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...
"I personally know two women got promoted to be managers, not because of their performance, but because they each is a higher manager's mistress. In short, Microsoft's is a fear-based culture. How could Microsoft not fall rapidly?"
"I'd attend a meeting where we needed 3 or 4 relevant people to discuss something but 30 or more would show up, to represent their group's interests, even if they had no real idea of what was going on. It was nearly impossible to reach any consensus, all decisions ultimately got made by whatever interested PM had the most clout - often not the PM with the most expertise or relevance"
" I recall the sole-sucking Business Process Reviews we'd go through. The culmination would be a Bill/Steve meeting. It was the 30 people developing 98 slide powerpoints with 2 point font (again, no exaggeration). It was game over for me once I sat through that."
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 defined a direction. No one ever set out a vision. The result of this was that each little section of a product would decide what the best possible direction for the product would be and build features to that vision. The summation of this effort is a frankenstein product with a user experience that is equally as scary. No one worked together unless they were forced to and even when they did, they never really worked toward a common goal. Based on my experience, I believe that a single charasmatic, intelligent, and visionary person could have easily turned our division around. All it would take is strong leadership and a crystal clear vision. We had neither.
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). What astounded me was how little others knew about non-MS technologies. We were beaten to the punch by other products nearly every time because we only ever focused inward and not on what the world itself was doing. Moreover, when people did look out the window they focused on the wrong things and instead of trying to innovate saw it as a need to start chasing tail lights.
Lastly, I got several hundred emails a day as a PM. Despite that deluge of written communication, I felt that no one was really ever saying anything of value. Sadly, most people aren't great communicators and the result of a culture that promotes a ton of communication is a torrent of useless discussions that take away from what really matters. It seemed to me that most managers were there solely to deal with the fact that no one was working together or communicating properly. I would argue that at least 1/3 of a person's workload at MS is the direct result of this inability to communicate and it absolutely destroyed many of the efforts I would've liked to have seen succeed.
I don't believe replacing Ballmer is some magic bullet. I think the company needs to be 1/10 of the size to reduce communication and to get people working together. I think it needs someone with a vision for the way things should be that isn't based on what's already out there. And I think Microsoft has a chance if it could only take a step back and see that it's no longer an innovative company, but instead a peddler of last year's model.
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# has definitely been ahead of its peers in the industry. The debugger continuously seems to get better. And even where it plays catch up, like ASP.NET MVC, its doing so rapid and smartly.
3) VS is where it seems like there are a lot of people who look outside the company. I've never met Scott Hanselman, but he seems like the type of person who could rattle off every open source project in existence.
4) Scott Guthrie seems pretty visionary and he's in VS isn't he?
I'm not doubting any of what you said, but it seems like VS is the one place in MS that I'd tell the rest of the company to look for inspiration -- although as an insider it appears otherwise.
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 web side, but he has no influence on the core of VS.
4) He's actually on the platform, not VS, though he does take a lot of interest in the core component itself. I like ScottGu a lot, I've worked with him a couple of times, but he's driving something very specific (.NET framework and its components).
MS is quite good at building platforms and not nearly as good at building interfaces. A big part of what I did before I left was prove that most people don't understand how to use VS. Moreover, there's a lot you don't see - all of the failed attempts to do things even more amazing than async. While VS itself seems like a model citizen, I would argue that's because it started out as the conglomeration of fairly strong original products and hasn't needed to move too far from where it started to be "best in industry."
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 which is actually pretty useful, extension methods, and of course async. While async exists in some languages, it doesn't exist in what I'd consider peers (other popular languages) from Common Lisp, Python, Ruby, Java, C/C++, and Javascript. And frankly, I think this probably isn't all that important -- and more religious than anything else.
But I am curious about one thing you said, A big part of what I did before I left was prove that most people don't understand how to use VS. Moreover, there's a lot you don't see - all of the failed attempts to do things even more amazing than async.
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.
C# programmers are always bragging about how generics are so much better than Java's. But when I've looked at the common day usage cases they're really about the same. I know about the type erasure issue but unless you're doing some crazy reflection stuff it never comes up. I'm not trying to start a religious war here but what is it that in practice makes C# generics so much better than Java's?
The lack of erasure means that you can use generics to do sophisticated type magic, sort of like in C++ templates - specifically using reflection. You don't usually want to do this too much, but doing it in one or two places can simplify code tremendously. This also allows you to eliminate boxing and reflection overhead in a lot of places by letting you use generics to bind to reflected types/members at runtime, which is really important if you're trying to build a performant app in C# that's got extensibility support.
For example, I use this to create strongly-typed bindings to individual fields/properties of class instances at runtime, which lets me pass around objects of types like 'BoundMember<int>', and generically store into them - essentially the same as 'ref int', except it can outlive function scope. This is really useful when doing asynchronous programming, and it lets you kill duplication when building things like configuration dialogs.
Hmm, sounds like what I said with "unless you're doing some crazy reflection stuff ", and it sounds like a solution that reduces the readability and maintainability. But maybe I'd need to see a good example to appreciate it.
In what ways is C# ahead of its peers in the industry?
I'm assuming that the most obvious peer in the industry is Java. As I've recently worked in both, it comes down to Linq and the fact that Visual Studio + ReSharper is just a better IDE than anything I've used in the Java realm.
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...
Recently I started digging how one could write a debugger for VS, and integration for a language (dynamic one). I stared by looking at pytools, and I was confused by all COM objects, classes, etc. I was not sure at what I point I'll get it to work - do I press F5, and it's installed? Do I make a DLL and it has to be registered?
Now that other plugins are easier - I'm looking now at MonoDevelop and SharpDevelop (Windows Only) but I wish something simpler - like emacs - straight to the core of the system - functions exposed, communication channels right there for you, etc.
Anyway I won't give up, it's just taking too much of my free time.
It sounds like there’s two parts of the debugging APIs that you’re confused about – how to get your debugger to run and how to implement the debugger where you have all the AD7 classes and interfaces – it’s certainly not a very discoverable API.
On the first part – how your debugger gets used – you ultimately need to have a DLL with your debugger in it which provides the correct registration. Like all things in the managed package framework this is provided by a ProvideAttribute – in this case a ProvideDebugEngineAttribute. So you’ll need a VS package which uses this attribute. There’s some other attributes which might be useful related to debugging and you’ll see those in PythonToolsPackage but I think you can ignore them for now. Once you have a package loaded which provides the debugger to VS you can use VsShellUtilities.LaunchDebugger to launch your debugger and start debugging. In PTVS we do this in DefaultPythonLauncher.cs. The standard VS debug engine sample (http://archive.msdn.microsoft.com/debugenginesample) also ships with an add-in which adds a menu item which does this for the current startup project. Note PTVS is built on this sample but PTVS might be easier to use as its all C# vs the mix of C# and managed C++ in the sample.
The second part you mention is all the AD7 classes. I would actually suggest that you try and ignore these for the most part – at least as you get started. Instead you should look at the PythonProcess class which exposes a simple C# API and a number of events which all of the AD7 classes are simply wrapping. If you completely replace this class with your own you’ll pretty much have a working debug engine. There may be a few things you’ll need to update (for example launch options over in AD7Engine.LaunchSuspended, or parsing expressions to see if they’re valid) but there shouldn’t be much need to look at those classes. And by the time you do need to look at them hopefully you can do it within the context of calls to and from the PythonProcess API and it’ll make more sense.
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.
To quote Steve Jobs: "The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste. And I don't mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way, in the sense that they don't think of original ideas, and they don't bring much culture into their products. "
This is so true. With other leading companies, you'll often see a product and it'll be so well designed and everything will be so thought out, that it'll bring an instant smile to your face. With Microsoft's products, on the other hand, you're often frowning the minute you open them.
Just today, I fired up Entourage (MS Outlook for Mac) over a really flaky connection; and the first thing it does is update the Bulk Mail folder. Really, Microsoft? Would that be my first priority when I open an email client, to see what new junk mail has arrived? Then it proceeded to update other sundry folders, and near the end it did it update the Inbox (which is what I was waiting for).
Making usable software is extremely difficult, and I don't think Microsoft has been much worse at it than any of the other big companies. They have both well-designed products and poorly-designed products.
It's such a huge company with so many different development teams of varying quality that it's silly to attribute the behavior of Entourage to all of Microsoft, as in, "Really, Microsoft?"
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 careful to seek out problems when the company is being successful. If stuff is going well, it's easy to gloss over problems with morale, teamwork etc.
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.
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.
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 compensation and employee retention. Granted, Google is a much smaller organization and can afford to be more nimble, but part of it has to do with with the fact that being in the valley means that its incredibly easy for talented, motivated engineers to move to the next hot startup once they're dissatisfied with their current job.
In Redmond, however, these options don't really exist and creates a culture of stagnation. People goto their jobs because they have and leave as soon as it is culturally acceptable.
I fear a lot of Microsoft's future as I just don't believe that they are able to recruit top young talent anymore. Not only is Microsoft not a "hip" place to work anymore, but their compensation is generally below market. Its pretty standard for funded startups to give more BASE salary than Microsoft. Google's base is roughly 50% more than what Microsoft pays. New hires at Google make more money than level 64 Microsoft engineers (5 levels from starting).
Microsoft will continue to execute and create good products, but until their internal culture drastically changes they will slowly slide into irrelevance.
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 startup culture that feeds from and back into the beast in Redmond.
Leadership, culture, and politics are all much bigger problems than geography.
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 live on the west side, in the city proper, not out in the 'burbs.
There's a reason why Google is now in Fremont, Facebook is downtown by the Market... I know personally (and some others who feel the same way) that there's not a chance I'll take a commute over the lake every day, and likewise no chance I'll live on the east side.
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.
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.
Can someone explain why this was down-voted? Opening with the somewhat inflammatory remark about Redmond might not have been the best choice; however, I thought it was well argued none the less.
What I found most interesting about that article was how, unlike most articles on CNN, the comments were dominated by people saying approximately "Yes I actually worked there from xx to yy and I fully agree with the substance of this article."
I've often thought that Microsoft would have done much better if the justice dept had broken it up. Being everything to everyone just doesn't work as a business strategy. But separate Windows/XBox and Office/enterprise apps companies could focus on their respective markets.
I still don't get how all these articles frame the debate as Microsoft playing catch-up with all the "innovation" coming out of Apple? I get the management culture and internal struggles and "analysis paralysis" that comes with the cover-your-butt mentality, but as far as I can tell, Microsoft is one of the very few companies that has entire departments dedicated bringing cutting-edge technologies to market. The only other companies that comes close(that I've seen) are Google and perhaps Philips. Talk to researches at elite technology schools, and I would venture to guess that they would put Microsoft far ahead of Apple, and maybe Google, in the innovation race. However, if you talk management or P/E people, they would probably give you a different answer. So I guess I'm in agreement that there's an internal problem at Microsoft, but that it lies with the culture, not the actual scope of their ability to innovate.
I'm sure Microfot has many smart engineers that make a lot of cool stuff in their labs, but almost none of those are coming to market, so in the end all that research goes to waste, or perhaps to patents that they'll only use to sue others later.
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.
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.
> Microsoft is one of the very few companies that has entire departments dedicated bringing cutting-edge technologies to market.
So where are these technologies? And why isn't Microsoft hauling huge sacks of money home each year from multiple products that didn't exist in the 90's? As far as I can tell, they make money from vendor lock-in with Office and Windows, and a gaming division founded by a visionary who left because he couldn't stand working there anymore.
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.
As to WP7, it's actually more of an indictment of Microsoft than it is a credit to them. Consider how much of a clusterfuck their mobile strategy has been for the last four years. It took them forever to get their bureaucratic shit together and actually ship something that resembled a next generation smartphone, and once they did, they did a piss-poor job supporting and improving the platform, despite the very high standard set by both Google and Apple for the same. It's a perfect example of their inability to execute or respond to changes in their industry.
Another example would be on the developer tools side. Things like C# 4.0, Linq, Entity Framework, ASP.NET MVC.
Not all of the their developer stuff is great (I actually had a MSFT PM to apologize to me for the unit-testing stuff built into Visual Studio) but I can't imagine life without Linq.
When you've got other companies bringing home billions in revenue on product categories that did not even exist five years ago, it's tough to be impressed that Microsoft gave a facelift to a product that was new in the early 90's.
I am being real. Even discounting some mis-steps (Kin, Zune, Vista) the incremental improvements made to Xbox, Windows, Windows Server, Visual Studio, SQL Server, and even IE9 are impressive.
It's perfectly possible for a company to be successful and innovative without having huge successes in product categories that didn't exist until recently.
From a perfectly selfish perspective, if Microsoft totally gave up on tablets, phones, search, and social. I wouldn't care or even notice because Apple, Google, and Facebook are meeting my needs nicely. Maybe it's unrealistic to expect them to just keep making the things that I use every day better and better. I don't know.
I've begun to wonder lately if all of the money they've spent on "innovative technologies" shouldn't be counted as marketing expense for their core products.
I mean they're not going to convince many people to buy Office for the first time with advertising. People buy Office because it's what you do when you have a PC.
On the other hand by spending money to appear to be a cutting edge technical company they can more easily justify (sell) to their business customers the need for another round of version upgrades.
I wonder if Microsoft needs to define themselves, as Apple and Google have. Apple: "Make it Shiny", Google: "Don't be Evil", Microsoft "Not afraid to fail". Maybe they could increase the velocity of bringing their research infrastructure in-line with their broader interests.
Finally some opinion I can agree with. I have a suspicion it's some perception thing, like the opinion leaders proclaimed that "Microsoft isn't innovative" and every media repeat that.
Actually, Microsoft is an innovative company, and after reading the blog of the Win7 developers, their software development methodology is far ahead of most other software companies. Maybe, just maybe, they are around for a long time a became very big, so people expect more of them...or, I don't know.
I'm sure Microsoft has many smart engineers that make a lot of cool stuff in their labs, but almost none of those are coming to market, so in the end all that research goes to waste, or perhaps to patents that they'll only use to sue others later.
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-level granularity to keep anonymity, but if the team has 5 people, out of which you're most likely to speak your mind (and everybody knows it), then everybody knows it was you who criticized the CEO.
I've seen such a survey end up with 80% in favor of everything, even though the people were actually discontented with the way the company was being managed -- 51% is pretty bad ;-)
My former employer did these types of surveys a couple times in the last few years I was there. Supposedly 100% anonymous but the survey link mailed to each employee had a hashed (unique) query string. People not taking part in the survey got follow up notices till they complied.
No one believed any of it was anonymous. The results were worthless, but quoted regularly. It was that type of place.
"Windows Everywhere" is a bad strategy for Microsoft. I still don't think Windows Phone 7 was a good name. Why didn't they just go with Microsoft Phone or something?
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.
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.
It seems like most of Microsoft wants Steve Ballmer to make a major change to Microsoft. I'd really like to see him follow the "New Detroit" idea and announce a major re-thinking of the company. But, I'm sure he won't. They'll complain, his approval ratings will get worse, Microsoft will decline, and he will stay in denial. Peter Drucker is rolling in his grave.
> I'd really like to see him follow the "New Detroit" idea and announce a major re-thinking of the company.
How about we wait until "new Detroit" actually succeeds before using it as a model?
Folks are constantly doing "major re-thinking" of various things and most of the ones that get implemented turn out to be disasters, especially the urban ones. ("The projects" were one such "re-think".)
everybody/everything is subject to natural lifecycle. At 35 one is completely different from the one at 15. The complex living system like a large company is subject to it as well. You go through life, you change, you age [the undead of course are exception from the rule, like vampires or IBM]
+1 for the mention of the undead. COBOL is the undead. It refuses to die, billions of lines of COBOL still run today and will still run 50 years from now, probably much longer. In my nightmares I see an Undead Arcane Mage cranking out PROCEDURE DIVISIONS for centuries to come.
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 important -- nobody knows. The place becomes a huge echo chamber where outsiders can't be heard except through marketing studies and sales staff reporting through the chain of command.
I wish this situation was unique to Microsoft, but it is not. Any large shop that makes software ends up creating their own prison.
The open question is whether Google and Facebook will also end up in this same spot.
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 (or maybe not), or you can milk you cash cow for all its worth. If you do the math its almost always better to NOT hasten your own demise for an uncertain future.
But even if you were to break them up, there's really no good way to break them up that really helps all that much. Windows and Office? Nothing else can really exist on its own. Now you have two big monsters that have the same problems, but spread out in two companies.
I think you have to let nature take its course. Which probably means some breakout technology that lets them continue their cash cow while providing new scenarios. If Windows 8 can actually merge the desktop, tablet, and phone in a way never even envisioned, that would be a shot. But it's such a long shot I wouldn't hold out much hope.
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.
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.
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.
I think those absolute rulers whose territories are small and whose populations can easily leave probably make more sound decisions. Singapore seems well run, for example. The people can remove a ruler by removing themselves.
"A system governed by sensible rules that rewards smart action, punishes bad actors and forgives errors is better."
Good luck writing that RFP. Especially the "smart action" part.
The best government, in the end, is one that's transparent and, ultimately, replaceable. Whoever is in power is always going to seek to retain power; you want that to be dependent on them making decisions that benefit everyone else.
Even if you had a "perfect" government, but it lacked transparency, you'd have a problem as that lack of transparency would make it difficult for everyone outside the government to make long-term decisions about investment, etc.
I guess that's true. It's real strength was probably the rule of law and property rights, which Parliament didn't erode while the House of Lords had power.
Yes, but what's going to happen once Jobs retires/steps away? I imagine he's been very busy at choosing/grooming possible successors for a few years already, but usually empires ruled by a powerful individiuals crumble after the change at the top.
I was told projects in Apple are generally endeavors by small teams. Five people write this app, four people write that subprocess. While feature staffing is similar at MS, the overhead of management, program management, and test often smothers any attempt to move fast at MS.
I don't think Microsoft's lack of innovation has anything to do with moving fast. The article nailed it by saying Ballmer and Co are in denial about their competitors.
I remember an article here on HN about how he mocked the single iPad user in the audience (I paraphrase): "look at that poor guy, slouched over his knees, trying to type awkwardly on that tablet. This isn't the wave of the future."
I understand that being an over-the-top company man is part of his public persona, but I truly believe that at some point after Bill Gates stepped down, Ballmer stopped acting and started believing the very public denial and actually living in it. And coincidentally, this is when everything started going wrong for MS. Management drank the "kool-aid", they became an organization of yes-men, following a delusional leader.
The problem isn't that middle management is smothering innovation, it is the result of upper management not providing clear, well-thought-out direction.
Even if integrating desktop, tablet, and phone in a way that has never been envisioned is a good idea at all (and I can't say). I feel that Windows 8 will either be way too soon to do it well, or they will way take too long to ship Windows 8. We haven't even got one proven good iteration of anything Windows on phone or tablet yet.
I agree... I suspect if it is a good idea it will be too soon to do it well. And in five years Apple will do it well. That's the story of the MS product pipeline. Do something five years too early to do it well -- get stuck in the decisions made at that point in time and can't come back and realize that the decisions of five years ago no long apply.
But even if (especially if?) you confidently foresee eventual failure, the net present value of your assets may be maximized by milking them right now. Just because there also exists a profitable market in cannibalizing your product, doesn't mean you have to be in that market.
> If you don't cannibalize your products what is almost certain is eventual failure
What I see happening is smartphones and tablets taking over much of the territory where people now use laptops and desktop PCs. Which is why Microsoft's failure in those two markets is so damning.
When the secret copyright-related Trans-Pacific Partnership treaty made Hacker News, I asked "Any idea on how to finally fix all this?" partly due to the fact that I was getting frustrated with what was happening and what was causing it:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2315729
Agreed. But I don't think the situation is as dire as the article paints it. Office is not going anywhere anytime soon. The rise of smartphones does not suddenly mean that there is any lesser demand for Office. The enterprise trusts Microsoft (with good reason IMHO) and if they stay on their game they can continue to dominate the market. Can you imagine trusting your billion dollar company to Google's half-assed support, or some upstart pitching support for OpenOffice (okay maybe eventually)?
Microsoft should spin off everything except Windows and Office. Let all those divisions and products sink or swim on their own merits. Ultimately they will get more value from the ability for some of those units to have a breakout success than the marginal benefit they get from twisting all products to serve the "Windows Everywhere" strategy. Not that "Windows Everywhere" is inherently a bad strategy, but if you have a CEO lacking vision, and a glut of middle management politics, it just makes sense to gut the inefficiencies and scar tissue in the middle of the organization and give the rank and file the opportunity to rise to their abilities.
This would also play to Ballmer's strength as a salesman. I get the feeling he looks at how Apple is thriving on a closed ecosystem ("OS X Everywhere") and wants to succeed in a similar way, but he is utterly incapable of it. If he were to focus on Windows / Office and say how can we sell more of this on its own merits I think he would be more successful.
Except, it's not "OSX Everywhere" - Apple doesn't have an OS integration in automobiles (Ford deal), refrigerators (http://www.zdnet.com/news/microsoft-plans-to-sit-inside-your...), and they're not trying to right now. That said, if they entered those markets, it'd probably be good. :)
I get the feeling he looks at how Apple is thriving on a closed ecosystem ("OS X Everywhere") and wants to succeed in a similar way, but he is utterly incapable of it.
Ah, but that's the thing-- Apple didn't go for "OS X Everywhere", they were willing to segment their OS strategy, and developed iOS for the iPhone and iPad. There's no telling what the tech world would look like now if Microsoft hadn't tied their tablet strategy to Windows XP.
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 market, Microsoft targets the highest-end software market, period.
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.
Perhaps not for certain definitions of OSX. Have you shopped for a car recently? Look how many different automobiles have dock connectors these days...
Those Fords with Windows in the dash are the same ones with ipod cables in the glove box.
> Can you imagine trusting your billion dollar company to...
> some upstart pitching support for OpenOffice (okay maybe eventually)?
Perhaps Microsoft could hasten that day by increasing their prices for office licenses by, say, five-fold. OpenOffice is looking better and better every day.
These problems have nothing to do with software. Every major company that makes innovative products have had this issue for the last few hundred years.
That also means that ways to fix or prevent it have been researched extensibly. It's doable, just take a look at Drucker. Of course, it's also often not done.
Google has apparently taken this lesson to heart. With Page taking over, it looks like his goal is to allow each group to act more independently, like startups, and to reduce the management structure so teams have more flexibility to do what they want to be successful.
Microsoft lost its way once Gates left. He was the visionary that started the company, and Ballmer was just a businessman. They need a visionary to lead, and from what I've read they need to do away with the internal turf wars. I know I've read a lot of blog posts from insiders saying that great ideas get smothered by other divisions all the time when they feel "threatened" by them.
