their OS. I doubt Microsoft can put Google in that position.