Exit One Kevin Johnson
So this email comes in from Ballmer this afternoon and, after appreciating Mr. Ballmer's picture thanks to ShowSenderPhoto, I'm scanning through it, "Yep, yep, sounds like a bunch of the stuff covered this morning at the Town H-what-the-hell-Kevin Johnson is leaving?"
That was a surprise.
A... pleasant surprise.
- Microsoft exec who led Yahoo buyout team to leave Financial News - Yahoo! Finance
- Tech Trader Daily - Barron’s Online Microsoft Kevin Johnson Out, Joining Juniper; Splitting Platforms and Services Unit Into Two Groups
- Mr. Bishop: Full text Ballmer on Microsoft strategy, Johnson exit and Microsoft platforms chief Johnson is leaving
- Ms. Foley: Microsoft splits its Platforms & Services unit in two All about Microsoft ZDNet.com
I'm really surprised. There was Mr. Johnson up on stage this morning during the Town Hall causing me to roll my eyes with his fake enthusiasm and now he's leaving Dodge. On the horse he rode in on 16 years back. I know he did a lot to pick up the pieces after the Vista-debacle and is probably due a good amount of praise for letting Win7 align itself to be on the winning trajectory, but I just never bonded with Mr. Johnson's leadership. And some of the projects he's interested in and driving just leave me cold (e.g., the upcoming MSN UI revamp. It puts the F in WTF).
Is he taking the opportunity to be CEO of Juniper? Is he the fall guy for Yahoo! being such a bumbling mess? Is his departure meant to make way for a big acquisition / merger?
As we consider the long race to succeed Ballmer, I was certainly worried that Mr. Johnson was at the top of the stack rank. No reason to worry anymore! And three of my favorite technical leaders, Mr. Sinofsky, Mr. DeVaan, and Mr. Veghte, all move up a notch. Hey, one less layer in the company. Throw all three of them in the running, eh?
If this had only happened before Ms. Foley's chat in Redmond about Microsoft's future: Audio Mary Jo Foley on 'Microsoft 2.0'.
Anyway, it's one hell of a way to kick off our Financial Analysts Meeting (psst, here's a hint: surprises? Analysts no like). Any interesting takes on the departure, and the future hire that's TBD? First comment I've seen:
Wow, I just heard that Kevin Johnson resigned. So much for trying to rid the product group of the cancer left by Allchin! This is not a good day for future quarterly results....
(Updated: fixed rather embarrassingly wrong honorific - sorry!)
243 comments:
«Oldest ‹Older 201 – 243 of 243>"Anyone successfully fight to have a patent amended? Any HR implications for those filing on your ideas?"
Yes, if you can back it up, write to the USPTO. You may lose your job over it, depending on whether the company. The company is required by law to credit the inventor. It is an age old exchange where the inventor gets almost nothing and his name on a patent and the company gets the assignment of the patent.
>"Umm... how familiar are you with the baser aspects of human nature?"
So that's ok? While many people work on products that get patented, there is usually only one or two inventors. A company that allows patent theft to happen deserves to be sued out of business.
Note to HR. While you are at the process of vetting patents, you might consider reviewing all the proof of background that will most likely surface a few scoundrels. Things that are rampant in the US are: identity theft, aka, modifying and using a stolen degree copy and and stolen work samples (is that recruiter that interviewed you really a recruiter?) through high end placement teams that are paid handsomely to insert a foreign worker into a position. You will probably know them by how useless they are. This is not wasp America any more.
>By your argument no one ever invented anything.
Not the OP here, but modifying a good idea does not a patent make. It is a copy modification process used to get around the patents of others. Perhaps the reason software patents are so worthless.
But the grammar checker was not a Microsoft idea. It started with thesaurus and moved out from there, was a part of Windows 3.1 and was built by another company for Microsoft.
A question about the discussion of patents. Who own a patent at MSFT? I mean, if i should work at MSFT (i don't) and file a patent, does it belong to me or MSFT? If i should leave MSFT later on, can i use the patent i filed at MSFT in my own business? Is this different from case to case?
>Who own a patent at MSFT?
You are either young or have not worked for any corporations. Almost all corps require patent assignments to the company in lieu of employment. You get your name on a patent and your salary and they get ownership of the patent.
It has to be that way, as a corporation exists to make money, and believe it or not, a patent for a corporation is usually the result of being supported by technologies in the company that you might not have known had you not worked for them. And patents are part of the valuation of a company.
Some companies make special circumstances for special designers, like royalties for example, but it is pretty unusual and only happens when a company wants an idea you already own through a patent you applied for and received before they hire you.
A question about the discussion of patents. Who own a patent at MSFT? I mean, if i should work at MSFT (i don't) and file a patent, does it belong to me or MSFT?
Well this is not specific to Microsoft. In the current environment, when you work at a high tech company you are renting your brain to the company. That is any idea that arose in your head while employed by the a company belongs to the company. It does not matter if it or not if the idea is relevenat to the company business. Of course to the extent provable in a court :)
Spell checking wasn't, grammar checking was. Did you notice that there's not a single other word processor out there that has it?
Grammar checking wasnt MSR, it was first created by thesaurus and others.
Also: OpenOffice 3 has a grammar checking API and multiple implementations, see for example http://www.languagetool.org/
>"It does not matter if it or not if the idea is relevenat to the company business."
That is nonsense. A company does not have rights to what your `brain' does when they hire you. You must first sign a patent assignment form when you are hired. You have the right to line trough any clauses which claim unrelated inventions.
They can chose to not hire you or you can choose not to work for them if they insist on patent ownership of non related technology. The bottom line is how valuable are you to the company hiring you? You might want to negotiate a higher salary, a bonus or a royalty for such `unrelated product rights'.
The idiot who wrote that you are renting your brain must be an hr or legal whore for some corporation. The truth is that if such were the case, you might as well kiss the economy goodbye, because people almost always invent new products and companies while working for other companies. All invention and startups would cease to exist if that were the case.
>That is any idea that arose in your head while employed by the a company belongs to the company.
You can't be serious. Lets see the case history of your bogus claim. Imagine you apply for a job with a corporation that was purchased by a conglomerate. The corporation you would be working for makes can openers and your job is to design new can openers. But on the other side of the world, the parent corporation also makes jet engines. If what you said were true, the parent corporation would own any idea you came up with for some kind of jet engine related component which is unrelated to your job and your responsibility.
All you would have to do is prove that you never had anything to do with the jet engine corporation owned by the conglomerate, that you had never been there and that you never met any of its employees. No judge in his right mind would side with the company, for the same reason that in California it is illegal to force non compete agreements on employees.
On the other hand, if a software engineer writes code for on line services at Microsoft, and then starts a company that uses the same online code to help him start a competitive company, Microsoft could sue the employee. Likewise, if the same employee wrote completely different online code `after' he left Microsoft, it might take longer to prove the case, but the software engineer could legally do that too. I think slavery has already been abolished and companies do not own a person,s brain or ideas after departing the company, no matter what the attorney says--these are fundamental rights of being an American citizen. Where it gets sticky is when the person starts competing with his previous company with almost exactly the same thing he was doing in house. That is the only area where legal issues come seriously into play.
Which is why the MSDN folks need to transform the documentation into a moderated Wiki initially open to MVPs, UA, product groups and other credible folks.
How else to get meaningful how-to, scenario, code snippet, and in-the-trenches content on a regular basis?
Next time you're using MSDN, try clicking the "Add Content" button above the article. (More info here.)
Any review numbers in?
Has anyone reported their review scores / raise / bonus figures for FY08 yet?
I've heard rumors of larger bonuses being granted, compared to the last few years..
Any review numbers in?
L61(1 year in level):
Achieved/70%
3.0% merit
9.0% bonus
115% stock
You can't be serious. Lets see the case history of your bogus claim.
I dont know if the original person responded, but the closest such case to the brain renting theory is the following link. Of course it all depends on the employment contract one signs :)
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E0DE2D81739F937A25755C0A960958260
>"Of course it all depends on the employment contract one signs :)"
Anyone who has worked in the Eastern or Southern US who is from the west coast has experienced the almost anal cultural high strangeness there. Some of the things people get arrested for boggle the imagination.
The guy served a prison sentence for his own invention? But Governor Lawton Chiles has offered clemency. If the guy ends up owning the three patents he received after legal disposition, I think it will say a lot about the bizarre thinking of some companies about their actual rights to inventions of individuals.
Should Willie Warnock, founder of Adobe systems go to prison for using his knowledge of fonts when he created Adobe systems? After all, he worked for Xerox Parc just before he started Adobe. The truth is that in the end, a mind is a private thing not owned by anyone except the individual. The whole area of law relating to individual vs corporate rights has not even scratched the surface yet.
The motto here is keep a detailed and thorough record of your work so you can prove what is true and what is not.
As a side note, Microsoft is in the position it is in in regards to significant and deeply important patents as a corporation probably because those people who could offer the company that kind of inventive legacy won't have anything to do with Microsoft. It seems to me the company needs to come up with a significant cultural and legal reversal if it wants to compete with the likes of Apple or Google.
>but the closest such case to the brain renting theory is the following link.
I love that example. The advertising byline for the University of South Florida: "Come to USF, where we have wonderful Florida weather and best of all, we regularly imprison our students for actually using what they learn."
Regarding the patent case that someone posted a NYTimes link for. Here is some more information:
A transcript from NPR about the case a while after the NYT article:
http://www.cptech.org/ip/npr.txt
A broader article from The Atlantic that discusses Universities, corporations and patents - "The Kept University":
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2000/03/press.htm
Mini -
How about a new topic on comparing review scores / bonus' ?
re >"How about a new topic on comparing review scores / bonus' ?"
Just a thought, what could be more important than discussing the process of how Microsoft develops new products, the politics, the reasons in this semi-post Gates era for why products get developed, what causes things to happen the way they do, how you reward creative and innovative people or better yet, how you don't reward them.
Good to see KY has left.... he was another fake exec . pretending like he gets it.
Sorry folks - this ship, is sinking hearing the #s on Vista SALES ----but What about vista DEPLOYED - just aint that many in the enterpise. Way too painful, the perception has surpassed the reality, and beyond repair.
the world is waiting for windows 7
and if we dont get it right, expect to see the falling of another empire on the NY best sellers list by 2011.
>"If the guy ends up owning the three patents he received after legal disposition"
I did a little search re my own comment. Apparently Peter Taborsky asked the patent office in 1996 for a re-examination. In 2008, his name is still on the patent as sole inventor, dated 1992. The USPTO reexamination notice in text: http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/com/sol/og/1996/week03/patrequ.htm
and the patent on USPTO:
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PTXT&s1=5,082,813.PN.&OS=PN/5,082,813&RS=PN/5,082,813
I am unsure about the other two patents, but still looking.
I tend to view the conviction of Taborsky as political. While Lawton Chiles has long since passed away, according to the NPR text, "Taborsky turned down a pardon offered by Governor Lawton Chiles because he said accepting a pardon would mean admitting he's guilty."
I personally have had an extreme negative intellectual property related experience by the management of a Chiles family owned company (the NY old money part, not the Florida part) in the south, where I refused to sign a severance non-compete in lieu of a small amount of funds, simply because the document tried to restrict me from participating in the design of any product the conglomerate might think to manufacture in the future. I still have the copy. Insane. Sort of a corporate justification to weasel out of a severance. Apparently it must be taught in law school as it happens a lot. I wonder if Microsoft practices the same thing.
2005 article about ten issues where universities do not serve the students who pay to attend:
http://www.lookingglassnews.org/viewstory.php?storyid=1989
"Every single person in Windows Shell team should be fired publicly too for creating buggiest and most painful product of the decade and not be able to fix it even after entire whole year. When these fuckers will fix the file view bug?"
To the guy who originally posted this - if you wanted to stay anonymous you probably didn't want to send the bug you called out to the internal shell alias a few hours after you originally posted this. How is that consulting job going? :)
review time, let's open a new thread :)
>"Mini -
How about a new topic on comparing review scores / bonus' ?"
Absolutely, Mini, I concur. Meanwhile lesser important topics kind of are making headlines, yathink?
http://www.macobserver.com/editorial/2008/08/20080819applecash.jpg
Perhaps another post on towels and Starbucks coffee. How's that going up there in Redmond for ya?
On a more subtle topic, I was thinking Balmer could use some of that $47 billion he was going to spend on Yahoo to commission a Redmond remake of H.M.S. Pinafore with a rewrite to substitute the backdrop of the Royal Navy with Microsoft, which would give Mr. Balmer many opportunities to poke good-natured fun at Microsoft and, at corporate politics and the rise of unqualified people to positions of authority. The title of the work itself would be humorous, as it would juxtapose the name of a little girl's garment, pinafore, with the symbol of a the greatest tech company of the 20th Century while the use of an 1898 play would remind softies that things have become a little out of date.
I have just come here from reading Steven Sinofsky article on the Windows 7 team
http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/
As I cannot leave a comment anonymously there, I hope you will pick the discussion up here.
He states that the average size of a feature team is 40 people consisting of sde's (developers), sdet's (testers) and pm's (non-productive overhead) at a ratio of 1:1:0.5
In other words there is 1 PM for every 2 sde's.
If you now take into account the well known estimation that from all employees 15% are actively constructive, 70% are neither actively constructive nor actively destructive and 15% are actively destructive, an average feature team of 40 has 2,4 sde's who are actually getting something done.
Steven mentions 25 feature teams so that would be 1000 people of whom 60 are producing or correcting code and another 60 are testing the product. Now if these 120 are permanently kept from being productive due to the non- productive communication (birthdays, marriages, babies, etc) involved with the rest of the 880 people, I can now see why you are lobbying for a more manageable people count.
Mini - can we please, please, resist the temptation to do the usual review/bonus/troll-bait post at this time of year.
I suspect 25%+ of the posts are bogus and the rest motivated by individuals who are at either end of the spectrum (the last word might be a spoonerism)
Mini - Wake up! Isnt it time for the traditional post on reviews this year??
What's with this $300 million marketng campaign and paying Jerry Seinfeld $10 million to be cool.
Seinfeld stop being cool 10 years ago!!
This is a waster of money.
MSFT is hiring Jerry Seinfeld as its spokesperson for a $300 million ad campaign.
I'm sure the marketing people at Apple are shaking in their boots ... NOT!
I guess it could've been worse. At least it's not Bill Cosby.
They should have gone for Colbert. _That_ would be something!
"How about a new topic on comparing review scores / bonus'"
Why did you do so great?
... congrats! I sure didn't.
Hey you damn good looking comment reader you,
Sorry for the week long pause here. This is the first time in the past week I've had a spare moment to get on an anonymous computer after having to make an unexpected trip.
So please, enjoy a few more days of summer. I plan to be back by mid next week.
Mini, a suggestion for your next post: SPSA payout. The partners have just finished their regular visit to the trough, payouts have been decided, and the numbers are staggering. Even more so given the extraordinarily crappy year we've just had.
L62 - 1 yr in level
Achieved/20%
3.50% merit
10% Bonus
160% Stock
When's the time for Ballmer to leave then?
- Eric
Ledova - Job Reviews from Inside Employees
http://www.ledova.com
Reviewzapalooza 2008!
Position: PM
Level: 60
Commitment: Achieved
Contribution: 70% (bottom third of 70% group - ask your manager what sub group you were in if you don't know about this throwback to the old 3.0/3.5/4.0 system)
Merit: 3%
Bonus: 5%
Stock: $5500
Promo: mid-year
Not pleased considering this is about the same total compensation as last year even taking into account the 3% "merit increase". Actually its less considering that cost of living has increased quite a bit this year. The mid-year promo always screws you. I mean its nice to get promoted and all, but its so weak that MS stopped mandating bonus/stock reviews at midyear. A group manager can always award bonus at any time through gold star, but how often does that ever happen? And how often to folks who actually have a life?
Given the low morale of managers on the team and the constant stream of talented folks leaving the org, this wasn't really a surprise. Vista continues to suck and Win7 isn't really much better. I mean redpill already leaked and nobody even noticed! So why should *anyone* in Windows deserve more money?
Glad I started looking elsewhere a month ago and already have promising leads. Don't think Windows is sustainable on its current trajectory.
>> "Most of the A grad hires now go to Google, and a large part is because of the free gourmet food at Google."
>> If that is true, then those are good non-hires. We don't need more prima-donnas complaining about petty things, but strong employees willing to knuckle down and become star team players.
You would not understand, for software development and innovation you need brains, to attract brains you need all kinds of appeasments, if you cant do it as a company...we will work for Google, Facbook, any one who is willing to sing for us.
Mini, how about a placeholder post to let us discuss FY08 reviews? My group is doing poorly regarding that though possibly fairly considering our results.
Just sold all of my stock in MSFT when it hit $28. Part of me didn't want to, but I was ready to find something I could grow in. Hoping I regret the decision.
Any review numbers in?
L60 (1 year in level)
Achieved
3.4% Merit
7.87% Bonus
110% Stock
And Mini, we really should have a proper comparison/bragging thread. After all, most 'Softies need the validation of smearing the feces of their accomplishments in other's faces. (I'm so glad to be Seattle based and not in Redmond with the smug masses)
Does anybody know the details on the first-class trip to NYC that a bunch of "central casting" diversity models from Redmond went on? Apparently 4-5 folks got pulled into some fancy ad campaign and flown out on a junket to the Big Apple, and are sworn to uber-secrecy.
I can't stop thinking about Mini, wondering where he could be, who he is with, what is he thinking, is he thinking of me, and whether he'll ever return someday.
I thought of you every day.
We're back, baby!
"Most of the A grad hires now go to Google, and a large part is because of the free gourmet food at Google."
If that is true, then those are good non-hires. We don't need more prima-donnas complaining about petty things, but strong employees willing to knuckle down and become star team players.
Good god, what kind of Eastern European gulag do you hail from? My brainpower and hard work come for a price, and I demand to be treated as the awesome asset that I am -- along with all of my fellow employees.
I will knuckle down and work like a fiend with my team to do amazing things, but the company better treat me really, really well while I'm doing it or else I'll find another company in short order.
Welcome to the meritocracy of being a highly skilled worker. Having been at Microsoft for almost 13 years now, I can say with certainty that for lower levels we are now a gulag and that's exactly why we have trouble attracting the best talent.
I don't know why you talk up Sinofsky, Veghte or DeVaan.
Sinofsky - this guy is about as mature and emotionally developed as my 12-year old daughter. Weak.
Veghte - He has his head so far up Ballmer ass. Smart guy but he's really not sure what's he doing at that level.
DeVaan - to this day, I still don't know what the hell that guy does for our company. Value add is a solid zero.
Frankly, despite KJ's fake enthusiasm, the guy understood customers and some of the biggest customers we have that generate literally Billions of dollars for us, respected him. Can't say the same about the three stooges listed above. Net, KJ's departure is a loss for this company, period.
Man, I tell you. In my 12 years at Microsoft, I've never felt so unimpressed with our leadership, from Ballmer down about 4 levels. It's scary people, these people are running us into the ground.
So who's going to start the www.fireballmer.com site?
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