It's a word-template for "Reorganizational Memo - Large Software Business".
While I'm here:
"I see you're trying to reorganize your company, would you like help with that." - Clippy
Is there a reason CEOs cannot use normal English but have to dilute the language so much?
For me the TL:DR after struggling to read it was - full steam ahead to the biggest walled garden on earth. We are still the Borg. Someone correct me if I am wrong.
I don't understand how anyone in their right minds can consider Windows to be the "biggest walled garden on earth". There is plenty to criticize about Microsoft, but when you descend into completely nonsensical arguments you lose all credibility.
When you add "Windows" there it completely dillutes the argument because Windows on the desktop is far from a walled garden as a proprietary platform can be.
XBOX commands sizable chunk of a very lucrative market. If we have luck the console industry will implode soon because the current model is unsustainable, but at the moment XBOX is not not very big.
If OP had said criticized Microsoft for moving toward being more closed, I would have completely agreed with him (to the extent that it is relevant to the link, which it isn't really). But he said "full steam ahead to the biggest walled garden on earth. We are still the Borg", and so his comment loses all credibility.
Number of time desktop/workstation is used in the memo - 0, number of times PC - 4 , 3 of them about the past. Number of times devices is used 20+, experience - 10+ - microsoft from today officialy desires to be looked as a device/experience company when dealing with end users.
That is full steam ahead to appleland for me. And it will be closed and walled future. WP8 and W8 demonstrated the MS attitude good enough.
The borg came from the one goal, one vision, one direction etc.
I'm not disagreeing with your general point, I'm just saying that if you cut out the hyperbole and bring your criticism down to a more rational level it would carry a lot more force. "Microsoft is becoming more closed, and that is a bad thing for x,y,z reasons" carries a lot more weight to me than "Microsoft are the worst company in the world, and are literally the Borg".
This is not just directed at you, it seems to be a common thing with criticism of Microsoft - so over the top that rational discussion of what they are doing right and wrong gets thrown out the window.
"full steam ahead to the biggest walled garden on earth."
Ok, English is not my first language, and that "to" seems a bit ambiguous to me... But in context that was pretty clearly a move toward a walled garden, not a move done by a walled garden.
They are moving in that direction since the W8 store was revealed and they are doubling down right now.
All parts of the company will share and contribute to the success of core offerings, like Windows, Windows Phone, Xbox, Surface, Office 365 and our EA offer, Bing, Skype, Dynamics, Azure and our servers. All parts of the company will contribute to activating high-value experiences for our customers.
High value experience is euphemism for gatekeeper from what I have seen.
I agree with you that Microsoft is becoming more closed, and that that is a bad thing. However, when you say "full steam ahead to the biggest walled garden on earth. We are still the Borg" it is so over the top that I can't take your comment seriously. Similarly to how I pretty much write off any comment that uses the terms M$ or "Cupertino idiot tax" unless used ironically.
If people want Microsoft to be "less closed", then they should stop avoiding Microsoft for platforms like Google and Apple, who are whooping Microsoft's ass by being far more closed.
Between the anti-open Google+/Play/Hangouts universe and the anti-open iOS iGarden, I'm surprised that it has taken Microsoft this long to catch up to their anti-open competitors.
Openness has nothing to do with abandonment of microsoft. It has all to do with the fact that they could not deliver good mobile device. And still can't.
They made errors on every step of the game - allowed carrirs to have saying on the devices, abandoned all lessons learned from PCs and building ecosystems and threw an inferior iOS me too (the UI was better though, the ideology the same)
I trialed a Nokia Lumia 920 with WP8 for a month before settling on a Note II, and I must say that I strongly disagree with your analysis of WP8. It seems very biased and it seems to be ignorant -- as in I don't believe you've actually used the platform as a daily driver for any period of time.
No offense, but calling it a "me too" iOS competitor is about as nuanced as calling Android a "me too" iOS competitor -- technically, Android is a "me too" product, just more mature, but it don't serve any useful end to point that out.
I was talking about the totally botched launch of WP7 mostly (and I have used wp7 device). While WP8 may be amazing it was just too late.
Android have the "dominant market share" thing going on about it.
MS had very short window to make a dent in the smartphone war but because of "reasons" never really got together to create a product that could be the smartphone win 3.11/98
My Nokia 900 is a great device, and I really like the OS.
Unfortunately the ecosystem never really picked up. I'm already looking to switch back to Android because I can't use WP with devices like my Pebble, among other things.
WP8 is the best phone OS out there. I absolutely love my Nokia Lumia after owning several iPhones. The mobile device is not the problem, the app store on the device is.
It's not surprising coming from the salesman/CEO who thinks that a loud voice and throwing chairs makes sense. While CEO's with real vision innovate, Ballmer thinks rearranging the furniture is the answer.
Shareholders want reasoning behind such large changes. It's really nothing more than describing where MSoft has been and what its strengths are
We will do this by leveraging our strengths. We have powered devices for many years through Windows PCs and Xbox. We have delivered high-value experiences through Office and other apps. And, we have enabled enterprise value through products like Windows Server and Exchange. The form of delivery shifts to a broader set of devices and services versus packaged software. The frontier of high-value scenarios we enable will march outward, but we have strengths and proven capabilities on which we will draw.
and what it recognizes as it's weaknesses
It is also clear to me and our leadership that we must do an extraordinary job to succeed in this modern world. We have delivered many great products and had much success in market, but we all want more. That means better execution from product conceptualization and innovation right through to marketing and sales. It also means operational excellence in cloud services, datacenter operations, and manufacturing and supply chain that are essential in a devices and services world. To advance our strategy and execute more quickly, more efficiently, and with greater excellence we need to transform how we organize, how we plan and how we work.
It then proposes the solution: the reorg. It gives benefits as to what it sees are possible with such a realignment.
Vagueness is related to the wide-reaching scope of the business, and high-level, long-term goals that they don't want to give metrics for, because they'll be held to them. It's also the description of the vision people see in the future when they think of MSoft (and in turn, how valuable shares will be).
I get that there's a lot of negative feelings towards corporations around the startup scene, but if they just said "Hey guys, we're completely restructuring so our teams can focus more", people (people important to Microsoft, i.e. shareholders) would want to know why the decision was made, how they see it playing out, when it will happen, and what the potential impacts could be in the future.
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 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.
I agree that, at least for a large company, product/vertical structure is better than functional/horizontal structure, and I think that Microsoft is just too big to be one company at all anymore, and that they should have split off into separate subsidiary companies of a holding company, each with a clear product category and mission, somewhat like GE. Then they can even sell the money-losing ones if the board wishes.
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.
> Is there a reason CEOs cannot use normal English but
> have to dilute the language so much?
Just look at this message board to see how much people will (naively or willfully) twist the meaning of what they read. pg has written about this as well [1] ... How he finds himself being extra careful about what he writes, trying to anticipate the ways that people will misunderstand what he's trying to say.
[1] Can't find the citation right now... Perhaps someone can provide the link in a reply.
I think this is a positive move for Microsoft. In particular, having all OS development work (including desktop, phone and XBox) looks like a good idea, as I've heard there have been a lot of problems with Windows Phone being managed on the periphery.
I'm not sure this is such a great idea. Doesn't the OS for the XBox have entirely different concerns than Windows for Enterprise? You cannot make an OS that works just as well for Billy the 10 year old gamer, and Mega Co. with 400,000 employees.
Apple's recognized this and decided to pretty much abandon enterprise. Linux has fragmented into different distributions (server, desktop, mobile) each with a different focus.
Microsoft, instead, has doubled down. They all even look the same.
Personally, as a consumer I like using Apple products over MS, and I like using Microsoft products as an enterprise user (I'm a programmer). In my perfect world, the two companies would complement each other. Typically Microsoft has done far better in the enterprise versus consumers (the xbox is the rare exception). Apple is the reverse.
You answered your own question the second after you asked it.
Look at Linux first. Note that it happily goes from cell phones to supercomputers. The reason that works is because "Linux" doesn't actually that much. Really, it means the kernel and (usually) the GNU userland. (Though note that Android proves that you can swap out the entire userland and still get something that people will call Linux.) Supercomputers don't have GUIs. Desktops run X or Wayland or Mir or whatever Ubuntu is doing these days, or sometimes just Chrome. Mobiles tend to run Android, although there's also Maemo and others. Meanwhile, a supercomputer would likely have no UI at all. In all cases, when we say these devices all "run Linux", we're really referring to the driver model, the kernel, and (when applicable) the user space.
The same happens with Windows. Windows Phone 8, Windows 8, Windows Server 2012, and the Xbox One all are Windows. They all run the Windows kernel, they all have the Microsoft CLR, and they all have (a lot of) the same APIs--especially at the driver layer. But while Windows 8, Windows Phone, and Xbox all run DirectX and have GUIs, Windows Server prefers to run headless. Windows Phone 8 and Windows both use WinRT, but Windows Phone 8's UI stack is slightly different from Windows 8 proper, mostly to facilitate power consumption and allow for the wildly different form factors. Xbox pretty clearly has a lot of Win 8 UI internally, but games mostly just code against DirectX. But of course these all count as Windows, because they all are Windows. Just sliced and diced in different directions, exactly like Linux does. And unlike Linux, there's actually a lot more in common that can legitimately be shared.
I don't think unifying all the OS here is really a big deal. It's been proven to work just fine with Linux (and actually, I'd argue, with OS X, but we can save that for another time).
The Linux kernel is used in a lot of different devices, this is true, but it's also a lot leaner than the Windows one. Although efforts have been made to pare down what Windows is, it's still got a footprint gigantically bigger than Linux. Where Windows can squeeze on to an ARM system, Linux runs on embedded systems that are even smaller.
The thing that's the most broken about Microsoft's strategy is it's not just the kernel being thrown everywhere, but the user interface. That's the most incoherent part of their strategy. Does the accounting department need to use the same UI as the Xbox? It's so confused.
OS X and iOS are similar, but not the same thing, although not as different as, say, Ubuntu is to Android. It's possible that the Ubuntu phone project might blur this distinction in time, it seems possible.
What I mean mostly is that just because Windows and it's user interface can run on all these different platforms doesn't mean it's an optimal approach. Then again, Microsoft has never shied away from monoculture. They're the Monsanto of software.
My Windows Phone runs faster than my Android Phone on less hardware, for one example. I also know my car runs on Windows on pretty barebones embedded hardware as well. The two OSes also have slightly dissimilar user interfaces.
Windows is not Windows is not Windows in exactly the same way Linux is not Linux is not Linux.
The Linux kernel is used in a lot of different devices,
this is true, but it's also a lot leaner than the Windows
one. Although efforts have been made to pare down what
Windows is, it's still got a footprint gigantically bigger
than Linux.
I think Windows Phone 8 shows that this is not meaningfully true anymore. There's more work to be done, but the kernel on those devices are quite minimal, happily running on underpowered ARM devices with minimal RAM, and still leaving plenty of room for apps.
So, the Windows kernel probably is pound-for-pound as lightweight as the Linux kernel. Whenever people talk about Windows they always drag the UI and such along, whereas with Linux they seem to merrily ignore all the chrome.
Any Windows kernel folks care to confirm/deny this?
I work at MSFT and while not involved with kernel stuff directly I interact with them from time to time. The sentiment among kernel people is they'd put the NT kernel up against Linux in efficiency any day of the week.
The challenge is that it's difficult to get just the NT kernel and minimal support libraries. There was an internal project called http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MinWin#cite_ref-zheng2007_10-0 Without watching the entire video, Wikipedia mentions something like a 25MB footprint for a usable NT kernel.
Windows installed OS features are a lot more a' la carte these days. It annoys me that there's not a ntsd.exe or telnet.exe on every box by default, but I suppose it's worth it for the greater goal. There's a lot of focus on Windows Server Core, Hyper-V, and Azure. Cloud is bringing everybody back to thinking about OS footprint again.
I think the Windows-sans-(stuff not everyone needs) approach is only going to become more normal.
I don't work on the kernel, but I'd note that you can very comfortably run Windows Server headless on 512 MB of RAM--just like you can with Linux. (MySQL will experience hellishly Pavlovian pain on either OS with that little RAM, though.)
What's the line you're drawing between an OS and a distribution? I certainly would have said that these various different Linux distributions you reference were different distributions of the same Operating System.
Which is the same thing with OS development at Microsoft. Microsoft builds one Operating System (Windows) and bundles it into different distributions (Xbox, Windows Mobile, Windows Server, etc).
In the old business model, you could have had kernel hackers throughout the company that didn't talk to each other. The Windows team would build an operating system and then other teams would adapt it - for example, Windows Server was part of Server and Tools Business, not the Windows division. It only makes sense to bring everybody under the same roof.
If they lose it they could always import some from the EU commission excess supplies. Seems that there is no global shortage for spineless inefficient bureaucracies.
They seem to be missing functions like "design" and "product", which is unfortunate. I'm sure they roll up to engineering and I bet they continue to garner little respect.
If you want to understand Microsoft, you could do a lot worse than reading http://hal2020.com/, by a former General Manager at Microsoft. I learn something from pretty much every blog post he writes.
For instance, in his most recent post he discusses how the lack of coordination between the divisions after the 2005 reorg can be viewed as a feature rather than a bug, but also something that now needs to be changed.
An artifact of a form of management known as 'Matrix Management'. Any given employee could have 2 or more managers that they report to. If you want to expose your engineers directly to politics and managerial power struggles there is no better way...
What look like complex failures in organizations are often rooted in simple causes. In Microsoft, it's stack-ranking and Enron-style (that is, visible in transfer packet) performance reviews.
When you have stack-ranking, you never get harmonious teams and "all-star" sub-organizations are out of the question. When performance reviews are part of the transfer process, people become largely immobile and teams become permanent camps and you get warring departments. Closed allocation, at that scale, is cultural toxic sludge in general.
Simple causes. Simple fixes. Wordy say-nothing emails that inject political complexity, when simple solutions are available, are really not helpful.
BTW, Wikipedians considered Microsoft's stack ranking notorious enough to provide the date they started doing it (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve#Microsoft): "Starting in 2006 Microsoft has used a Vitality Curve despite intense internal criticism." Which I've noted elsewhere is the year in which Bill Gates stopped his day to day roles at Microsoft.
I could talk about how Ballmer himself is a significant problem, but then again these "simple fixes" would surely require removing him from an position of direct power in the company.
Microsoft has been doing stack ranking long before 2006. I left in 2005'and attended stack rank meetings, where managers indirectly decide your review score before you even get the form from HR. it goes back to at least the late 90s, IIRC.
There was certainly mention of "up or out", and a bad review or two would bring about the PIP stick (which seems to be only legal CYA before the firing, not for any hopes of real improvement). And, frankly, it was a long time ago and I haven't gone to any effort to remember details. I will say that in general it was as screwy and demotivating then as it is described to be now.
It was based on a model proposed by Ballmer's hero Jack Welch. What Ballmer forgot is that Welch himself said the "trim the bottom 10%" model didn't work once a company got larger than a certain size.
What Ballmer forgot is that Welch himself said the "trim the bottom 10%" model didn't work once a company got larger than a certain size.
I'm not sure that size is the issue. I think that the percentage of deadwood a company has being static is the problem.
A typical 10,000-person company probably has enough deadwood to make a 10% cut safe: a mature company that's accrued enough slackers and incompetents can endure a cut of the obvious nonperformers and few will be upset about it. Even many of the nonperformers will agree, to some extent, that it's time. Besides, the company will have a cut anyway if it underperforms. But if you cut 10% every year, after two or three iterations you are cutting good people, and the cultural effects of that make the process not worth it.
This seems simplistic to me. Doesn't Valve, your favorite poster boy for open allocation, also stack rank? There seem to be several sub-organizations at Microsoft that are harmonious, at least to an outsider's view (e.g. Azure since Scott Guthrie's involvement). As I understand it there's not too much pressure to hit the stack ranking curve until you get up to the several-hundred-report levels.
Valve stack-ranking is for compensation only-- not a "fire the unluckiest X percent" system. That can still be damaging, if low rank results in permanent underclass status, but that's a human problem that I have no insight into as it pertains to Valve.
I don't know enough about Valve to know how it works, or even if the culture lives up to the press. So I'm not going to try to comment on that.
In general, though, stack-ranking is destructive even if no one gets fired. In companies that use it, it becomes impossible to transfer without a top-10% political success review (sorry, I mean "performance" review) history. But if you're doing that well politically, then you don't want to transfer because it entails rolling the dice again. The result is that people become pretty much immobile.
Closed allocation actually forces engineering ladders (with their attendant negatives) into existence because unsuccessful/persecuted people can't move and successful people won't move at all unless they can get a permanent credibility bump (promotion). But that leads to an arrangement where managers avoid promoting their best people because they know it might cause them to transfer.
Stack ranking seems, to me, to be an incredibly bad idea for Microsoft as a whole. Do you know if they are considering moving away from it?
I think Stack Ranking can work in some situations, like mechanical (ie. non-heuristic) work, but for Engineers? I've never understood why they even considered that it would work.
How do you ensure that performance is rewarded fairly and consistently across an organization with tens of thousands of engineers? I'm not wild about the concept of stack ranking but I don't see any alternatives that don't have serious drawbacks of their own.
Is that a goal? I'd rather own a company where the pay was unfair and inconsistent but it delivered on products and made money. I'd rather work for one, too.
It's not like Jack Welch's worst idea isn't a driver of politics and strategic[1] moves in the real world.
[1] as in, bad for the company but the most rational move for the employee, like attempting to make sure every person added to your team is worse than you.
How about evaluating each engineer's job performance (based on sane productivity and code quality metrics) without forcing them to a curve, where even if your whole team is high-performing, someone will get a bad review and be marked for firing just because it's required that someone gets a bad review?
Jack Welch-style rank-and-yank is cruel and wildly inappropriate for software developers (or any human workers, I'd argue). It encourages political blame-shifting/scapegoating games that distract from the actual work. Just having the practice is also an implicit acknowledgement that your hiring process blows.
Performance curves are just a demented and sadistic way to manage people. They're also the epitome of b-school cargo culting.
The problem with this is that it enables weak-willed managers to claim that everyone on their team is great, serving as a kind of grade inflation that makes true high-performers seem less impressive. As I understand it, the curve is only enforced at something like the VP level, so it's not like a team of 10 great engineers is going to be forced to have 2 people scored as underperforming. Are there 200-person groups at Microsoft where everyone's better than average?
I'm not convinced that "weak-willed managers claiming that everyone on their team is great" is an actual problem.
And what if they really are all doing great, on a given team? Then no sense in punishing someone just because you have to punish someone.
And if someone is underperforming? Their direct manager's job is to take care of it. If the manager isn't even doing their job of managing people, a grading curve isn't going to fix that.
Also, if it's only enforced at a higher level of hierarchy, then what happens is that it's the junior members of underperforming departments that get the shaft. They probably had the least to do with the team's underperformance, but they also have the least power and therefore the least ability to dodge blame. Shit rolls downhill.
Trust your managers and allow people to move freely internally? If a manager is too stingy their people will move away from them; if a manager is paying a lot either they'll get results that justify it or they won't, and in the latter case they correct things or you fire them.
Interesting that the guy that said, "Developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers", didn't mention where the developer tools end up in the re-org...
It's easy to miss specific units when they enumerated so many of the organizations of such a large company. We haven't really moved:
> Cloud and Enterprise Engineering Group. Satya Nadella will lead development of our back-end technologies like datacenter, database and our specific technologies for enterprise IT scenarios and development tools...
A new CEO was hired to replace an outgoing CEO. The outgoing CEO met with the incoming CEO for an exit interview. During the discussion, the departing CEO stated he had placed 3 very important letters in his drawer just as his predecessor had done for him. He explained that the new CEO would find opening the letters in order most useful when a serious event took place. He also stated the letters left for him had really helped him over his tenure.
Several months passed before a major event came up. The new CEO now remembered the letters and noticed they were numbered 1, 2, and 3. The former CEO had instructed they be opened in order for maximal benefit. The new CEO opened letter #1 and the paper inside had the words “blame it on your predecessor.” The new CEO did as the letter stated and amazingly he was able to avert serious problems and keep his job.
Several months passed before the next serious event took place. This one was growing in magnitude and things were starting to get ugly at the company. There were even calls for the CEO to step down. In desperation, the CEO opened the drawer and pulled out letter #2. With great fear he, opened it carefully to read the word “reorganize.” He followed the instructions and just as before he was saved. The whole company quieted down and went back to business as usual.
After about a year, a third serious event took place and it was much worse than the rest. The CEO knew how to get out of the mess because he had a third letter left to open. With a smile he reached for the letter #3 and opened it to read “write 3 letters.”
I actually did this when I was leaving as the only division systems admin, half-jokingly since my replacement was a friend. Except in the case where I read it was "Blame your predecessor", "Blame the old technology", "Write 3 Letters."
If their new tack is as sharp and focused as that memo, Microsoft is in trouble.
"We will be all things to all people by getting rid of anything that is not a huge profit center. Those profit centers will be organized in appropriate silos. Those silos will assign people to product committees for collaboration with other silos on individual products. Each committee will have a leader (Champion) who reports to the layer just below me. This new, tighter, organization will make us leaner and more nimble."
Sounds -- as good as it could for a large organization I guess but there is a lot of contradiction. Greater reach through consolidation? Nimble action through layers of management? We are all One except for these few special cases? Build on our character as Microsoft but emulate Apple? One Strategy through rigidly defined feifdoms with their own Champions battling for influence?
I also love their list of 'high-value activities' "high-value activities — serious fun, meetings, tasks, research, information assurance and IT/Dev workloads" Does anyone know what they mean by this?
And all of this couched in such thick Business-Speak that 10 different people will come away with 10 different messages.
Mr. Ballmer. For the love of all of the brilliant people you employ, step down. It's time.
I honestly think he doesn't realize that he's the problem and people around him won't tell him the truth. Ballmer is a very intimidating guy both in physical size and attitude and is always ready to be combative. This make it very difficult to have a open dialog with him.
Him remaining still as the CEO is not his fault its the boards fault they should have made moves to genteelly replace him a long time ago.
>"Ballmer is a very intimidating guy both in physical size and attitude and is always ready to be combative."
As larger than average person I'm fascinated/frustrated by the way physical presence affects people.
Most troublesome for me have been people who apparently feel intimidated and project it back as something intentional, as I'm trying to intimidate them or have intimidated others into agreement with me.
>Most troublesome for me have been people who apparently feel intimidated and project it back as something intentional, as I'm trying to intimidate them
I am 6'7" tall and weigh 220 pounds. I've also been in IT for about 20 years in a corporate setting. Are you bigger than I am? I ask because I have never had anyone say that I intimidated them nor have I heard of anyone telling me that someone else is intimidated by me. I'm curious as to whether people are intimidated and just aren't telling me.
I'm not as tall as you, just 6'2" but I take the precaution of sitting when talking seriously to people (mostly students, I'm a teacher, I just carry a chair round the classroom). The result is less challenging behaviour from students (UK)
I'm your height, 60+ pounds heavier and no stranger to the gym. I've been in IT for going on 16 years.
I've had many people admit they were initially intimidated after we've gotten to know each other - women a bit more than men. I've had several problems arise from superficial assumptions/accusations by people who'd never fully interacted with me.
About your situation, there are a couple things I think can help/hurt:
* Build. I can remember being 220. I'm definitely perceived differently now, more "big" than "tall" or "slim" previously.
* I'm pretty quiet. I get the impression that people assume negatives before positives when they can't read a person.
* Jobs. I've done a lot of work in the public sector where things always seem to be contentious. In a place with less infighting and political maneuvering I'd hope for less assumption and undermining as well.
This is a good point, and it goes the opposite way too.
I'm a smaller than average guy (5 foot 4) and people that don't know me are often started when I'm vocal and assertive in meetings. I'm a working professional with opinions just like anyone else, and just because I'm short doesn't mean I don't want them heard.
I don't know if intimidated is the right word, but I'm pretty average height - 5'11'', and I've personally observed over time that I feel much more insecure around bigger people. I'm not sure how common it is but it's something I've become consciously aware of and try to correct myself on. But even being aware of it, it's really hard to ignore. For example, I find I gain a lot of self-confidence when I sit at a conference table talking to someone, putting us on "equal" footing. But if standing where I'm looking up at someone I suddenly feel like a small boy talking out of place to a grown-up. It's silly but it's an overwhelmingly noticeable sensation that drives me crazy.
I suspect it could have evolved out of having a physically intimidating older brother growing up (I grew out of a lot of insecurities when I became taller than he was, but maybe not all).
Ballmer is very good in one thing and it is: remove the main rivals from inside microsoft. He was doing this since years to try to put himself in a secure position with no alternatives for the Board of Directors.
I think he will never step down. The only solution would be a strong pressure from all the main actionists of microsoft, but it seems they are all sleeping.
"Going forward, our strategy will focus on creating a family of devices and services for individuals and businesses that empower people around the globe at home, at work and on the go, for the activities they value most."
I really was intrigued by comparing this vision to the previous vision of putting a computer in every home...
The previous was while completely open ended at least on some level measurable. The current is basically saying, we will make stuff to help customers do whatever wherever.
Agreed. And across business and personal use. "We will be all things to all people." If I'm a Microsoft employee there is not much here for me to get behind.
My fellow Americans. As a young boy, I dreamed of being a baseball, but tonight I say, we must move forward, not backward, upward not forward, and always twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom.
"Terry Myerson will lead this group, and it will span all our OS work for console..."
Interesting, because I think XBox One (from One Microsoft) is a bit of a Hail Mary. It's not clear to me that the "next console" is going to be that big a deal. (My secret hope is that Apple has a really juicy Apple TV up its sleeve with iOS dev support, etc., and is just waiting to announce it when it will do the most good / damage.)
How, exactly, does this top-level re-organization change what happens on the ground, where products are built? I fail to see what an organizational change does here that improves product creativity and collaboration across teams.
I can't imagine their chief problem was "if only our superiors had different reporting structures, then we could get along with ABC team from 123 group."
It wasn't immediately clear in Ballmer's statement, but is the Office division moving under the Cloud services group? It's interesting that they are putting their money-making operations (Office + Server&Tools) under Cloud with Satya Nadella instead of moving it over to Application Services under Qi Lu. Which, given the name, you would think Office would move under Applications.
The big push with Office is in Office 365 now, the desktop and server products of the Office family (Office, Exchange, Lync, Project Server, Sharepoint) are all direct results of the direction MS is headed with cloud services. Of course I don't see MS killing their on-premises products, but the change makes sense to me.
All the critical decisions have already been made: Microsoft branded hardware, running Windows, everywhere. No courier. Bring XBOX solidly into the Windows fold. It's all Windows.
Why reorg? Who would accept the job of telling Ballmer that, when Nokia goes under, the "devices" part of that story is a fable? On top of that, the press release was apparently written by a student of Vogon poetry.
And why on Earth would you want to bring your entertainment console closer to a brand that says "stuff I use at work because my boss says I have to" to everyone who sees it? That's not marketing, it's the antithesis of marketing. Anti-marketing.
> Mark Penn... will lead with Tami the newly centralized advertising and media functions
Seems like a rhetorical question, but it actually has an answer: Game console unit volume, even two generations ago when it was still growing, is less than 5% of mobile handset unit volume.
That said, walking past the Microsoft store at the Pru last night, the only display drawing a crowd was the Kinect darts game.
Seems like a rhetorical question, but it actually has an answer: Game console unit volume, even two generations ago when it was still growing, is less than 5% of mobile handset unit volume.
That said, walking past the Microsoft store at the Pru last night, the only display drawing a crowd was the Kinect darts game.
I'm not sure why people bring up axing the courier as a negative thing. It was always a niche concept idea than a product that could survive in the market.
Hmmm, well, this seems to be some marvelous buzzword bingo / word salad. It's looking more and more like MS is well and truly clueless. They don't understand the market. They don't understand their strengths. They definitely don't understand their weaknesses. And Ballmer isn't going to leave until he has a heart attack or maybe two.
Edit: fine, I'll add some useful details. What are Microsoft's actual biggest advantages/disadvantages, how should they embrace the market? Advantages: the PC platform is still enormously powerful, and open, and they've still got huge ins with corporate computing. They could own the market on business oriented tablet form-factor computing but they don't have the vision. Disadvantages: stack ranking is poisonous to morale and retaining talent, the company is too monolithic (they used to be monolithic in multiple silos, now they're becoming monolithic in one giant silo, that's not better), and they still struggle with agility. The market? Android is the MS of the mobile generation, is it really so crazy to imagine that MS becoming the MS in mobile as well could be a route to success for them? And that's just what I could type in about 2 minutes.
the company is too monolithic (they used to be monolithic in multiple silos, now they're becoming monolithic in one giant silo, that's not better)
Exactly, they are too big, and this reorg is going to make that worse, not better. I think they would have been better off actually spinning off their business units into separate companies, each with a clear product category and a clear organizational mission.
One of the things that Surface, Xbox One, and Windows Phone 7/8 has shown is that MS is scared but not hungry. They're still arrogant. Much more so than if they were a bunch of separate companies rather than one huge empire.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 281 ms ] threadTip your waiter/waitresses, try the lamb chops.
For me the TL:DR after struggling to read it was - full steam ahead to the biggest walled garden on earth. We are still the Borg. Someone correct me if I am wrong.
That is full steam ahead to appleland for me. And it will be closed and walled future. WP8 and W8 demonstrated the MS attitude good enough.
The borg came from the one goal, one vision, one direction etc.
This is not just directed at you, it seems to be a common thing with criticism of Microsoft - so over the top that rational discussion of what they are doing right and wrong gets thrown out the window.
Ok, English is not my first language, and that "to" seems a bit ambiguous to me... But in context that was pretty clearly a move toward a walled garden, not a move done by a walled garden.
All parts of the company will share and contribute to the success of core offerings, like Windows, Windows Phone, Xbox, Surface, Office 365 and our EA offer, Bing, Skype, Dynamics, Azure and our servers. All parts of the company will contribute to activating high-value experiences for our customers.
High value experience is euphemism for gatekeeper from what I have seen.
Between the anti-open Google+/Play/Hangouts universe and the anti-open iOS iGarden, I'm surprised that it has taken Microsoft this long to catch up to their anti-open competitors.
They made errors on every step of the game - allowed carrirs to have saying on the devices, abandoned all lessons learned from PCs and building ecosystems and threw an inferior iOS me too (the UI was better though, the ideology the same)
No offense, but calling it a "me too" iOS competitor is about as nuanced as calling Android a "me too" iOS competitor -- technically, Android is a "me too" product, just more mature, but it don't serve any useful end to point that out.
Android have the "dominant market share" thing going on about it.
MS had very short window to make a dent in the smartphone war but because of "reasons" never really got together to create a product that could be the smartphone win 3.11/98
Unfortunately the ecosystem never really picked up. I'm already looking to switch back to Android because I can't use WP with devices like my Pebble, among other things.
It's not surprising coming from the salesman/CEO who thinks that a loud voice and throwing chairs makes sense. While CEO's with real vision innovate, Ballmer thinks rearranging the furniture is the answer.
Shareholders want reasoning behind such large changes. It's really nothing more than describing where MSoft has been and what its strengths are
We will do this by leveraging our strengths. We have powered devices for many years through Windows PCs and Xbox. We have delivered high-value experiences through Office and other apps. And, we have enabled enterprise value through products like Windows Server and Exchange. The form of delivery shifts to a broader set of devices and services versus packaged software. The frontier of high-value scenarios we enable will march outward, but we have strengths and proven capabilities on which we will draw.
and what it recognizes as it's weaknesses
It is also clear to me and our leadership that we must do an extraordinary job to succeed in this modern world. We have delivered many great products and had much success in market, but we all want more. That means better execution from product conceptualization and innovation right through to marketing and sales. It also means operational excellence in cloud services, datacenter operations, and manufacturing and supply chain that are essential in a devices and services world. To advance our strategy and execute more quickly, more efficiently, and with greater excellence we need to transform how we organize, how we plan and how we work.
It then proposes the solution: the reorg. It gives benefits as to what it sees are possible with such a realignment.
Vagueness is related to the wide-reaching scope of the business, and high-level, long-term goals that they don't want to give metrics for, because they'll be held to them. It's also the description of the vision people see in the future when they think of MSoft (and in turn, how valuable shares will be).
I get that there's a lot of negative feelings towards corporations around the startup scene, but if they just said "Hey guys, we're completely restructuring so our teams can focus more", people (people important to Microsoft, i.e. shareholders) would want to know why the decision was made, how they see it playing out, when it will happen, and what the potential impacts could be in the future.
TL; DR: It's a press release, not a white paper.
This is a huge shift for MS.
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.
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.
[1] Can't find the citation right now... Perhaps someone can provide the link in a reply.
Apple's recognized this and decided to pretty much abandon enterprise. Linux has fragmented into different distributions (server, desktop, mobile) each with a different focus.
Microsoft, instead, has doubled down. They all even look the same.
Look at Linux first. Note that it happily goes from cell phones to supercomputers. The reason that works is because "Linux" doesn't actually that much. Really, it means the kernel and (usually) the GNU userland. (Though note that Android proves that you can swap out the entire userland and still get something that people will call Linux.) Supercomputers don't have GUIs. Desktops run X or Wayland or Mir or whatever Ubuntu is doing these days, or sometimes just Chrome. Mobiles tend to run Android, although there's also Maemo and others. Meanwhile, a supercomputer would likely have no UI at all. In all cases, when we say these devices all "run Linux", we're really referring to the driver model, the kernel, and (when applicable) the user space.
The same happens with Windows. Windows Phone 8, Windows 8, Windows Server 2012, and the Xbox One all are Windows. They all run the Windows kernel, they all have the Microsoft CLR, and they all have (a lot of) the same APIs--especially at the driver layer. But while Windows 8, Windows Phone, and Xbox all run DirectX and have GUIs, Windows Server prefers to run headless. Windows Phone 8 and Windows both use WinRT, but Windows Phone 8's UI stack is slightly different from Windows 8 proper, mostly to facilitate power consumption and allow for the wildly different form factors. Xbox pretty clearly has a lot of Win 8 UI internally, but games mostly just code against DirectX. But of course these all count as Windows, because they all are Windows. Just sliced and diced in different directions, exactly like Linux does. And unlike Linux, there's actually a lot more in common that can legitimately be shared.
I don't think unifying all the OS here is really a big deal. It's been proven to work just fine with Linux (and actually, I'd argue, with OS X, but we can save that for another time).
The thing that's the most broken about Microsoft's strategy is it's not just the kernel being thrown everywhere, but the user interface. That's the most incoherent part of their strategy. Does the accounting department need to use the same UI as the Xbox? It's so confused.
OS X and iOS are similar, but not the same thing, although not as different as, say, Ubuntu is to Android. It's possible that the Ubuntu phone project might blur this distinction in time, it seems possible.
What I mean mostly is that just because Windows and it's user interface can run on all these different platforms doesn't mean it's an optimal approach. Then again, Microsoft has never shied away from monoculture. They're the Monsanto of software.
Windows is not Windows is not Windows in exactly the same way Linux is not Linux is not Linux.
Any Windows kernel folks care to confirm/deny this?
The challenge is that it's difficult to get just the NT kernel and minimal support libraries. There was an internal project called http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MinWin#cite_ref-zheng2007_10-0 Without watching the entire video, Wikipedia mentions something like a 25MB footprint for a usable NT kernel.
Windows installed OS features are a lot more a' la carte these days. It annoys me that there's not a ntsd.exe or telnet.exe on every box by default, but I suppose it's worth it for the greater goal. There's a lot of focus on Windows Server Core, Hyper-V, and Azure. Cloud is bringing everybody back to thinking about OS footprint again.
I think the Windows-sans-(stuff not everyone needs) approach is only going to become more normal.
Which is the same thing with OS development at Microsoft. Microsoft builds one Operating System (Windows) and bundles it into different distributions (Xbox, Windows Mobile, Windows Server, etc).
In the old business model, you could have had kernel hackers throughout the company that didn't talk to each other. The Windows team would build an operating system and then other teams would adapt it - for example, Windows Server was part of Server and Tools Business, not the Windows division. It only makes sense to bring everybody under the same roof.
For instance, in his most recent post he discusses how the lack of coordination between the divisions after the 2005 reorg can be viewed as a feature rather than a bug, but also something that now needs to be changed.
When you have stack-ranking, you never get harmonious teams and "all-star" sub-organizations are out of the question. When performance reviews are part of the transfer process, people become largely immobile and teams become permanent camps and you get warring departments. Closed allocation, at that scale, is cultural toxic sludge in general.
Simple causes. Simple fixes. Wordy say-nothing emails that inject political complexity, when simple solutions are available, are really not helpful.
I could talk about how Ballmer himself is a significant problem, but then again these "simple fixes" would surely require removing him from an position of direct power in the company.
It was based on a model proposed by Ballmer's hero Jack Welch. What Ballmer forgot is that Welch himself said the "trim the bottom 10%" model didn't work once a company got larger than a certain size.
The only detail I was interested in was the timing; the Wikipedia citation of 2006, which I will stop using, did strike me a bit recent.
I'm not sure that size is the issue. I think that the percentage of deadwood a company has being static is the problem.
A typical 10,000-person company probably has enough deadwood to make a 10% cut safe: a mature company that's accrued enough slackers and incompetents can endure a cut of the obvious nonperformers and few will be upset about it. Even many of the nonperformers will agree, to some extent, that it's time. Besides, the company will have a cut anyway if it underperforms. But if you cut 10% every year, after two or three iterations you are cutting good people, and the cultural effects of that make the process not worth it.
I don't know enough about Valve to know how it works, or even if the culture lives up to the press. So I'm not going to try to comment on that.
In general, though, stack-ranking is destructive even if no one gets fired. In companies that use it, it becomes impossible to transfer without a top-10% political success review (sorry, I mean "performance" review) history. But if you're doing that well politically, then you don't want to transfer because it entails rolling the dice again. The result is that people become pretty much immobile.
Closed allocation actually forces engineering ladders (with their attendant negatives) into existence because unsuccessful/persecuted people can't move and successful people won't move at all unless they can get a permanent credibility bump (promotion). But that leads to an arrangement where managers avoid promoting their best people because they know it might cause them to transfer.
I think Stack Ranking can work in some situations, like mechanical (ie. non-heuristic) work, but for Engineers? I've never understood why they even considered that it would work.
It's not like Jack Welch's worst idea isn't a driver of politics and strategic[1] moves in the real world.
[1] as in, bad for the company but the most rational move for the employee, like attempting to make sure every person added to your team is worse than you.
Jack Welch-style rank-and-yank is cruel and wildly inappropriate for software developers (or any human workers, I'd argue). It encourages political blame-shifting/scapegoating games that distract from the actual work. Just having the practice is also an implicit acknowledgement that your hiring process blows.
Performance curves are just a demented and sadistic way to manage people. They're also the epitome of b-school cargo culting.
And what if they really are all doing great, on a given team? Then no sense in punishing someone just because you have to punish someone.
And if someone is underperforming? Their direct manager's job is to take care of it. If the manager isn't even doing their job of managing people, a grading curve isn't going to fix that.
Also, if it's only enforced at a higher level of hierarchy, then what happens is that it's the junior members of underperforming departments that get the shaft. They probably had the least to do with the team's underperformance, but they also have the least power and therefore the least ability to dodge blame. Shit rolls downhill.
> Cloud and Enterprise Engineering Group. Satya Nadella will lead development of our back-end technologies like datacenter, database and our specific technologies for enterprise IT scenarios and development tools...
(Emphasis mine)
A new CEO was hired to replace an outgoing CEO. The outgoing CEO met with the incoming CEO for an exit interview. During the discussion, the departing CEO stated he had placed 3 very important letters in his drawer just as his predecessor had done for him. He explained that the new CEO would find opening the letters in order most useful when a serious event took place. He also stated the letters left for him had really helped him over his tenure.
Several months passed before a major event came up. The new CEO now remembered the letters and noticed they were numbered 1, 2, and 3. The former CEO had instructed they be opened in order for maximal benefit. The new CEO opened letter #1 and the paper inside had the words “blame it on your predecessor.” The new CEO did as the letter stated and amazingly he was able to avert serious problems and keep his job.
Several months passed before the next serious event took place. This one was growing in magnitude and things were starting to get ugly at the company. There were even calls for the CEO to step down. In desperation, the CEO opened the drawer and pulled out letter #2. With great fear he, opened it carefully to read the word “reorganize.” He followed the instructions and just as before he was saved. The whole company quieted down and went back to business as usual.
After about a year, a third serious event took place and it was much worse than the rest. The CEO knew how to get out of the mess because he had a third letter left to open. With a smile he reached for the letter #3 and opened it to read “write 3 letters.”
http://www.mondaynote.com/2010/05/30/ballmer-just-opened-the...
http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1995-11-01/
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/05/25/735217/-Khrushchev-...
The anecdote was cited in the 2000 film Traffic.
"We will be all things to all people by getting rid of anything that is not a huge profit center. Those profit centers will be organized in appropriate silos. Those silos will assign people to product committees for collaboration with other silos on individual products. Each committee will have a leader (Champion) who reports to the layer just below me. This new, tighter, organization will make us leaner and more nimble."
Sounds -- as good as it could for a large organization I guess but there is a lot of contradiction. Greater reach through consolidation? Nimble action through layers of management? We are all One except for these few special cases? Build on our character as Microsoft but emulate Apple? One Strategy through rigidly defined feifdoms with their own Champions battling for influence?
I also love their list of 'high-value activities' "high-value activities — serious fun, meetings, tasks, research, information assurance and IT/Dev workloads" Does anyone know what they mean by this?
And all of this couched in such thick Business-Speak that 10 different people will come away with 10 different messages.
Mr. Ballmer. For the love of all of the brilliant people you employ, step down. It's time.
Him remaining still as the CEO is not his fault its the boards fault they should have made moves to genteelly replace him a long time ago.
As larger than average person I'm fascinated/frustrated by the way physical presence affects people.
Most troublesome for me have been people who apparently feel intimidated and project it back as something intentional, as I'm trying to intimidate them or have intimidated others into agreement with me.
I am 6'7" tall and weigh 220 pounds. I've also been in IT for about 20 years in a corporate setting. Are you bigger than I am? I ask because I have never had anyone say that I intimidated them nor have I heard of anyone telling me that someone else is intimidated by me. I'm curious as to whether people are intimidated and just aren't telling me.
I'm your height, 60+ pounds heavier and no stranger to the gym. I've been in IT for going on 16 years.
I've had many people admit they were initially intimidated after we've gotten to know each other - women a bit more than men. I've had several problems arise from superficial assumptions/accusations by people who'd never fully interacted with me.
About your situation, there are a couple things I think can help/hurt:
* Build. I can remember being 220. I'm definitely perceived differently now, more "big" than "tall" or "slim" previously.
* I'm pretty quiet. I get the impression that people assume negatives before positives when they can't read a person.
* Jobs. I've done a lot of work in the public sector where things always seem to be contentious. In a place with less infighting and political maneuvering I'd hope for less assumption and undermining as well.
I'm a smaller than average guy (5 foot 4) and people that don't know me are often started when I'm vocal and assertive in meetings. I'm a working professional with opinions just like anyone else, and just because I'm short doesn't mean I don't want them heard.
I suspect it could have evolved out of having a physically intimidating older brother growing up (I grew out of a lot of insecurities when I became taller than he was, but maybe not all).
I think he will never step down. The only solution would be a strong pressure from all the main actionists of microsoft, but it seems they are all sleeping.
"Going forward, our strategy will focus on creating a family of devices and services for individuals and businesses that empower people around the globe at home, at work and on the go, for the activities they value most."
The previous was while completely open ended at least on some level measurable. The current is basically saying, we will make stuff to help customers do whatever wherever.
What a sentence!
OK for JFK, LBJ, Obama et al
"Terry Myerson will lead this group, and it will span all our OS work for console..."
Interesting, because I think XBox One (from One Microsoft) is a bit of a Hail Mary. It's not clear to me that the "next console" is going to be that big a deal. (My secret hope is that Apple has a really juicy Apple TV up its sleeve with iOS dev support, etc., and is just waiting to announce it when it will do the most good / damage.)
I can't imagine their chief problem was "if only our superiors had different reporting structures, then we could get along with ABC team from 123 group."
In dysfunctional organizations people are sometimes not allowed to talk across org silos. It's horrific.
Okay, so still fucking broken. Moving along.
Why reorg? Who would accept the job of telling Ballmer that, when Nokia goes under, the "devices" part of that story is a fable? On top of that, the press release was apparently written by a student of Vogon poetry.
> Mark Penn... will lead with Tami the newly centralized advertising and media functions
Oh. Well that explains that, then.
That said, walking past the Microsoft store at the Pru last night, the only display drawing a crowd was the Kinect darts game.
That said, walking past the Microsoft store at the Pru last night, the only display drawing a crowd was the Kinect darts game.
Edit: fine, I'll add some useful details. What are Microsoft's actual biggest advantages/disadvantages, how should they embrace the market? Advantages: the PC platform is still enormously powerful, and open, and they've still got huge ins with corporate computing. They could own the market on business oriented tablet form-factor computing but they don't have the vision. Disadvantages: stack ranking is poisonous to morale and retaining talent, the company is too monolithic (they used to be monolithic in multiple silos, now they're becoming monolithic in one giant silo, that's not better), and they still struggle with agility. The market? Android is the MS of the mobile generation, is it really so crazy to imagine that MS becoming the MS in mobile as well could be a route to success for them? And that's just what I could type in about 2 minutes.
Exactly, they are too big, and this reorg is going to make that worse, not better. I think they would have been better off actually spinning off their business units into separate companies, each with a clear product category and a clear organizational mission.