Microsoft FY11Q2 Results
A quick check from the last Quarterly Results leading up to today's Microsoft Quarterly Results:
- What's great: Kinect. We sold millions of Kinects and it's full of cool! And we have a 93% customer satisfaction rate with Windows Phone 7. Looking around, I think that's also assuming that 93% of Windows Phone 7 handsets sold are the Samsung Focus.
- What's good: our reputation is working through the bothersome-hated-defeated-spurned-ignored-renewed-respected cycle compared to Google.
- What's okay: Windows Phone 7: we sold some to non-employees and two-million licenses are in the channel. I have no idea what that means with-respect-to actually sold hardware. But it's no KIN, so... success! Yeah.
- What's really, really bad: the iPad is gnawing away our laptop market. And a new version is coming out soon.
Hungry Hungry Cannibals: reading Ms. Friar's last beat-the-hell out of Microsoft Goldman-Sachs report just about made me permanently hungry for human flesh given the repeated fixation on cannibalization. I swear, I'd look up from my print-out occasionally and longingly eye my more fit co-workers.
It's the iPad baby, and - booga booga - it's going to destroy Microsoft. Well, at least destroy Windows.
First all: sure, Microsoft leadership deserves all the head-bashing it gets for both mobile and small form-factor markets. We had the jump on these markets with inelegant, uninspired devices that never had a chance of taking off with consumers and no one was bold enough to reboot the product line without successful leadership from Apple showing us the way.
Next: our iPad-compete strategy is unspoken. For good reason. Just about any application developer at Microsoft can tell you that it's a secret wrapped in red. Most Microsoft-observers have put the pieces together and figured out our strategy could be and realize who could be on point to deliver something exceptionally cool to compete with Apple. This will certainly could be our bet-the-company chance to validate the tortoise-vs-the-hare fable.
How have our past tortoises fared? I can think of three recent late to market responses: Zune HD (iPod - remember those?), Kinect (Wii), and Windows Phone 7 (iPhone / Android). All great devices. In order for our possible iPad compete story to be a success, it has to pull a Kinect and be beyond the competition vs. a me-too or, well, me-kinda-sorta.
CEO Changes: Mr. Ballmer's respect meter in the ephemeral tech-business... news (?) world is still low. Kinect has helped, but questions linger regarding what he's doing with his leadership team given Muglia's upcoming departure. I had always remarked to folks that Bob's a survivor. His time just finally ran out. It will be intriguing to see what leadership steps in or up and what happens to Bob's current team. And who might be next. Bets? Unless HR is about to unleash something huge that's been in the making my first bet is on LisaB. Also, Craig, I'd love to know what successes you've brought to the company as of late.
In the midst of Google and Apple going through leadership changes, you've got to ask: who is on the bench to replace Mr. Ballmer? What is the Board's plan? I have to reject Ms. Foley's point of view that there is no-one that can replace Ballmer. That's a too big to fail leadership jail sentence. Perhaps the decision is that his departure immediately results in a broken up Microsoft and the presidents he is putting in place now would be quite capable of running those sister corporations. Given the convergence and consolidation that is happening internally on a number of fronts for future development, such sister corporations would be much more dependent on each other, so it's not as whacky - or dog-eat-dog cannibalistic - as it might have seemed in the past. Given that the consent decree is considered over, Microsoft self-breaking itself up will certainly help prevent penalties when the inevitable violation occurs.
From another angle: if the Sinofskyfication of the company continues (IEB now with its massive re-org complete, post-Muglia Server & Tools next?) then Mr. Sinofsky ascending over a whole Microsoft will be a moot decision.
Interesting coverage after the results:
- Amazon adds thousands more workers; Microsoft still cautious - Mr. Todd Bishop looks at the hiring trend of Microsoft, Amazon, and Google. Want to find a new job? Knock on Amazon or Google's door. Microsoft is pretty much a flat-line.
- Microsoft tops estimates; Kinect fuels Xbox; Windows 7 hits 300M - Mr. Todd Bishop again.
- Microsoft Sees Business Tech Spending Continuing to Rebound, Benefiting Office and Windows Ina Fried Mobilized AllThingsD - Ms. Ina Fried
- Microsoft’s Results Easily Beat Expectations paidContent - Mr. Joseph Tartakoff
- Microsoft Q2 2011 by the numbers Record $19.95B revenue, 77 cents EPS Betanews - Mr. Joe Wilcox.
- Microsoft Beats The Street, But Not By Enough To Send Stock Soaring - Mr. Matt Rosoff
- Why Microsoft Desperately Needs To Become More Acquisitive - Mr. Robin Wauters. Dude. More acquisitions? Really. aQuantive still blows my six billion dollar mind. Can someone help me remember some of the recent good acquisitions that Microsoft has made. Is it better to make none or risk some of these money vaporization deals we've done (stupid billion dollar bat).
In general, no surprise to people that Windows/Live was down and that Entertainment was up on the Kinect. Online (aka Bing aka Partner-Level-Palooza) lost over half-a-billion dollars. And gained a bit of market share.
Pulling out my crystal ball that's covered with dust along with all the other Mini implements used to write this blog (oooo, an unopened bottle of Col Solare! Score!): Microsoft product groups should feel good about WP7 and the influence Metro is having around the company. Like I said, there's a big convergence ahead of us, and it will be good to start aligning a simpler development story, both for Microsoft and its partners. The biggest obvious concern is the development path for the mobile platform compared to the development path for Windows, but even there you can squint and see on the horizon the possibility for that to be successful, too.
IE9 is great technology that yes, has a way to go to score some high compliance number across a bunch of random folk's assessment sites. Still: wow. WP7 is a modern joy to use and is slowly building an app catalog. Kinect. And a whole bunch of developers hunched over and hammering bits to create the next big "Wow." Yeah, "Wow" might be inscribed on the back of a tortoise, but sometimes... the tortoise wins in the end.
The only thing that concerns me right now is (and you're going to love this): hiring. We've got great successes that excite people about working at Microsoft, but really, how many more people are we hiring to work on Kinect? My friends and I have never been so courted by other companies. Not since 2000. And I've got to say, the culture that Ballmer and LisaB have created is really weary. It's enlightened for the mid-1980s. But if crazy stock price jumps are no longer enthusing your employees, you've got to reboot the culture.
715 comments:
«Oldest ‹Older 201 – 400 of 715 Newer› Newest»Good commentary Mini. As usual we commenters are quick to lower the bar to adolescent drivel. (Hint to readers, if someone is not articulate enough to be a high school graduate, they likely aren't a Microsoft employee.)
That said, I'm sympathetic to comments on the review system. We are asked to differentiate and not "peanut butter" rewards. Since we promote until most are roughly among equals this can lead to mental gymnastics at calibration time. Some may call it politics, but managers need to rationalize disparate reward decisions. Favoritism plays an exaggerated role.
Following the event–and a brief hands-on demo of Honeycomb–Mobilized and a few other reporters cornered Google exec Hugo Barra and pressed him on some of these issues, including just how big a dent he thinks that Android tablets can make on the huge lead established by Apple with the iPad.
“It’s hard to say,” he said. “We’ve put our best foot forward. Now it’s up to the ecosystem to make it flourish.”
However, he noted that hardware makers are eager to have a more competitive product to counter Apple’s tablet. “We think that (device makers) are incredibly motivated,” he said.
I wonder who won the current and future loyalty of hardware makers, aka our former partners? Google, who used the last year to rewrite Android for the tablet form factor and has now given them something competitive against iPad today? Or MS who spent the last year doing nothing and is saying make due with Windows 7 for a couple of years until we can get something that actually makes sense?
Well played Ballmer and Sinofsky. Well played.
Everyone else, get your resumes ready. Cause guess who is going to pay for their failure? That’s right, you will. Future layoffs are going to be huuuuuuuuuge.
I'd like to hear more about this. A web link would be just fine. They called me the other day and this is quite discomforting.
The incidents I am aware of were heard through the grape-vine in addition to one I witnessed myself (in the subsequent discussion I learned about the others). This is nothing to worry about if you are planning on working there - the point I was trying to make is the stress level is higher than at Microsoft. The actual violence was kind of a pathetic geek rage (looked more like a couple of chicks fighting) but again not something I ever witnessed at Microsoft.
"@ Anonymous said...
I work for a telco in Australia. Two things:
1. Sales of WP7 phones have been shockingly low. We knew WP7 had an uphill battle, but these phones just aren't selling."
May be true - but the *absolutely* piss poor launch ALL the Telcos had of WP7 didn't help much.
At software conference in December, I sat at lunch watching an experienced software professional trying to figure out how to adjust the volume on his new WP7 phone.
He never could figure it out. He finally gave up, and declared that he was returning the phone and getting an Android-based model as soon as he got home.
That's because you can't. Its one volume for everything. If your music is too loud and you reduce the volume you won't hear the phone ringing. And if you increase the volume to hear the ringing, you need to remember to reduce it before listening to your music.
http://social.answers.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/windowsphone7/thread/de5441af-e5b0-4bee-9b9c-41511ee2d80f
I wonder if any of the usability PMs for the phone ever used a smartphone or any phone at all.
becoming a manager at microsoft was the worst career decision I have seen so many people make...including myself.
The inward focused/CYA/taking undeserved credit/backstabbing really started around 2000. Then MSFT hired IBM/Oracle/DotBomb ex-pats. The ethics and hubris were just bad...and have only become worse. Back then the money was coming in and people put up with it.
You can survive going back to an IC role, but it's easier if it is with another group. I know I was better for it, though it was largely because I had a great manager.
This is the elephant in the room... morale..?? hell it's down right anger...!!!
People need a class action suit for mass and stealth layoffs.
Mini, Please let this one through.
>> I really wish people would stop referring to Windows Phone 7 as a "1.0 product" because it's a 7.0 product. <<
It is interesting you would say that. Many on the WP team considered WP7 as v1, a.k.a. a startup. They try to decouple themselves from WM, a.k.a. Windows Mobile.
From a former MSoftie for a long time and someone who has some small degree of respect for the company (was a HiPo for 5+ years before I left for a more exciting opp) - couple of constructive comments for all of you still in the rut.....having MSFT on your resume for too long is a liability in the outside world today - if you want a job outside drop the 98052 attitude - NO ONE CARES!, all the innovation is 98052 does not amount to much in real world - there is a lot going on with GOOG and APPL similar to all the 'clandestine innovation' at MSFT which does not mean much till MSFT delivers e.g. the secret tablet and Win 8 strategy....really!?!?!? Show us (the shareholders) the money i.e. real product - AAPL, GOOG and Chinese OEMs are not stupid or asleep and finally the rudest wake up call in the real world....give us all the analysis paralysis in PowerPoint and stop paying external consulting companies (hello MsKinsey! SCREW YOU!!!) and MSoftie employees who have left and figured out how to milk MSFT for re-purposed PPTs and start shipping product. Last but not the least, give up the WP 7 dream....2M is channel sell in ...not sell through. Go talk to your local mobile store...oh away frpm 98XXX zip codes....!
As a newly promoted manager, my views and opinions of SRT and team have changed a lot. I would like to share them here and as a principle, I refuse to see people as L59,60-62. I see them as developers, and/or members of my team. With all honesty, being a manager is a tough job. It’s really hard to manage people, their opinions, issues and relationships. If you are passionate about technology, focused on building a great product and not bothered managing relationships, I would say you are better off not being a manager.
First things first, SRT is well aware of problems and focused on building strategies. In hindsight, you have a 20/20 vision, but for decisions which affect future outcomes, there are lots of factors to look at and with each call you satisfy some folks and disappoint others. That’s part of game and gaps are filled in future updates.
Team –
Peer ranking/stacking -
Having gone through “first” wave, I can assure that it’s never a pleasant discussion. Ranking peers is labors effort and time/energy sapping one. You might have made great contribution but when those tasks are not on my priority list; I won’t consider them as best effort because you made no difference where it really matters. I don’t stop you from spending long hours on those tasks because I hope that at end, you might come up with great ideas to improve and ways to do things better.
It’s not always that I don’t remember all the great things you have done. Others would have done better things and would be rewarded.
Priorities change through the course of year, you should grasp the ones which make a difference and are relatively important. (At least on tasks you are assigned)
Help others and help team built better stuff. I do notice what everyone is doing and whose helping whom. Helping others increases your “value”. I also look out for people who are a show ponys and try to help others rather than actually helping them. If you are one of them, I would suggest you to start looking because you are never going to get promoted.
Advertising/Marketing – Its’ my job that I have listen when people showcase their accomplishments. I might think otherwise, but its’ my job to listen.
If you can show me savings/benefits in a dollar numbers, you are doing me a HUGE help.
Try refreshing my memory with your accomplishments a month or so before peer ranking.
Its’ part of my job to illustrate team’s accomplishments to leadership. I am one who’s involved in those discussions. Do yourself a favor and try helping out other group when they need something from you. This generates a good feeling and people won’t mind when I suggest a better ranking.
For those people who crib on this site; if you are a bad energy for the team, - You won’t be rewarded and promoted. We don’t manage you out; we just don’t recognize your accomplishments because you hurt the team spirit and energy and we are better off without you.
And those who say Microsoft is a toxic place. Learn to trust and put your faith in people.
Harry Potter
And one more thing, please don't confuse exuberance with capability
Harry Potter
I speak to many enterprise customers during my working day. And I have not met one - not one - who uses or is even seriously thinking of using a WP7. The telco's here in Australia are offering these devices for dirt cheap prices when committing to a contract, so I'd have expected to see some others beside the MSFT employees using a WP7 device.
After my own experience with a Windows phone - a good corporate citizen suffering through all beta and released builds of WM2003, WM5, WM6 and 6.1 and 6.5 - I will personally rather poke a hole in my head than ever go back to a phone that even remotely has the word Windows associated with it. It was the most horrible consumer/enterprise experience you could wish for. By the looks of it, WM7 is going the same way. Those anecdotal numbers of returned devices which some folks so easily dismissed as statistically insignificant are conceivable from where I sit.
What I think MSFT is perhaps slowly starting to realise is that most folks actually could not give a toss about Windows. It has been forced on them through corporate decisions, their experience with the platform has for the most part been poor (yes, even on Win7). And I sense that there is real optimism at the potential viability of alternatives in the near future.
So here is how I see it panning out in the next few years: The move to cloud, whilst a big MSFT strategy, actually reduces the dependency for users to be running a Windows client platform. Conceptually, but a little more difficult, this also reduces the dependency on Microsoft productivity apps. Future EA renewals will be harder, and by the time Win7 reaches end of support I think that the numbers will be vastly different - in a bad way for MSFT.
I suspect that by this time, MS will have bludgeoned together some mobile platform that will have the same poor user experience as the phone/mobile offerings of the past decade. I hope that corporates remember that far back and that the greasy posterior from the MS licensing investments is still fresh in their mind. I hope also that they have worked out their risk aversion to alternatives. Certainly consumers have.
So, to the rock star $400k p.a. salesman who posted earlier, milk it while you can. In a bizarre way you are the architect of your own demise. Surely could not happen to a nicer bunch.
So, who's getting fired? I know of two folks who have been at the company for over 5 years that have been fired due to "performance reasons," without severance packages.
The good 'layoff' days appear to be over.
MARK HURD FOR CEO!
>> It is sad to point out that the C++ compiler and libraries get better and better at every new release, but unfortunately the WPF IDE which comes in VS2010 is a hog (try loading a non trivial C++ solution in VS2010 IDE: VS2008 is faster).
VS2010 is not, generally speaking, slower because it uses WPF (or .NET in general). In fact, top "here be lag" spots in traces are mostly native. It's slow because it's a heap of shit code (again, still mostly native) that has been piled layer upon layer for too long without any serious re-architecturing. There's too many kludges there, nested several levels deep. And then, every release. there are even more hacks to fight back at least some of perf lost on all that crap in the first place.
Moving over to .NET and stuff was actually supposed to fix all this - and it partly did, hey; at least the new editor is much better! - but the way it was ultimately implemented is another horrible kludge. Dev10 looks like a WPF application, but it's not written the way any sane person would write one, and most of model code underneath is still native (yeah, it has XAML bound to COM objects in places - how's that for perf and readability?)
As for WPF in general - I'm not surprised that Windows folk have unpleasant experiences from the days before Vista (what was it, 2003-5?), because the first release of WPF was rather crappy. A lot of nice concepts on paper, but many missing features, downright slow, and crappy rendering esp. for text (did you see what its renderer did to Tahoma? bleh!). They did improve since then, but gradually - I dare say that WPF 4 is the first version that's actually usable without compromises.
Anonymous said...
Microsft is facing what IBM was facing when Gerstner came in to transform it from its legacy state to whre it is today...
Wednesday, February 02, 2011 1:18:00 PM
... and it was services that saved IBM... interesting
I have been waiting for "Mini" to become active again to share a few "Leaving MS" tips:
Thank you for these tips and congratulations on your successfully planned and executed departure. If anyone else has any tips about interview preparation would be greatly appreciated if you post them.
Studying is difficult as I am used to working every weekend for over 10+ years.
>At software conference in December, I sat at lunch watching an experienced software professional trying to figure out how to adjust the volume on his new WP7 phone
He never could figure it out. He finally gave up
Right. Did he try pressing the volume buttons? That sure is tricky! Maybe you need a hardware engineer to show you the ropes on this one. I have Android and WP7 devices and the WP7 experience blows Android out of the water.
Re: Amazon vs Microsoft
Every company has its pros and cons. I've worked at both and your enjoyment depends largely on what you care about, which group you're in, and to some degree what functional group you belong to. Yes, Amazon burdens devs with operational tasks which get old fast. But Amazon is still innovating all over the place and still creates/funds small teams looking at new opportunities whereas MS really focused its efforts behind its core businesses.
Comp is roughly the same but depends largely on how long you expect to stay.
Some MS people won't get used to the culture at AMZN. Frugal, highly distributed, very agile. It is not a place to rest and vest. You will get weaned out.
MS is still a great place to be to work on products/services that tens of millions of people use. But most of those products are mature. And the teams are huge (to a fault). Despite MS stock doing nothing in 10+ years, MS is unlikely to disappear either.
Do your behind the scenes due diligence with any team you're about to join.
Thanks to Kinect, people suddendly think of Microsoft as an innovating and interesting company. But, is it?
Microsoft buys dozens of startup companies every year, later to close almost all of them and fire everyone around. Kinect was just "buying the right startup company" for a change. Coincidence? yes, innovation : yes, but not by Microsoft.
And of course Microsoft is doing the same mistakes with Kinect as well. Microsoft was bragging for years with multi-touch screen but refused to get it to market. Now, touch screens are synonim for Apple.
The same with Kinect, people are facsinated, scream for "minority report" UI and dozens of other great applications and Microsoft still won't do the right thing - release Kinect (driver) for the PC. In their effort not to "cannibalize" xbox, they are making the same mistake IBM did with the PS1/PS2 computers. The writing is on the wall, when a "Kinect" like experience captures the world, it will have the Apple logo on it...
Its nice to bash Win32 today, given I have 8 Gb RAM in my box and all kinds of bloat that wouldn't even be entertained in the past, but the Win32 system was cleanly designed and well implemented. Yes, it was.
Compared to what? It was a viable competitor to the original Mac APIs (which was the goal)--not much better, worse, or different. But it suffered from typical Microsoft API problems. Overly verbose naming, overly complicated arguments. For the love of god, how many arguments do you really need to create a file or start a process? In POSIX it's like 2... in Windows it's closer to 10. Typical Microsoft design-by-committee.
--You do realize that the Windows team tried to use .NET (specifically Avalon) for 2 years before giving up on it because Avalon was designed so poorly.
I recall lots of problems, but blaming the problems on tooling or managed code performance was and still is just a cop-out. I know excuses when I hear them. Look. I guess if it makes you feel better to bash managed code or C# or shell.. ok..
Taking a bunch of C++ systems developers and asking them to immediately be C# UI application developers was frankly a disaster waiting to happen from the get-go.
Parallel development, daily breaking FI's, etc.. due to an unmature UI framework dependecy was another really obvious product planning lesson that to this day MS has oddly never seemed to learn from.
Building high quality software is like construction. You just can't build a skyscraper on wet soil and expect high quality no matter how hard you try. You'll be spending all your time bailing water out of the basement when you should be busy picking the art to hang in the lobby for the grand opening.
One day we will finally figure it out. Maybe windows 9, 10, 11- we will deliver the UI experience we could have delivered all the way back in Vista had Microsoft not executed so shockingly poorly.
if you are a bad energy for the team, - You won’t be rewarded and promoted. We don’t manage you out; we just don’t recognize your accomplishments because you hurt the team spirit and energy and we are better off without you.
So, Microsoft management is like the Amish -- shunning the "Bad English" based upon things like "bad energy".
"[...] if you are a bad energy for the team, - You won’t be rewarded and promoted. We don’t manage you out; we just don’t recognize your accomplishments because you hurt the team spirit and energy [...]"
Are Microsoft now turning to the new age / occult for management inspiration? If so, I'll give you a tip - it will only make things even worse.
groupism is badly involved into the system. you support me i will support u :)
Yep, I've seen managers yanking their favored staff from team to team across the company, with this deal going.
And I have not met one - not one - who uses or is even seriously thinking of using a WP7. The telco's here in Australia are offering these devices for dirt cheap prices when committing to a contract, so I'd have expected to see some others beside the MSFT employees using a WP7 device.
We're in Australia and we're trialing them for a medium-size business. For a short time, they were under serious consideration. Not any more.
So far, meeting reminders are being given at the wrong time. Our admins can lock down/manage/control WM6.5 much better than WP7. Exchange email access is inferior to BlackBerry's. They're telling me that clients need to have the Zune software installed to install apps (really? in a corporate environment?).
The problem isn't all Microsoft's. Australia is a spread out country and if you're not in a city, you need a phone with a very strong xmit/receive radio. Doesn't seem that the OEMs of WP7 phones are interested in that part of the market.
It's a phone built to appeal to consumers, when the primary market MS had a chance at getting part of was the ENTERPRISE market that will accept lack of coolness in favor of control and a single vendor solution.
FAIL. Management was highly, highly fanboy-in-favor of WP7 until it had been in test use for a month. Now they feel that they cannot consider deploying it.
It does not surprise me that half of them get returned in Australia.
I'm sure Ballmer doesn't care about Jobs or Apple. But then again, Ballmer doesn't care about Microsoft either.
What the (bleep) are you (bleeping) talking about? Are you out of your (bleeping) mind? I love this (bleeping) company! And I WILL throw a (bleeping) chair at anyone who says (bleeping) otherwise.
OK OK, I admit I made some mistakes. For example I should NOT have played with my putter in LisaB's office when I offered her the job of SVP HR. But sometimes, people, my putter has a mind of its own. I just want to get on the green so my putter can get the job done. And Lisa's credentials for HR SVP are impeccable: she ran the OS2 test lab. What the (bleeping) else do you (bleeping) people need to (bleep) know? As far as the recent senior exec resignations go - who the (bleep) cares? The (bleeping) press are blowing chunks about Ray Ozzie, Dave Thompson, Robbie Bach, J Allard, Bob Muglia et. al? I'm still (bleeping) here, and that is all that matters, and all you need to (bleeping) know.
> Priorities change through the course of year, you should grasp the ones which make a difference and are relatively important. (At least on tasks you are assigned)
I'm sorry, but if I don't see changing priorities reflected in my list of assigned tasks when I look at it, it's solely your fault as a manager. The whole point of your job is to make sure that your reports know exactly what they are supposed to be doing today and tomorrow.
With all honesty, being a manager is a tough job.
>> You say it is really hard to do your job as a manager. But from what you have listed in your papal rant, you seem to be taking it -easy-. As an often promoted manager, I need to tell you the really *hard* parts of being a manager.
Having gone through “first” wave, I can assure that it’s never a pleasant discussion. Ranking peers is labors effort and time/energy sapping one. You might have made great contribution but when those tasks are not on my priority list; I won’t consider them as best effort because you made no difference where it really matters. I don’t stop you from spending long hours on those tasks because I hope that at end, you might come up with great ideas to improve and ways to do things better.
>> Why are great contributions (GCs) not on your priority list? Sure, you have a bunch of operational, release or business deliverables on your list. Everyone, including your ICs, understands that. Buy why should GCs not ALSO be on your list? A C might not be G for you but it is for the person who owned it. You need to have trust and faith in your people, for you to stay as a promoted manager. Did your IC trust you, when you did your job of explaining to him why his C was not on your list, or why he was not told earlier before he invested his labor, time and energy for his GC? You say you dont stop ICs from long hours on their GCs, because you think you can. You cant. If your ICs know you think you can, they wont spend long hours on stuff that ARE on your priority list. That wont hurt the ICs or you - but it hurts the company as a whole. It is *hard* to rally and motivate your ICs to spend long hours on a list that you AND your ICs own as their team's priority list. It is -easy- to tag an IC's or anyone's work as "doesnt really matter". It is your *hard* job as a manager to use that work to make a difference where it matters - to convert an IC's passion to the company's potential. The SLT has been telling managers this, for a very long time.
It’s not always that I don’t remember all the great things you have done. Others would have done better things and would be rewarded.
This is true for the SLT too. MS works hard, wins some but loses when other firms have done better. And customers at large, may not remember all the great things we have done. Everyone, including ICs at L59+ understand this. What they also understand is, it is -easy- to dismiss an IC's contribution in his review, with the standard bogey - "Others did better than you". This is a variant of the other team-player bogey - "No one likes working with you". Both are textbook posits to weaken the other party, by constructing an imaginary headcount on your side of the fence. Are you sure your ICs have enough trust in you to believe that you are not using any of those bogeys to instead reward a buttkisser?
Albus Dumbledore
Dumbledore again - Part 2
Priorities change through the course of year, you should grasp the ones which make a difference and are relatively important. (At least on tasks you are assigned)
>> It is your job to look out for priorities, create tasks and rally your team around them. You are the first line of information that the team gets. It is your job to explain and help ICs transition to the new priority, given the time/energy they have invested in the team's last priority. ICs have it hard when they are deeply invested (in design and
construction) in a given feature and are expected at the same time to look at each opportunity, spend half a day on its cost-benefits and risks, and to decide and justify a context-switch from the current priority. And for each IC to do this - is a criminal waste of human capital. That is why it is your job to do it. It is equally *hard* for you as a manager to decide, given the many known and unknown unknowns that come with each opportunity. Your best ICs are there to help you with data on past experiences with technology/API choices, for the team to mitigate those unknowns, and collectively choose a new priority. But then it is -easy- for you to apportion tasks, and then ding your ICs for not having grasped the ones that make a difference.
Help others and help team built better stuff. I do notice what everyone is doing and whose helping whom. Helping others increases your “value”. I also look out for people who are a show ponys and try to help others rather than actually helping them. If you are one of them, I would suggest you to
start looking because you are never going to get promoted.
>> It is -easy- to not look at the mirror, when looking for people who are just trying to help others rather than actually helping them. It is *hard* to look into the mirror and say "Which IC have I helped overcome a challenge lately? Which IC have I sat down with lately to resolve an ambiguity - in the requirements or in the specs?" If you dont do the *hard* stuff, your best ICs will not see "value" in you, and will start looking out.
Advertising/Marketing – Its’ my job that I have listen when people showcase their accomplishments. I might think otherwise, but its’ my job to listen.
>> If you have any positive energy at all, about yourself, your team, your work and your role, then you should (a) be happy to have your people have any accomplishments at all to showcase
(b) feel good about yourself that you have done the right things for your ICs to have the morale and motivation to accomplish them (c) feel deserved that they are showcasing it to you and not to their skip or your peers. It is *hard* to build that trust in your ICs to do this to you. But it is -easy- to take it as just your job to listen. Your best ICs know it when you listen to them just because its your job. Do that often, and they will start looking.
Try refreshing my memory with your accomplishments a month or so before peer ranking.
>> Why would you need refreshing? Its your job to keep track of accomplishments. If you need refreshing, it shows you didnt have any meat in those accomplishments. You werent involved in any meaningful (to you) way - decisions, tradeoffs, backing up during setbacks, cross-team support etc. What were you a manager for? But then, when being refreshed, you take it as just your job to listen - you treat your refreshers as advertisers/marketeers. It is -easy- to expect to be entitled to be refreshed.
Albus Dumbledore
Dumbledore again - 3
If you can show me savings/benefits in a dollar numbers, you are doing me a HUGE help.
>> ICs never have enough context for anything in dollar numbers. If anyone, you as a manager would have any. So it is your job to do a HUGE help to your ICs to set priorities (in terms of the tasks you rally your team on, that have meaningful dollar impact). Not everyone works all the time on dollar stuff. As you have realised as a newly promoted manager, even the SLT and MS as a company, do not work that way. Allow your ICs the benefit of 20/20 hindsight. If you dont, then take the rap for dollar-tasks that didnt turn out well and share the credit for those that did well. You think thats unfair. No, thats Management 101. The SLT, to which you are so beholden to, after your new promotion, works the same way. Ballmer or any other CEO takes the rap for the bad, but MS as a company shares the credit for the good. It is -easy- to put the onus of dollars on your ICs and ding them in their review for having worked on stuff that did not have expected dollar impact. Ding them once - shame on you. Ding them twice - no so fast, amigo - they have moved on.
Its’ part of my job to illustrate team’s accomplishments to leadership. I am one who’s involved in those discussions. Do yourself a favor and try helping out other group when they need something from you. This generates a good feeling and people won’t mind when I suggest a better ranking.
>> Treat yourself to an orange popsicle, for being the one who's involved in those discussions. What if "helping out other group" is not on your priority list? What if the other team thinks this is a great contribution, but then you won’t consider it as best effort because the IC made no difference where it really mattered? See, it is easy to muscle up
with your priority list (PL), and then cop out by dinging an IC for working on non-priority cross-team work. Nobody likes two-faced newly promoted managers. There are other places to play poker. It is extremely natural for people to want to help and be helped. But reality, through their managers, intervenes with PLs. The more someone gets a PL waved at him, the less likely he is to help out. Do your ICs trust you to take them on good faith, if they are found helping or answering interop questions for other teams? It is -easy- to ding your ICs for not generating a 'good feeling'. It is much *harder* for you to do your job in enabling your ICs contribute to other MS teams' efforts, while still making good on their PLs.
For those people who crib on this site; if you are a bad energy for the team, - You won’t be rewarded and promoted. We don’t manage you out; we just don’t recognize your accomplishments because you hurt the team spirit and energy and we are better off without you.
>> How did the "I" suddenly become a "We"? You dont recognize anyone's accomps. Each team member carries his weight and then some. As a manager, your accomps or lack thereof, affects the team more than any IC. So worry about doing good on your accomps - which is to enable your ICs to achieve
theirs. Instead of showing up at the end with a popsicle to recognize their accomps, its your job to be the energy and spirit of the team by being part of their successes and failures. You
want be to so for your SLT - are your ICs any lesser human beings? You are better off without your best IC's accomps, if you like it that way. This is a free company.
And those who say Microsoft is a toxic place. Learn to trust and put your faith in people.
>> Its a two way street. Give to be given, Serve to be served, Reward to be rewarded, Trust to be trusted. For a moment, I am with you in saying MS is not a toxic place. But by being a leader serving your team, you will make MS a better place than it already is.
Albus Dumbledore
To Harry Potter, newly promoted manager: Congratulations, for a new manager you represented the self serving manager philosophy very well. With comments like, “You might have made great contribution but when those tasks are not on my priority list; I won’t consider them as best effort because you made no difference where it really matters”, and saying that you “have to” listen to your peoples’ ideas, you show that no matter how intelligent and innovative your people are, you will always be convinced you are the one that knows best. Even if you are as all-knowing as you seem to think, you show how unconcerned you are as a manager by allowing them to spend long hours on tasks you think don’t really matter, which proves you are weak in providing direction and in the end it’s all about you. If you are graced with a team full of self-directed superstars who do their own marketing to your management then your approach works because you are rendered ineffectual (at best). Which then begs the question, what do your people need you for anyway?
For most teams, however, if you haven’t marketed your peoples’ accomplishments throughout the year you will find yourself being the one forced to hand out low rankings/ratings no matter how they performed. Judging by your attitude with, “Try refreshing my memory with your accomplishments a month or so before peer ranking,” I’m sure you have no clue how to actively promote your team. Your people are left working blindly the entire year toward that one brief moment when you hand them their reward sheets. Good luck trying to manage out the people you ticked off before your next MS Poll.
Harry, if you want to be the best manager you can be at MS, I implore you to step back from the years you spent criticizing your peers and take a good look at how you can best serve your people now. Don’t do them a disservice by relying on the sink or swim, aka, “drive your own career” attitude. I think you’ll find that the more you connect with your people and try to put them in touch with the vision of your management chain, the more you will connect with that vision as well. Take your own advice, “Learn to trust and put your faith in people.” Don’t expect your people to do your job for you.
@Harry Potter
And one more thing, as you explained well, this applies to all managers as well -
Learn to trust and put your faith in people (in all your directs not only for favorites).
I know as usual no manager will accept this fact :).
Microsft is facing what IBM was facing when Gerstner came in to transform it from its legacy state to whre it is today...
To where it is today?
You do realize that over the last couple of years IBM now has more employees in India than in the US, right? Just the same Microsoft has been investing billions offshore over the last few years to take advantage of cheap labor?
It is time for people to unplug from their computers, stop whining about the review process, and start seeing the bigger picture.
Despite record profits, these corner office executives are manipulating the labor market and waging war on the middle class.
They have been increasing workloads, cutting benefits, freezing pay, pressuring you to not use vacation time, using contractors, etc... and will eventually be sending your job offshore... all for one reason - greed- 500X your salary is still not enough for them.
Do you know why the Microsoft career site has 10,000 open positions with ridiculous qualifications that never get filled? They are bogus job ads designed to meet PERMA requirements so they can "demonstrate" that they can't find qualified US workers. They have been using the H1-B's to keep downward pressure on US workers wages.
If this is the 'new' transformed American company than just shoot me now. Get it over with and let HR collect on their life insurance policy.
But it suffered from typical Microsoft API problems. Overly verbose naming, overly complicated arguments.
You are seriously complaining about the API function names? That seems like a pretty trivial problem. You can always make up your own wrapper around that kind of stuff to make the interface just how you want.
I am really picky about details in my own code, but I would put verbose names way way way down on the list of significance.
Observations from an SMSG GM through MYR:
1. The culture in SMSG is so broken, we're paralyzed. KT you need to go dude. This isn't Wal-Mart and great IT partner managers are not like your average Wal-Mart store employee. This is a relationship business and you've ruined it.
2. The review model has gone from being a way to explain an inequitable distribution of a fixed pot of money to a complete political club that promotes only a small clique of deep insiders. Really this is bad stuff and has gone far further down in the rank and file than in the past.
3. We must integrate our product strategy!!! Selling the integrated story is a potentially unique differentiator for MSFT. Our products have always worked better together than our people have, but now even our products don't work well together. Good news is product integration is fixable, but the bad news is it requires people willing and able to do so and I've yet to meet any senior leaders in a BG who could do this.
4. We are a business and that requires a profit. Our online business is the industry clown. Fix it in the next year or kill it. Enough already.
5. Stop trying to fix the P&L by RIF-ing people then trying to back in to a business strategy. you have to do that the other way around. Oh, and the peanut butter, spread the pain equally approach to RIF and budget reduction is, to quote a very famous and successfull CEO, "chicken-sh*t management by people who don't know their business and are apparently too overpaid to make the hard decisions". We all get paid to make the hard calls - so make them!
Ok, rant over.
>Its nice to bash Win32 today, given I have 8 Gb RAM in my box and all kinds of bloat that wouldn't even be entertained in the past, but the Win32 system was cleanly designed and well implemented. Yes, it was.
No, no it was not. Let's not make the ridiculous claim that it was well designed as evidenced by the number of apps that were written on top of it. It was successful in SPITE of the terrible design, mainly because there was a lot of money to be made making/selling software so developers put up with ridiculous shit, much as they do with Apple today, but at least Apple is willing to break with backwards compat when they realize changes need to be made. We still support ridiculous mistakes of 25 years ago at the expense of the entire system. Apart from the indecipherable nature of most of the 'design' you have things like methods that take 10 parameters, 3 of which are 'reserved' and developers are supposed to always pass say NULL or 0 in for those params. WTF? Public APIs with magical parameters that developers aren't supposed to use? Why the fuck are they there in the first place? Why not have a 'public' version that thunks into a private version that 'fills in' those place holders? If it is because other internal teams need those parameters but third parties can't use them then you have a major design WTF right there. I don't know ANY developer that has used Win32 for any significant amount of time and thinks 'this is a well designed system', in fact do you think the exodus AWAY from 'raw win32', and in some cases entirely off the platform all together is due to the sheer fun that is writing a semi-decent looking application in Win32? Let's hope the Win8 work helps, but I don't have high hopes for that, seems like yet another clusterfuck of confusion / grand ideas with no real grasp on reality.
To Mini, thanks for this insightful dialog for what seems to be a lot of forward-thinking FTE's that could really benefit the company, if they had the opportunity to.
To my new hero, SMSG GM, how to I come work for you?!? Seriously, thank you for giving me hope and reason to not think I am crazy. I am in MCS, and you hit the nail on the head. You have my vote if they ask us who should be driving this division.
if you are a bad energy for the team, - You won’t be rewarded and promoted. We don’t manage you out; we just don’t recognize your accomplishments because you hurt the team spirit and energy
Good, as long as you don't manage me out I will sit here and continue to collect my paycheck and do whatever. You sound like the perfect boss, any openings on your team? Even better that you don't recognize my accomplishments - neither of us or the rest of the larger group need to care what I am doing this way.
Lots of chit-chat here about management, good and bad. As an ex senior director I can say with some authority that managers generally have a binary choice: you can either be a good manager, or build your career - but not both.
Good management, by which I mean strong WHI, exceeding goals and apportioning rewards fairly, is not appreciated nor rewarded by Microsoft. Sweating your team like farm animals, managing up, cheering numb-skull projects that you full-well know are stupid and destined to fail, plus taking credit for every success and blaming others for every failure is the way to climb the ladder.
Leading a team of 50+ I pulled WHI numbers above 90% favorable for several years, grew productivity and cut costs. And for the record my TEAM did that, not me. I just helped create an environment in wich they could succeed. Or put another way, I kept the corporate / KT bullshit our of people's hair as much as humanly possible. Some refer this to managing OSI Layer 8, the political abstraction layer :)
For which my reward was to be run over by a steam roller.
This is not to excuse poor managers, of whom there are all too many. But before shaking the voodoo stick at them, just remember that they are a product of an environment which does not give a shit about truly good management.
Re: Amazon vs Microsoft
Some MS people won't get used to the culture at AMZN. Frugal, highly distributed, very agile. It is not a place to rest and vest. You will get weaned out.
Here's the translation:
frugal = crappy equipment & environment with corresponding compensation
highly distributed = like metastasized cancer - each group dysfunctionally harmful in its own unique way
very agile = what the hell are we working on today? Oh yeah, responding to 2am pages about antediluvian Perl code.
not a place to rest and vest = we're watching you like a hawk
you will get weaned out = drink the Kool-Aid or you'll be force fed it.
What happened to the cutting room floor? Why not redirect all posts to the cutting room floor un-moderated and then promote the ones that are suitable for the mainline blog?
Reading about old Win32 APIs being "good" makes me chuckle.
How about a simple thing - change the background of a button? You'd think there would be some kind of function you could call, or maybe a window message you could send to the button to tell it? Well, nope. You've got to handle WM_CTLCOLORBTN for the parent window, determine which button this is in the handler, and provide the colors. Great design, since the button has to keep permanently polling for color changes as there's no way for it to be sure it won't receive a different color every time it has to ask.
Awesome discoverability, too. I mean, go ahead and try to find this little tidbit on MSDN without typing in the WM constant, I dare you.
There are many genuine complaints to be had about WPF, but coming from people who created the monstrosity that is Win32 UI API (which is to say, practically everything in user32.dll), it's hypocrisy at best.
Regarding tablets, the potential to be leaders is not by competing with iPad, but by competing on price. How about a $150 slate vs. iPad for emerging markets?
And Microsoft is going to do this, how, exactly?
The Motorola Xoom, Android's latest "first true iPad competitor", will be selling at Best Buy for $800 - which doesn't include the cost of the apparently mandatory data service you have to buy from Verizon before you can use it.
So if Motorola can't beat iPad on price, despite having an operating system they don't have to pay for and a special deal with Verizon… then what chance does a Windows 7 tablet have? Heck, what chance would even a mythical Windows Phone 7 tablet have?
All the energy channeled into this blog should have been used to kick competitor's behinds... Underutilized braincells (at work, no fault of their own) must crank up the energy level somewhere.. Time for a visionary tech dictator to clean the place up.. It's sad to see this dressed up IT elephant being passed left and right by the young and hungry hounds.
>The review model has gone from being a way to explain an inequitable distribution of a fixed pot of money to a complete political club that promotes only a small clique of deep insiders. Really this is bad stuff and has gone far further down in the rank and file than in the past.
Of course. Harry Potter sits around to criticize Ron's direct reports. Ron does the same to Harry Potters. We have a toxic brew and a toxic review culture.
It’s not always that I don’t remember all the great things you have done. Others would have done better things and would be rewarded.
Priorities change through the course of year, you should grasp the ones which make a difference and are relatively important. (At least on tasks you are assigned)
I'm not sure whether to take you seriously; you write 'Principle', when you mean 'Principal'. You write 'SRT' when I suspect you probably meant 'SLT'.
Irrespective, I'll respond to the quoted material:
What you're saying in that section is for your reports to sell themselves to you. You're basically putting the onus on them to give you the material as to why they deserve rewards. In short, you're rewarding people spending their time selling themselves to you, rather than being productive.
I find this to be indicative of Microsoft management today, and very disappointing.
Bluntly: The things that you're stating that reports should do? Wake up. That's actually your job. The fact that you're unable to keep track of what reports have done probably means that you're spending your time doing to your boss what you're asking your reports to do to you.
A destructive pattern, but one that explains Microsoft well.
@Albus Dumbledore
I am your fan now.
Great explanations to a wise manager/leader. I wish some managers/leaders from India will learn something out of it.
Elop rumored to be doing massive layoffs at Nokia and moving executive headquarters to the US. Nokia wasn't doing that well on its own but it will be a shame to see this once-great company ruined by Microsoft-style mismanagement.
Issues with weak offers are causing qualified applicants to think twice about accepting them. Without inbound handcuffs to keep people here longterm, expect that experienced new hires are going to keep on talking to any headhunter that calls. Just because it was the best job we could find at this point, as we looked at our financial obligations today, doesn't mean we want to stay. If the performance reviews are as heinous as outlined here, will re-evaluate choosing Microsoft after the first set of bonus/stock/increase has come. If it's not substantially an upgrade from where things are now, I will use this as the place to look from, as any wage is better than unemployment and tapping into retirement funds. How many more billion dollars of net profit a quarter would MSFT need to have, before compensating employees better? And this ridiculous idea of hacking the benefits that made the lower wages seem okay - come on, it's totally unnecessary, and the feudal kingdom where Lisa B. and now maybe Steve own basketball teams, but the rest of us live small - it's not likely to encourage anyone to come in to work and do something amazing.
Paying people well is really an okay thing to do. It should buy you some good work, and people who are less worried are bound to work harder. All of you managers and up, who are pleased to have squeezed someone on an offer, knowing they would take it to survive, and try to get things back on track - imagine how much better it would have been to have hired someone who would want to stay.
As to the Amazon vs. Microsoft thing, have interviewed both places, and will need to cast the vote with those who have found the Amazon interview process to be full of inflated egos, really disorganized process, and more arrogance than quality. Hilariously to me and all my references, they thought I wouldn't be able to keep up with their fast pace. Fast pace must be why their site is so incredibly ugly.
Ballmer Said to Plan Microsoft Management Shake-Up to Boost Tech Expertise
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-02-07/ballmer-said-to-plan-microsoft-management-shake-up-to-boost-tech-expertise.html?cmpid=yhoo
Microsoft Corp. Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer plans a management shuffle that will put in place more senior product executives who have a strong engineering background, two people with knowledge of the decision said.
Maybe he should go too in the shakeup since he doesn't have a strong engineering background himself!
"You do realize that over the last couple of years IBM now has more employees in India than in the US, right?"
So? IBM, MS, and most other large multinationals compete globally for markets and talent. You can whine about it here or on the Seattle PI MS blog like you normally do, but that's the way it is.
WP7 bug # 1 - Marketplace Hub Freezes
Open the Marketplace hub.
Browese through seven or eight apps
- Expand the product descriptions
- Expand the reviews
- Open up the screen shots and scroll through them
- Don't purchase any of these apps, just keep looking at new ones.
After about the eighth app, the hub will freeze up in "Loading..." screen.
At that point, the only action that works is to hit the "home" button to return to the main screen. If you tap on the Marketplace tile, the screen will switch to "Loading..." for awhile and then throw you right back to the phone's main screen.
The only way to recover is to do a full power-down on the phone.
WP7 Bug #2 - Unauthorized Feedback Transmissions
Go into "Settings" and disable your phone's "Send Feedback" option.
Power the phone all the way down (through the "Goodbye" screen).
Power the phone back up.
Check the "Settings" page again and you'll see that "Send Feedback" has been re-enabled. Other phone settings are correctly preserved across the reboot.
This setting is automatically enabled every time the phone is hard-rebooted.
So without any notification (and in spite of your specific instructions to the contrary), WP7 will use your data plan to send feedback to the mothership.
Rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic is starting again. So who's getting move around this time?
Here's a Go Do for KT: leave!
Take half of the partners with you on the way out!
@Harry Potter
You might have made great contribution but when those tasks are not on my priority list; I won’t consider them as best effort because you made no difference where it really matters.
Did you explained or set the clear expectations with your directs that what is in your top priority list at any point in time? If I consider my case I asked my manager N number of times these things and did not got any proper answer.
Try refreshing my memory with your accomplishments a month or so before peer ranking.
what are you getting paid for?
That's why we have such a worst culture in MS.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-02-07/ballmer-said-to-plan-microsoft-management-shake-up-to-boost-tech-expertise.html
"Microsoft Corp. Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer plans to extend a management reshuffling aimed at adding senior product executives with an engineering background, two people with knowledge of the decision said. "
You are seriously complaining about the API function names? That seems like a pretty trivial problem.
Don't kid yourself. It's a huge problem.
To Harry Potter, newly promoted manager: Congratulations, for a new manager you represented the self serving manager philosophy very well.
His posts are a window into the cancer that is eating Microsoft alive. MS has become filled with over-paid, smug, piss poor managers like this one that at very best qualify to be an L57 STE
to: Harry Potter (the new manager)
from: another manager (5+ years in the role)
1. It is great that you don't look at your folks as 59,60-62.
2. Your comments about people with great contributions which are not on your list is not good. It is your job and responsibility to make sure that your folks set good commitments aligned with your goals and the goals of your org. You must recognize people with great contributions. Sometimes tasks change and priorities shift. It is possible for someone to have worked long time on a task that becomes unimportant. Try to recognize this person regardless of the fact that the priorities have changed.
3. Regarding "For those people who crib on this site; if you are a bad energy for the team, - You won’t be rewarded and promoted. We don’t manage you out; we just don’t recognize your accomplishments because you hurt the team spirit and energy and we are better off without you."
You should not confuse accomplishments and contributions with your perception of a person's energy. If in your opinion someone is "bad energy", it is your job to talk to that person and resolve the problem. In some cases this may not be possible and you'd better manage that person out. However, please recognize people when they deserve it and work with them if they have bad energy problem.
- If you can show me savings/benefits in a dollar numbers, you are doing me a HUGE help.
I have always wondered. How money much is enough?
The company pulls in 20 billion dollars every 90 days. Over 85 billion in liquid assets. Over 40 billion in cash. It has no significant debt. It is on the list of the top 5 corporations in America hoarding cash.
In short, Microsoft has never seen so much money.
But yes, after devoting a life of service it still needs to jerk me off on the finer points of my career stage profile - so if I am really lucky I can muster another annual 1.5% cost of living increase.
And to think - I am one of the 40,000 lucky ones that the company calls "full time" ..
Pathetic.
A woman in Europe recently contacted me via Twitter, saying her husband is interviewing at MS and what could I tell her about affordable housing, commute time, and so on.
Traffic? Among the nations 10th worst.
Affordable housing? (I just gagged all over myself)
The eastside has grown-up into a city, and is just not affordable anymore. 90 grand at MS gets you into an apartment living paycheck to paycheck. Even going out to snohomish has gotten to be inaccessible to many MS families.
IBM - new All-Time high today ($164.82). 11.7% higher year-to-date. 33% higher than a year ago (Feb 8, 2010).
MSFT - 0.7% higher year to date. 1.7% higher than a year ago.
Doesn't it feel great to work at Microsoft? If only we could actually become the next IBM...
The idiot financial analyst types are now speculating that Nokia may ship WP7 on their phones. No disrespect to anyone here who worked on WP7, but that would be the stupidest thing Nokia could do. Bye bye Nokia. It was nice knowing you.
I've chatted with some devs about WP8. The plan seems pretty cool, at least what these guys are doing. I do hope they ship.
On the other hand WP7 is a dud. Forget a minute about the bugs, and the half-assed functionality. (I wonder how many more apps there'd be in Marketplace if they had only included sockets?) NO ONE outside the Redmond reality distortion field gives a crap about it. It could cure cancer and we would still get nowhere, and it sure as hell doesn't cure cancer, it actually kind of sucks. I don't know how much longer we can keep pumping money into a project just to stroke our collective ego.
So now people are saying they'd like it to kill Nokia, too? I don't know who came up with that, but they probably own stock in Google and Apple.
Mini - you have lost your touch. I use to come here to see a truly fair view of the state of Microsoft, perhaps middle age is making you weary?
Microsoft may continue to plod along, but the company is finally heading into decline:
1. Leadership exists in droves. Where are the great leaders? Watch them run ... and the content ones stay.
2. Lack of vision at the leadership level (to the SMSG commenter - Kevin Turner, Mr. Walmart, the guy who only cares about the scorecard. When a company has a sub like the UK miss plan by a metric ton for 3 years and then 'voila' show up and win sub of the year thanks to a green scorecard and light quota - then go right back into the dump (this year) - it is time to step up and find a real sales leader. KT isn't it). Microsoft has turned into the most process heavy company I have ever known. Cut out half the processes - get back to the customer!
3. Read How the Mighty Fall, I think they wrote the part on hubris and mega egos about leaders like Kevin Turner. Go into the field and ask about the Russian jet story, or the fact that he wouldnt eat with a client because he doesnt like fancy foods - he like burgers, and on and on. His mega ego is poison. Please ... Elop .. come back ... bring us back to the days of a down to earth leader who loved the people, not himself.
4. Windows Phone 7, come on Microsofties, buy away - because no one else is. Google Android is taking the show, destroying all competition and WP7 is a disaster because it is not relevant to the market. Balmer once ranted at a town hall that selling 17M phones a year means nothing - Microsoft needs hundreds of millions - and it still hasnt change. Claim defeat - buy Blackberry - at least it will make MS relevant (for a little while until they borg it up)
5. And on the topic of the iPad, that is not the tsunami ... check out CES .. 106 new android tablets. Honeycomb almost there. And what is microsoft doing? Trying to jam windows desktop onto the HP slate. GOODNESS! At least put Win Phone 7 on the tablet! But no, another dog is born. Does no one else weep at the fact that MS invented the tablet in 2002 and hasnt figured out how to make it work because of the desktop centric myopia?
6. And last the cloud. Lower margins .. more competition.
Microsoft needs to find a good old fashioned leader who cares in each division. Who loves the group, is willing make hard decisions, cut out process, cut down jobs to make it more efficient and rebuild the culture. No fancy visions, no mega ego leaders, just good solid people who do not bask in the light of a scorecard and process upon process upon process.
Mini Microsoft ... where is the voice of reason? Where is the voice of change? You talk about job offers, but would you ever change or are you like the majority of MS people .. plodding along ... willing to complain about things, but not really do anything.
That is what is killing the company. All talk, no action.
Microsoft Corp. Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer plans to extend a management shake-up aimed at adding senior product executives with an engineering background, two people with knowledge of the decision said.
Changes may be announced this month, said one of the people, who declined to be named because the plans are private. Last month, Ballmer pushed out server division president and 23- year company veteran Bob Muglia, saying the company needed new leadership that could focus on areas such as cloud software.
The move would expand on an effort to promote managers who have engineering skills and experience executing product plans - - a bid to help Microsoft catch up with rivals such as Apple Inc. and Google Inc. in Web services, smartphones and tablet computers. The overhaul also may quell criticism from the board and investors that Microsoft is falling behind in some markets. Four top executives have left the company since May.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-02-07/ballmer-said-to-plan-microsoft-management-shake-up-to-boost-tech-expertise.html?cmpid=yhoo
"But it's no KIN, so... success! Yeah."
Considering KIN was on the market all of 6 weeks, that is quite the high bar you have set there Mini.
How about this design blunder (how did this ever make it past a design review?):
http://social.answers.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/windowsphone7/thread/de5441af-e5b0-4bee-9b9c-41511ee2d80f
See anything familiar in this story of the decline of DEC?
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/08/technology/business-computing/08olsen.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=DEC&st=cse
Would have been refreshing to see this memo cross the wires internally. MS situation not *quite* as drastic, but certainly on the path.
http://www.engadget.com/2011/02/08/nokia-ceo-stephen-elop-rallies-troops-in-brutally-honest-burnin/
And I've got to say, the culture that Ballmer and LisaB have created is really weary.
Yes Mini. The culture that both sucks and blows not only simultaneously but at the same time, is truly a marvelous thing.
There is a cure for weariness ...
I heard from a friend that DevDiv gave select employees a sweet 8-10% raise. Does anyone know if this is rumor or there is some truth to this?
Who Needs PCs? Growth Slips As Tablet Demand Explodes
One year ago, former VP Dick Brass wrote his NYT Op-ed saying that MS had become a clumsy, uncompetitive innovator and was being disrupted. Ballmer and MS’s PR mouthpiece vigorously denied it. A year later, tablets have already wreaked havoc on PC sales, iPad II is reported to be in production, Android has been completely rewritten for tablets, and MS is still working on its v1 response which isn't expected before mid 2012 at the earliest.
Score: Brass 1: Ballmer 0.
In October, Goldman technology analyst Sarah Friar downgraded MS and raised several concerns. Ballmer called her analysis and recommendations “nutty”. Her main points:
- iPad/Android would eat into PC sales
- 2011 would prove to be a more challenging year for MS with growth slowing from 12% to 7%
- Mobile OS market share would remain at single-digits despite the launch of WP7
- the stock would be locked below $29 unless the dividend was increased
Score: Friar 1: Ballmer 0.
3. We must integrate our product strategy!!! Selling the integrated story is a potentially unique differentiator for MSFT. Our products have always worked better together than our people have, but now even our products don't work well together. Good news is product integration is fixable, but the bad news is it requires people willing and able to do so and I've yet to meet any senior leaders in a BG who could do this.
My guess is that if you are an SMSG GM then you have never met someone in a BG with the power to integrate product. The firewall between marketing and engineering is so extreme that it's dysfunctional. Not until you reach the president level do senior leaders begin to understand what MYR means to 50% of MSFT's employees.
Oh, and I think I'm going to take my HiPo ass out the door before I'm unfit to work anywhere else.
Lawsuits for stealth layoffs? So last year. This year it's hire every warm body that comes in because we can't keep up with attrition.
Ballmer once more excels!
First, he makes everyone believe he will be promoting those with "engineering skills". Then, he promotes Satya Nadella to president of Microsoft’s Server and Tools Business.
I rest my case...
Nadella didn't have a good track record inside Microsoft and probably was one of the less qualified persons to head STB: Dynamics wasn't growing when he was in charge. Search was heading to the gutter until Qi Lu was brought in from outside.
Why, why, why?
Wow Nadella for STB President! I guess Ballmer continues on his mantra - till the time you are in HIS good books, it doesn't matter if you have previously failed in your leadership initiatives, you will be rewarded. In Nadella's case I dont think it went well in small bus apps and recently search where not much breakthrough against google. Wow Steve, you continue to amaze us with your picks. I guess, this time he thought promoting Mehdi might not bode well for his conscious, oh or may be he just failed once (MSN) and one needs two failures now to be President :-)
(Hint to readers, if someone is not articulate enough to be a high school graduate, they likely aren't a Microsoft employee.)
How I wish that were true! I've read first revisions from too many PUMs and now GMs that were - despite Word's spelling and grammatic aids - nearly incomprehensible.
(Not limited to execs; however, it's more surprising when shown by an exec.)
And one more thing, please don't confuse exuberance with capability
Harry, don't confuse arrogance and confidence.
Not MS Employee but a very interested party, made $$$ as Solution Provider in the 1990's. Loved the quarterly numbers. Ballmer knows how to placate investors. Here's hoping the MS head-rolling exercise is far from over in the executive suites. Ya think someone's reading Mini-MS up there? heh
Soon HP will begin shipping PC's without paying a Microsoft tax, for the first time in many years. HP gave notice today that they'll do their best to ditch Microsoft in every possible way. You may find yourself running Windows on HP computers in a virtual OS session, within the HP WebOS desktop. That's how Apple's Mac owners use Windows today. Three magic words: No Windows Tax. Soon.
This Friday Microsoft and Nokia are supposed to announce a joint venture of some kind. A future version of the Windows Phone 7 mobile OS software that will be tightly coupled to phones designed and built by Nokia is on deck. I like to think of the new venture as "Microkia" and their new product as the "Phune" because I love rhyming, and that rhymes with Zune. I won't call it a certain fail, because I know that billions of dollars can buy success.
I believe people would rather pay a little extra for a Phune, rather than put up with an uncontrolled virus-laden OS like Android. However, Apple's iPhone and HP's webOS phones both have huge head starts. Anyone that believes WP7 is not a v1.0 OS hasn't been paying attention. If you don't want to call it v1.0.1 then perhaps v1984 would be more appropriate, because that's when cut & paste became standard OS features.
Finally, it appears that Microsoft's ability to execute in mobile devices, and Steve Ballmer's job, is on the line. Glad I'm on the sidelines for this one!
STB President: Sathya comes with a legacy of the Bing v1 failure. Looking forward to see what changes he brings to the table based on those learnings. Poor Amitabh, he is rightly pissed. Azure seems like the only future looking initiative in STB and he has been dissed.
Meanwhile Amazon AWS is growing like weed, getting more entrenched thereby establishing a moat with a lot of websites. Clearly STB missed the bus here; focussed too much on VMWare but did not notice the growth of AWS.
so...what's the feedback on Satya Nadella?
@Observations from an SMSG GM through MYR:
I wish I had worked for you. You apparently get it. Been out of the SMSG gulag that KT runs over there in 121 for about six months now; just start to detoxify from the experience.
@Harry Potter,
What a load of crap! Get off your high horse you smug moron. You are the reason why ICs are so frustrated.
Stop letting your ICs put in countless hours that will not pay off for their career advancement. Do you realize that if you set clear expectations (SMART ring a bell), you could have all those hours the employee is willing to spend on fruitless projects go toward making a better product. Did they not teach this in your management training?
Take some advice from the MYCD and career compass crap you shove down your ICs throats, and learn to be a leader instead of another clueless schmuck who perpetuates the toxic culture.
Mini a post on the ongoing leadership changes and the way forward for microsoft. In MS India we had gotten used to high attrition and high profile exits however the latest has me asking for a comment on the future of microsoft given the recent leadership changes.
OMG! Satya was promoted! And he's leaving OSD to join Tools. When this kind of thing happens, we better fasten our seat belts...it's going to be a long fall.
Unless humpty dumpty is finally "conducted" to his much deserved retirement. Hopefully soon - I wanna see my shares rise again.
Also, Craig, I'd love to know what successes you've brought to the company as of late.
$70M of stock sales just since 9/09. Yeah, somebody should be asking what success that bought.
@Harry Potter:
I was a successful Microsoft manager for six years. I left for Apple.
I've now been with Apple for over three years. The first six months, I had to detox from Microsoft - the "leadership" style you articulated, the fear-based culture, the focus on politics vs. the work. I had to relearn how to do anything well.
That you *actually* admitted that you "don't talk" to the levels below you? It's so shocking. I literally caught my breath when you said it. And how someone's work isn't important if it's not your priority? I read that and it literally feels shocking.
I've never posted on this blog before, it feels disrespectful. I love Microsoft, I'm rooting for all of the amazing things I know it can do and will do. But you are so damaging and the power of your new manager hat is very dangerous to your team.
I'm just so glad that "managers" like you rarely last for a second in my environment. We're actually held accountable to developing our people and creating an environment where our teams shine and do their best work. After reading your comments, I'm feeling a little desperate to get the talented people I know to get out of there while they still can.
They have been increasing workloads, cutting benefits, freezing pay, pressuring you to not use vacation time, using contractors, etc... and will eventually be sending your job offshore... all for one reason - greed- 500X your salary is still not enough for them.
Okay, where are all these unemployed CS majors, and engineers? My company has resorted to creating a 4 month training program to train smart finance students to fill up the employee ranks.
Don't assume the results of the toxic MS culture, where short term profits are rewarded beyond anything else, right from the top, is a sign of "job-stealing"
I'm not sure whether to take you seriously; you write 'Principle', when you mean 'Principal'.
If you subscribe to devjobs mail list, almost every week you can see those same principals and partners make same mistake. I have seen e-mail from principal dev manager looking for 'principle dev lead' :)
If you can show me savings/benefits in a dollar numbers, you are doing me a HUGE help.
I have always wondered. How money much is enough?
Well, his incentive is to slash costs any way it can, as he will get his portion through higher bonus (and his bonus max is waaay biger than yours).
It is sad time that this rich company does not allow me, SDE, to order a laptop, or extra monitor, or myriad of other small improvements.
Rumor is, Dave Cutler and Amitabh Srivastava have left Microsoft in the light of the recent STB events.
Steve, was it worth it?
90 grand at MS gets you into an apartment living paycheck to paycheck. Even going out to snohomish has gotten to be inaccessible to many MS families.
I know eastsiders with families who make $60k and have a good lifestyle are extremely proud of how much they make, so you saying that you can barely scrape by on $90k is entitlement plain and simple and is frankly repulsive. Softies think that Audis and XBoxes and smartphones and ski vacations in Whistler are basic "cost of living" expenses and then they wonder where all the money went at the end of the year. It's sick, and it gives us a bad reputation with other Seattleites.
>Poor Amitabh, he is rightly pissed.
He was eased out of his position. It is high time to clear out dead wood at L68+ from BobMu/Amitabh orgs. Give credit to SteveB for cleaning stuff up.
Office/Windows needs some massive house cleaning at L68+ to eliminate the deadwood that has built up there over the past twenty years.
http://conversations.nokia.com/2011/02/11/open-letter-from-ceo-stephen-elop-nokia-and-ceo-steve-ballmer-microsoft/?mobile
First three points:
• Nokia will adopt Windows Phone as its primary smartphone strategy, innovating on top of the platform in areas such as imaging, where Nokia is a market leader.
• Nokia will help drive and define the future of Windows Phone. Nokia will contribute its expertise on hardware design, language support, and help bring Windows Phone to a larger range of price points, market segments and geographies.
• Nokia and Microsoft will closely collaborate on development, joint marketing initiatives and a shared development roadmap to align on the future evolution of mobile products.
It looks like Windows Phone just got a huge boost. It'll be good to see some real competition from Microsoft.
Ballmer needs to get a clue from Mubarak!
You might have made great contribution but when those tasks are not on my priority list; I won’t consider them as best effort because you made no difference where it really matters. I don’t stop you from spending long hours on those tasks because I hope that at end, you might come up with great ideas to improve and ways to do things better.
... and this is where you fail
Barbara Gordon and Marlena Werder are on point to execute on these strategies. Move jobs offshore to India and China. If you doubt the preceding, just check how much vacant space exists in Charlotte and Las Colinas. If they could fire all expensive tier-3 engineers in the US and Western Europe, they would.
The writing was on the wall for PSS in 2003 and 2004. They had the famous "Customer Focused Culture" offsite which was cover for "Job Fair" and they said without actually saying, "If you want to ensure your job security, move to the field." They were marketing Premier and MCS to the PSS folks. Now Charlotte uses less than one building and the place is a ghost town. Most of the people who still have offices and cubicles there work from home or the field most of the time if they're not the 20% left in PSS.
On the hiring, SMSG, particularly MCS is on a frenzy right now. The problem, to link back to the KT comment, is foresight. We riffed so many good people because a line was drawn over utilization to date and poof, now we're short-handed. So now the pendulum swings the other direction and we can't hire enough folks. Then you start talking to folks about pipeline and I can see a bloat coming again.
So this comment hit home and is directly related to the first one. So in 2004 when they had the job fair, many of the folks took it to mean "Find a job that someone overseas can't easily do, like visit customers in the US on a daily basis." So now it is 2011 and we're so short-staffed in MCS that we'll sell a SOW and then if it is for a specialization that we can't staff, we'll fly someone out from India to staff it. It is as if he EM's and Sales folks are on the hook to sell 1000 man-years of services, but we only have 850 people in the US to staff those services. If you're in a space where a partner can't be leveraged to staff the engagement, you either have to give the customer their money back or fly someone in from overseas to do the job. The overseas consultant is technically sound, but they are in a strange place, their family is on the opposite side of the planet, and they are forced to do 4-6 week solid stretches without going home. Not good for the employee, which translates to not good for the customer either. So there's your "Customer Focused Culture"
"IBM - new All-Time high today ($164.82). 11.7% higher year-to-date. 33% higher than a year ago (Feb 8, 2010).
MSFT - 0.7% higher year to date. 1.7% higher than a year ago."
52-week high for Oracle today too. A lot of stocks are hitting their all-time or 52-week highs. It's easy to forget if you own MS but we've had a bull market for a while now.
Google and IBM should both pass MS next. Probably in that order, although IBM is closer right now.
MS -2.26% for the year and the breakdown has only just begun. Even Oracle might be worth more than MS before the year is out.
I bet Steve wishes he could have dumped all his shares late last year instead of just 20%.
My Career Compass led me to the Elephant's Graveyard. It did not point North, South, East or West, just straight down ...
Judging by table talk in cafeterias, the overall take on Nadella as head of STB within DevDiv ranges from "meh" to "WTF?", with an overall gloomy attitude.
Lawsuits for stealth layoffs? So last year. This year it's hire every warm body that comes in because we can't keep up with attrition.
I am pretty sure my entire team is looking for another job. Plus the chef in the cafeteria confided that he is planning to quit.
Management: delightfully clueless- thumbs up there asses, thumbs up there asses
Hopefully soon - I wanna see my shares rise again.
..
Corporate shareholders <= top 1% of America. MSFT could trade at $1 a share and all other things being equal I doubt the average worker would lose any sleep over it.
CNBC had a great special on Enron awhile back. The executives were shorting millions of shares, while standing in auditoriums rallying the rank and file workers.
Lesson: Watch what the executives do, not what they say.
I heard from a friend that DevDiv gave select employees a sweet 8-10% raise.
Wooptie do. Even if MS handed out 20% raises- it is hardly some kind of saintly favor. It wouldn't even make up for the last few years of paltry merit increases, rapid inflation, MSR BS, late nights/stress/lost family time.
Further, lets be realistic. You would be an idiot to think that it would ever flow equitably to the low level IC's on the ground that busted butt and slept in their cubicles to make WP7 or Windows 8 or Azure.
Where it will flow is to where it always flows - a small minority. The executives and managers that game the system and spin tales of 35% increases in productivity via their savvy leadership skills.
Visionary principles and partners that could just as well screw up Hello World will be next in line with their hands out.
Once things pick up; even the most loyal employees will be looking to move on. After all - how much can people take?
So? IBM, MS, and most other large multinationals compete globally for markets and talent
That is the lie.
What they are competing for is lower wages, not higher talent.
As an IT worker in the United States today the downward pressure comes directly from the subsidaries of these big US corporations.
Billion dollar offshore operations such as VanceInfo, job shops like Volt have made lowering wages and destroying American families their core business.
I have a story to share about my time at Microsoft that you just wouldn't believe. I have never been treated so terribly in my life.
And to all the non-IC's on this board, no, it wasn't me - it was the system.
Does anyone ever feel like we work in The Firm?
I'll share once this is over. Any GM's + read this board?
Just read that Microsoft suffered a strategic defeat in the Federal Govern Public Sector space..17,000 apps clients went to Google at the General Services ADministration. A few more of these defeats puts Google squarely in contest for MSFT install base.From what I see the execs there should spend a little more time on overseeing account strategy and managing account relationships and issues and less time on career building and industry schmoozing and internet presence.Over and over again the majority of managers who they hire in the field drift off toward career promotion and have less concern for cultivating the talents of their reports and sharing their knowledge with them...it is a pattern they need to address.
I have to agree that $90K gets you plenty in this region. I have been supporting 2 people on about that for a few years, and living in walkable, high-rent neighborhoods the whole time. I've still generated a lot of savings in that time. The only reason I would ever be made to feel like I was living paycheck to paycheck is when I take expensive vacations and refuse to dip into savings to cover the cost. (This is an easy enough problem to have.)
However, I do also agree that the rank and file doesn't see enough of Microsoft's massive profits. This is a general problem with American businesses in recent years. They talk about cutting costs and laying off but they still make obscene amounts of money even without that. Meanwhile a bunch of us peons in the trenches are working our asses off, days, nights, weekends. We don't have a fair slice of the wealth that generates. Meanwhile there are a lot of over-promoted types making a lot more for doing much less. In a lot of cases they make boneheaded decisions that create busywork for others and hurt the bottom line, but they get rewarded for these bad choices.
Microsoft reward for big things. Imagine who can claim big thing s (with emphasis on “big”), PM and management, right? And some really exceptional developers.
Being a developer,
I have to spend countless hours to fix nasty bugs and make new features. Spend time understanding new technology and explaining to PM.
We have really tough competition for developer at Microsoft. Lot of great DEV, you have to give sacrifice personal time to be recognized being developer.
Feedback from management:
You did a good job and meet your level goal, great!
You fixed the bugs and made features, which is the job.
In order to have great review, I needed to do something extra ....xxx...
My PM:
He/She was driving feature, driving new processes, driving xxx meetings.
Meeting with xxx peoples in top management.
Got Gold Start for delivering great feature with minimum bugs. Got into 20% bucket.
All feature credit goes to the PM and some folks in Management. I was just a good developer. It doesn't matter who spend time on really delivering/making.
Being worked in other big companies, if you are just good developer but not geek or exceptionally talented, don’t join Microsoft as developer. You will be surprised to know that you are not in the great category here.
Join as PM/Test/management if you really want to join.
Developer are their own enemy. All developer think that they are SMART and they take pride in showing themselves as super hero. When it takes week to deliver something, MS developer says 3 days to show he is SMART. Then he spends extra hour each day and some weekend (in most cases) to prove he can do it faster. This creates a competition which management takes a good advantage.
Surprisingly Test/PM role doesn’t have these issues.
Developer at MS doesn’t need to show management they are SMART and spend their personal time for nothing. Be a real SMART guys.
It looks like Windows Phone just got a huge boost. It'll be good to see some real competition from Microsoft.
It could be a huge boost or it could be the final nail in Nokia's coffin. Not sure why anybody would assume the former.
The issue with 60K at 90K MS vs Outside is that with outside, the work stops at 5PM. You have time to spend with your kids and no
10% worries.
You can live well with 90K MS but the stress sort of make it a bad experience.
"I have a story to share about my time at Microsoft that you just wouldn't believe. I have never been treated so terribly in my life.
And to all the non-IC's on this board, no, it wasn't me - it was the system.
Does anyone ever feel like we work in The Firm?
I'll share once this is over. Any GM's + read this board?"
Enough with the clandestine teasing -- either share your story or don't.
Yes, GM's read this board -- mostly for amusement and/or diversion, given the quality of comments usually posted. Nobody at the partner level cares about your story.
My Career Compass led me to the Elephant's Graveyard. It did not point North, South, East or West, just straight down ...
This time it is not a bug. I have a solid repro.
;)
You might have made great contribution but when those tasks are not on my priority list; I won’t consider them as best effort because you made no difference where it really matters. I don’t stop you from spending long hours on those tasks because I hope that at end, you might come up with great ideas to improve and ways to do things better.
Wow. And with that folks, you can see the inside thinking of a manager at Microsoft.
Not afraid to let directs work long hours for free; on the off-chance that they might produce something of value to them.
Hey - when can I get on your team? I always wanted a job in unpaid research.
The Win32 "magic parameters" are there for extensibility. There's no reason to go all the way down to the Win32 API these days anyway. There are far nicer layers on top (e.g., QT, XPF)
Mini, please write a summary of your experience on how good/bad incentives and management have gotten and the main tools which are causing pain or recruiting talent to stay. My own opinion is horribly tainted by a bad manager and seeing the HR system's responses, but we would all benefit from a focused discussion.
From friends in non-MS companies, I've heard there's been a recent increase in folks looking from MS. Any idea what's caused it?
I don't know the groups - just a general comment that lots of folks from MS seem to be looking and applying for things right now, and it's more than usual.
Ballmer needs to get a clue from Mubarak!
Yes, microsofties should use LinkedIn to organize a demonstration in front of Building 34. Then Ballmer will probably shut down the corporate intranet. :)
As part of assessing the value of the Nokia / MSFT partnership, consider that Nokia sells well everywhere except the US. Why? Well mostly because the US is just about the only country does not use GSM exclusively, whereas Nokia helped invent GSM. Also the US is just about the only country that allows consumers to be screwed over by the wireless companies thru locking handsets to particular carriers or only 'supporting' the handsets they authorize. So it is unclear to me what moving Nokia HQ to the US will do to address either of the preceding concerns in order to be more successful in US sales.
Nokia is strongly identified as an open platform competing well with Android on that score. Moving to WP7 will negate the OSS advantage and alienate large numbers of Nokia customers outside the US. While iOS is proprietary, its growth has slowed considerably, and Android is booming. So moving to WP7 and abandoning Symbian is very strange, especially considering that NOK internal engineering skill sets will not include WP7 at all.
Overall I would be surprised if this deal does not turn into an unmitigated disaster for Nokia, but by the time that becomes evident Elop, a well known job hopper with a history of staying no more than 2 years in any one place will have fled.
For Microsoft the deal seems a clear winner. I mean things could not really get any worse for Windows Phone (that is being outsold by its predecessor Windows Mobile) so any change is preferable to the status quo. Perhaps Elop's bumbling with SteveB as his able assistant will drive NOK market cap so low that MSFT can acquire it for chump change in order to assimilate or just destroy.
what is the best way to leave MSFT?
I have 4 weeks of vacation and 2 weeks of sick leave.
Should give notice and then take vacation or
take vacation and then give notice?
Microsoft is paying Nokia billions of dollars to adopt WP7? Isn't it supposed to be the other way around?
And those who say Microsoft is a toxic place. Learn to trust and put your faith in people.
You are breathtakingly naive and completely divorced from reality.
No-one at Microsoft who has any sense is laboring under any delusions as to exactly how toxic the workplace has become. In fact, even outsiders who follow this blog can easily discern that morale is on an ever-steepening downward trajectory as a result of the increasingly dysfunctional workplace culture.
WP7 was Microsoft's last chance in mobile phones, and it has clearly failed. By extension, Microsoft will not be a significant player in the tablet market. As the on-going shift towards mobile computing and away from Microsoft products continues, the consequences for workers at Microsoft will be dire. Expect to see more lay-offs (particularly of the stealth variety, to try and reduce costs and to avoid negative publicity). There will be an increase in back-stabbing, and there will be bickering and recriminations at all levels, but particularly at the higher levels. Senior management will be desperate to save themselves, and in the face of dwindling profits will do whatever they can to delay the day of reckoning - so expect to see more and more jobs sent off-shore, further cuts in benefits, and very little if anything in the way of pay rises. Employees will be engaged in a fight for survival, and the office politics will become much more vicious.The politically astute will survive, while those who are technically competent will either be shown the door or will leave in disgust. A tipping point may be reached, at which time a revolt by shareholders who have finally run out of patience will ensue; this would precipitate a mass culling of senior management. This would be followed by the spinning-off or shutting down of unprofitable divisions, and inevitably by mass redundancies across the rest of the company. What would remain would be a rump, a mere shadow of the former Microsoft.
He who lives by the death spiral dies by the death spiral. While Microsoft isn't spiralling just yet, it has clearly started to wobble.
On Amitabh - I heard my Director of PM talking to someone in the espresso line saying he was glad he is gone because he was a cancer.
I asked him about it at our all hands and he just said he thought Bill Lang would do a great job bringing everyone together.
So what's the vote? I tend to believe the guy I know who has been around these people more than me.
I posted the comment about the deal with Nokia, which is probably the biggest and most important thing Steve Balmer has done while in his role.
Waiting for the fresh blog post about this. This is HUGE. Microsoft has effectively bought Nokia.
Okay, where are all these unemployed CS majors, and engineers? My company has resorted to creating a 4 month training program to train smart finance students to fill up the employee ranks.
Where do you advertise your jobs?
Some companies do the same thing even if you already have a CS degree. Facebook runs a "boot camp" (the recruiter's term ; not mine) for new software developers they hire.
There are still a lot of job postings with ridiculously specific job requirements that convey an attitude on the part of the employer that one procedural programming language is so different than another that someone with a CS degree can't possibly learn it quickly enough so they need someone with specifically "X" years of experience in a particular language ("X-1" isn't good enough).
The inward focused/CYA/taking undeserved credit/backstabbing really started around 2000. Then MSFT hired IBM/Oracle/DotBomb ex-pats. The ethics and hubris were just bad...and have only become worse. Back then the money was coming in and people put up with it.
Now that Google is hiring faster than Microsoft, Microsoft's toxic culture will spread from Microsoft to Google with people moving from Microsoft to Google.
Microsoft's performance management problems are already showing up at Google:
Tips for Noogler Engineers
It is not as bad as Microsoft yet so it might be good enough for a lot of people.
MARK HURD FOR CEO!
Greasy.
Try printing in black and white only on your HP printer without color cartridges; you can't do it.
Take a look at the parts inside your HP computer.
VS2010 is not, generally speaking, slower because it uses WPF (or .NET in general). In fact, top "here be lag" spots in traces are mostly native. It's slow because it's a heap of shit code (again, still mostly native) that has been piled layer upon layer for too long without any serious re-architecturing. There's too many kludges there, nested several levels deep. And then, every release. there are even more hacks to fight back at least some of perf lost on all that crap in the first place.
On top of that, add the "not responding" messages from Windows due to anti-virus products hooked into file access taking longer on Vista and Windows 7.
The Vista to Windows 7 upgrade still needs work for similar reasons. Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor did tell me to uninstall a drawing program that works fine on Windows 7 though even though it didn't bother mentioning the software that causes the upgrade to hang.
Microsoft's administrative problems and goofy performance management system is affecting the quality of the software it produces:
Microsoft Research: Explaining Failures Using Software Dependences and Churn Metrics
Recent events seem to show that Stephen Elop is a great disciple of SteveB. So great in fact, that it has taken Elop just a few months to do at Nokia what took SteveB a decade at Microsoft: destroy substantial shareholder value, enrage employees and become a figure of fun in the market.
By the time Nokia ships a WP7 device (unless Elop is fired first), the market will have whizzed by and whatever piece of poop does ship will be pathetically behind the times.
"But along the way he hasn’t done much to help Microsoft regain its image as an agile, innovative company with a vision for steady growth into the distant future. As a result, the time has come for Ballmer to go."
Losing the tablet market does have one benefit. It finally succeeds at doing what everything and everyone else failed to do for a decade, namely put a stake through the heart of Windows and Office. As that becomes more apparent as the year progresses, even MS’s fucked up leadership will be forced to admit that continuation of the status quo - the company’s prevailing strategy for a decade - is no longer an option. The company will either do the things it should have done but has resisted all along (adapt, embrace change, innovate, disrupt, get agile, remove internal roadblocks, work together for once, figure out how to succeed in new markets, etc. ), or it will decline, and probably faster than most think possible.
I hope MS finds the courage to reinvent itself. That's what great companies do. But it's really up to you now. The industry is moving on with or without you.
At today's close, Apple's market cap is about 3.75 Dells more than Microsoft. Or to put it another way, 97% of Hewlett-Packard.
I like Ballmer's strategy. I like it a lot.
I know eastsiders with families who make $60k and have a good lifestyle are extremely proud of how much they make, so you saying that you can barely scrape by on $90k is entitlement
???
What is missing from this reply is calibration. Allow me to school you.
When I have 6 houses, 500 cars, and drop $25,000 a night on a hotel room - ok I will conceed your point. http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/02/14/944388/-Nine-Pictures-Of-The-Extreme-Income-Wealth-Gap
... until then - dude. 90K in a major metro area today is jack. I was making close to this figure twenty five years ago!! I know bell boys that made 80K thirty years ago pushing elevator buttons.
That is just the type of class war that the elites like to hear- because it obscures the bigger picture, and real discussion.
The studies on US working wages have been done. Properly adjusted for inflation, an average IT salary today should be closer to 200K
Check online. The facts are very well established:
- As of 2007, the top 1% of households (the upper class) owned 34.6% of all privately held wealth, and the next 19% (the managerial, professional, and small business stratum) had 50.5%, which means that just 20% of the people owned a remarkable 85%, leaving only 15% of the wealth for the bottom 80% (wage and salary workers).
- In terms of financial wealth (total net worth minus the value of one's home), the top 1% of households had an even greater share: 42.7% of all US wealth.
- Using standard measures, income inequality in America today is worse than most third world countries, including Egypt.
- Between 1980 and 2005, despite record productivity gains, “more than 80 percent of total increase in Americans’ income went to the top 1 percent.”
- One out of every 34 Americans who earned wages in 2008 earned absolutely nothing -- not one cent -- in 2009.
- The top 74 people made as much as the 19 million lowest-paid people in America, who constitute one in every eight workers."
It looks like Windows Phone just
got a huge boost.
Sure. All MS had to do was pay them to use their software. Give me a few billion and I'll use Windows too.
::rolls eyes::
- It’s really hard to manage people, their opinions, issues and relationships.
- Ranking peers is labors effort and time/energy sapping one.
Wish I had this guy's problems...
Good management, by which I mean strong WHI, exceeding goals and apportioning rewards fairly, is not appreciated nor rewarded by Microsoft.
Sweating your team like farm animals, managing up, cheering numb-skull projects that you full-well know are stupid and destined to fail, plus taking credit for every success and blaming others for every failure is the way to climb the ladder.
You mean.. I can get more money, by being narsasistic and running the company into the ground?
Shocking. Say it Ain't So!
Apart from the indecipherable nature of most of the 'design' you have things like methods that take 10 parameters, 3 of which are 'reserved' and developers are supposed to always pass say NULL or 0 in for those params. WTF? Public APIs with magical parameters that developers aren't supposed to use?
Hmm..
FILE_FLAG_POSIX_SEMANTICS
"Access will occur according to POSIX rules. This includes allowing multiple files with names, differing only in case, for file systems that support that naming. Use care when using this option, because files created with this flag may not be accessible by applications that are written for MS-DOS or 16-bit Windows."
...
Ok. How dare you diss our file apis on a public forum! These are your co-workers, decades of innovation! FFWD: Did you know Microsoft invented the first file??
REWIND: Some nights, when I am smoking weed in Bld 33 garage - I think like, Win32 still is the way of the future for our customers. We just need to modernize it, you know what I am talking about?
So after Ex should come Lx and Dx versions of every api; since performance and cost both count now. Most importantly for backward compatability, we are not going to deprecate anything here... you know just in case someone still wants to play Cheesy Invaders v0.8c for DOS - they won't be disappointed.
I love Borland C++ and I support this message.
They finally killed InsideMS... yay! One less place for internal marketing spam.
Q&A: Ravi Venkatesan, Microsoft India
http://www.business-standard.com/india/news/bqab-ravi-venkatesan-microsoft-india/424935/
Question: Was Stephen Elop one of the Microsoft execs who was pushing for Microsoft to buy Yahoo?
> I have a story to share about my time at Microsoft that you just wouldn't believe. I have never been treated so terribly in my life.
And to all the non-IC's on this board, no, it wasn't me - it was the system.
Does anyone ever feel like we work in The Firm?
I'll share once this is over. Any GM's + read this board?
--> You're anonymous...do tell. Otherwise you'll be written off as another troll.
> It looks like Windows Phone just got a huge boost. It'll be good to see some real competition from Microsoft.
Winmo7 is DOA if you read today's technews.
This blog is nothing more than an anti-Microsoft bash fest.
Mini-Microsoft you are doing a disservice to Microsoft.
While Microsoft certainly has some issues, it's still a great company to work for. The people in these posts who reportedly work for Microsoft paint it like it's a bleak place to work. It most certainly is not.
Responding to a few posts about CSS (PSS) cutting 25%. The intent is not to cut budgets - the money is actually being reinvested and SHIFTED from technologies/projects that currently today don't drive customer loyalty TO those that do (in a much bigger way, in innovative ways to compete with Apple). We know we need to improve how we help our customers, so I just want to clear up that we're not divesting in customer support, we're actually putting that money towards even bigger bets that will touch more people and help them have a better overall experience with their PC and phone.
I have a story to share about my time at Microsoft that you just wouldn't believe. I have never been treated so terribly in my life.
Welcome to the club, it only takes one bad managment chain wipe out gold stars and 6 years of quota over-achievement.
Having gone through “first” wave, I can assure that it’s never a pleasant discussion. Ranking peers is labors effort and time/energy sapping one. You might have made great contribution but when those tasks are not on my priority list; I won’t consider them as best effort because you made no difference where it really matters.
You position yourself as a the God. Feel sorry for your reports. Good luck with them dealing with your arrogance.
All those whining about the movement of jobs to India/China should consider this FACT... The FTE strength in India has actually GONE DOWN in the last 24 months. Over the last three years the total FTE strength has been STATIC at around 5400 and that includes IDC, GTSC, MSR, MGSI, MSIT and SMSG. the office space is marginally lower due to the closure/scale back of some offices. If MS is shipping jobs out of US then they're certainly not coming to India by shiploads certainly not for the last 3 years.
Frankly, I'm just scared. I lead a team of marketing professionals. We have so complicated doing business with the company that no mortal being could figure out how to even purchase the right products. Or, to purchase all the right components to a solution.
Why do we make it so hard to buy from us? Imagine if you went to Wal-Mart and couldn't figure out how to check-out, you'd just leave your cart and walk out. Customers hate the confusion, and yet we just continue to pile it on. Every licensing program manager, outside of WWLP, that makes new twisted licensing crap, needs to be replaced.
My $0.02 on Satya : He seems like a "good" exec - I wouldn't say the same about Yusuf (though he is good at talking).
When Satya came in, Live Search was consistently losing search share every month before the rebranding to Bing. Now it's consistently gaining market share every month and putting pressure on Google (OH : In October Marissa Mayer was forced out of the search org into local because of this - it was marketed as a promotion though).
OSD is still losing billions a year but the momentum is positive now. Satya was the common factor (Qi is good but the launch plans were made before he joined). I believe this (turning around the momentum) is good enough reason to hope that he can do the same thing for STB.
Microsoft has this gem called Silverlight - if the versions could be consolidated to have the same version on WP7, Slate/Tablets and PC (and potentially other devices), the number of developers writing apps for your platform would 10x overnight.
Why? Even with the hubub about HTML5, it is still HTML.. (oh the pain!) and virtually any .NET developer, given the choice of HTML/CSS/JavaScript versus C# and a real application event model, would choose Silverlight 9 times out of 10.
Also if I could write my app once and have it run as is on WP7, Slate and PC... Yah!
And for the devs using Java on Android and Obj-C on iPhone, would be an instant convert.
I gotta believe there is someone out of the 90k folks at Microsoft that gets Silverlight is a gem... and a business winning strategy to boost the stock!
anyone heard what's up with Bing's shakedown in the middle of the release cycle?
Nadella is gone, Viola and few other folks moved to adcenter, a few principal-level researchers left microsoft, large teams dropping test org ("devs will test themselves") etc.
It appears that no one is commenting any more. Is the system broken?
You know Mini ... I do love you, but you are full of shit. You demanded headcount reduction, when that came you criticized the methods, and now you are complaining about hiring issues. You can't have it both ways ...
Goes to show the evil of the line of thinking that profits are more important than people.
Comment on wmpoweruser.com:
This just frustrates me to no end. Microsoft have known for a long time that the future is tablets. Bill Gates was literally saying "tablets are the future" since XP. This video and WP7 (and courier, come to think of it) show that Microsoft know how to make a great tablet OS, but why oh why have they not actually done it yet?! Now Apple release a halfbaked "tablet" that doesn't really offer anything new, just iPod touch functionality, yet they will still get remembered as the ones who started it all, the ones who transitioned us all over to this new paradigm, even though Microsoft have known that this was going to happen for years. By the time the iPad actually starts to get some features that utilise the new capabilities and become truly a credible PC replacement (say iPad 3, maybe 2 thought I highly doubt it), MS might have announced a decent tablet, to ship 8 months later by which time it will be feature incomplete and absolutely everybody will already have an iPad!!!
Why indeed?
Live from MWC 2011....WP & + NOK really, really terrible decision. The big fat guy needs to now when he needs to give up. No phones sold and no one case about Windokia to come. It is really sad when two smart people make random decisions.....good luck MSFT.....last few big lots of stock shall be dumped ASAP.....your bubble will kill all of you. This is real life and not the Truman Show....get out of 98052
iPad, iPad, iPad. I COULDN'T AGREE MORE.
But I've recently come across news that may be the cavalry on their way: Asus Eee Slates and Acer Iconia.
Yes, innovative hardware manufacturers like Asus and Acer are the ones who are going to prevent the mass defection to the iOS platform and SAVE MICROSOFT'S BUTTS.
The EP121's *pen* is the ONE thing that is going to keep me from buying the iPad 2 I had already committed in my mind to getting.
The Acer Iconia and Toshiba Libretto W100 show us ideas that Steve Jobs is not yet brave enough to try but which have incredible potential - think completely reconfigurable touch interfaces and true book-like reading.
Now... MS have to do their part and support such innovative hardware by engineering a PROPER TOUCH INTERFACE - get the Surface Team working on these consumer devices already and properly unify WP7 and Win7 multitouch interfaces.
CLR/WPF/Silverlight provide the most advanced development environment on the planet - at least a generation ahead of Android and Xcode. We're all waiting for Microsoft to use it to actually create something that will beat iOS and Android!
Since Who da'Punk has apparently retired, (not letting comments through on his blog often enough to foster discussion), are there other such blogs where discussions on Microsoft can be carried on?
I work for one of your strategic OEM partners. I want to apply to Microsoft and thinking of submitting my application for a position in your WW OEM marketing and planning (745768 - sr. manager marketing strategy, as advertised on your careers site). How is the OEM planning organization? I have been lurking on this board. Is this in your SMSG or BMO organization? I don't want to move ahead if this is yet another environment which will qualify for the federal superfund program ;-)
Their was a time when I was proud to say that I worked at Microsoft. It really meant something to me.
No more.
Microsoft has a long track record of breaking rules, and hurting its own employees. They have shown their true colors time and time again. They do not support an America I would want to live in.
I suggest people in Redmond unplug and get the facts.
http://techrights.org/
- Microsoft funded the Washington Software and Digital Media Alliance, to persuade the Washington state Department of Labor and Industries to remove the provision for time-and-a-half for overtime. WA has an explicit exception for "Computer Professionals".
- Vizcaino v. Microsoft - Microsoft exploited IRS tax loopholes to get out of paying full time employees benefits. The judge suggested to Microsoft lawyers that they should "suggest to their clients that they do the right thing". It settled the 1996 class action case out of court with its employees for $97 million rather than risk a ruling. The Microsoft permatemps finally collected their due money - almost 10 years later.
- Microsoft thwarted the last unionization effort by WashTech by starting an internal disinformation campaign targeted at its own employees. By using third party contracting companies, they further made it harder for its workers to organize and leverage collective bargaining rights.
- Microsoft was recently caught using teenage children as slave labor at KYE in China. 12 hour shifts and .35 cents an hour to make their Mice.
- Microsoft India's average salary for an SDE (src: glassdoor.com) - $21,244.30/year USD - note to investors reads: "We depend on India for manpower that is why we are scaling up operations here". Obama is dining this week with tech heads hearing how H1B visa regulation hurts America.
- MS executives recently pushed to kill a state income tax in WA. They once again circuated internal propaganda to try and pursuade their own employees how to vote. They said it would hurt their "executive retention efforts"...
Next post: "Microsoft FY11Q3 Results" in ~ 2 months. Stay tuned!!!!!
I'm not even going to use it for writing tweets on Twitter, let alone writing emails. It's for screwing around, and I like screwing around
I'll bet you do precious...
I sympathize with field sales managers at Microsoft...Front line managers have a nearly impossible, poorly developed and supported jobs in making the company's bottom line. They are overextended, forced to implement demotivating review procedures and rules, rarely given any time to develop themselves from bosses over them who are completely overextended to promoting themselves within the company and outside the company. Just look at the amount of time some of these field execs devote to maintaining huge presence on the web, with the press, hosting community events, being praised by the press (due to their accessibility) and other industry colleagues.
Yet they some of them have immense territory to oversee and a large amount of direct reports. Do you really think they are motivated to take time to help their front line managers, enrich their skill sets, overcome their weaknesses and get out their hands-on with customers? Who has seen this in the last ten years? These execs have limited time to make their mark and that is where their energy will go. The easiest and quickiest way to achieve that goal is through fabrication of their image.
It is not in the DNA of Microsoft to hire and promote public-regarding managers....the type of people who go about quietly day after day helping others and making sacrifices for the team and the company good without fanfare.
Microsoft inevitably hires and promotes self-centered, aggressive, oftentimes mean, self-absorbed succophants to management. When they fail to make their numbers, they can get caught but that is after they have left a demoralized group of reports. These line managers have to politic their jobs all day appeasing every other group head. They yield little authority over their reports since they are held in fear of their retaliation on MS POll. This supports the GM's and VP's above who can keep everyone scared and divided. Not a very rosey picture I am afraid.
So Nadella had sold every share he'd collected over 19 years prior to receiving over 200K of them as a signing bonus for his new job. Yeah, that's the kind of confidence in the company I want to see in our senior leaders.
Nokia debacle. First WP7 update disaster. Stock in the tank.
Who will SteveB blame this time?
Date is 23rd Feb - for the 2nd time in my life I was feeling bad about leaving MS - IDC - because Hopcroft came to give keynote speech. wow. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Hopcroft
[My first time was when I could not play in the IDC Ground]
Now, what he stammers: How great bing is.
WOW.
And then we find out that his son is a partner architect at BING.
I just lost respect for that Guy, as well as for MS-IDC. I don't expect ass licking from someone who is a Turing Award winner.
On the point of reviews and pay:-
Here are the historical ratings of me:-
1. [after 6 months of joining 2004] 3.5
2. 3.0
3. Mid Year - a promotion. [An award by GM also]
4. Excellent Performer - bucket 1
5. Good Performer bucket 3 with promotion.
6. Under performer. [Changed team prior to that]
7. Excellent Performer - bucket 3.
6. Mid Year - bucket 5. [Team dismantled]
7. Last review [1 month ago received 3 job offers] under-performer.
Awards Earned in MS: 3 awards in total, one EE selection award.
Patent Award: 1.
My first managers manager said that
he tremendously values me, because someone has to counter argue the popular notion to check if at all the popular notion makes sense.
He explained that is why people like me are needed.
My last managers manger explained that the fear I have about windows future is baseless, Windows is not threatened - and people at *high* places are angry about me for that view.
I identified the rot - and decided to leave.
[On a side note - 7 months after leaving MS my salary has just doubled.]
Looks like LisaB took down InsideMS in response to MiniMSFT no longer being updated.
WP7 update. What a joke. I bet Elop is looking for his next job already.
Mini, are you Rip Van Winkling again? Either moderate or get the fuck out of the way.
real embarrassment for WP7 today, roll out a tiny update for WP7 and bricked a whole bunch of Samsung WP7 phones out there.
where is the test team? how did it get sign off? maybe jus fire the entire test team in charged.
with so much resource pouring into WP7, why such a fuck-up?
-disappointed employee
WP 7 update bricking phones...first update that we release referred to as a disaster in the press.
I am sure Andy Lees will get a bonus, stock award, and possibly another unwarranted promo for this...
>Dev10 looks like a WPF application, but it's not written the way any sane person would write one, and most of model code underneath is still native (yeah, it has XAML bound to COM objects in places - how's that for perf and readability?)
This analysis smacks of poor engineering practice. I am not familiar with the code base, but it sounds like you are. You say 'the way any sane person would write one', this implies that the team had the option of completely re-writing/re-architecting what must be massive amounts of existing code to be more WPF-ey. This seems unlikely given what I know about large scale (Microsoft) software engineering and the actual act of delivering software with fixed resources and on a given time schedule.
I am sure it makes you feel smugly superior pointing to it and saying 'what idiots!', of course not knowing what (if anything) you did in the release or really ever in your career it is hard to know how accurate your judgement is (I am guessing 'not very').
Most of the times you see decisions that appear very stupid there are normally two possibilities
1: The person that made the decisision is an idiot. This seems unlikely as they were at least smart enough to pass Microsoft's interview loop (though that isn't hard now days) and competent enough to convince the others on the team to entrust them to do this work.
2: There is some underlying cause that is not immediately obvious that lead the people down that path.
Perhaps they just 'don't get it', or perhaps you are oversimplifying complex matters, or are just a troll.
You speak of the performance issues being heavily in native code, so it sounds like you are involved in investigating these things. You then imply the places they 'bind XAML to COM objects' is a bad idea for 'perf and readability'. Are the measurements bearing this out for perf? Or are you just trying to boost your own (low?) self-esteem again?
As for readability, well I know a bit about XAML and a little about COM, enough to know that one can't just bind XAML -> COM objects, so there must be a layer in between. Does that layer not help readability? Are you intimately familiar with the problem space and still find it 'unreadable'? Or, are you (more likely) an armchair quarterback with little real domain knowledge who decided they should tell everyone else how to solve problems in their domain?
This is fun. I think I am going to go to work, open some random code in an area I know nothing about, and then start filing bugs telling people how stupid they are and how they should just change this all in ways I describe, in my infinite wisdom! You sound like a principal level idiot, or perhaps an 'architect'.
People have lost integrity here.
A lot of people who are in MS for more than 15 years and do not have challenging skill set and are managers/leads just scrap by blaming others and kissing ass.
People who work hard, honestly deliver good are left behind and are given BS/lies of not getting promoted. While people who kiss ass are given preference.
Such a terrible place to work.
where are the posts, mini? We miss you!
hello!
I have finished all the comments twice. Can we get some new material for reading/digestion
The poison of a free mobile OS... (Android), well it's not completely free to implement, still takes resources tweaking and adjusting, but getting license fees is a much harder sell plus that hardware companies were never too happy with a single OS supplier, the business world hates to have -one- supplier, it cannot last. MS could have had such a comfortable position in this market.... Win7 is recovering because of the existing install base of XP, Vista and lack of competition, Win mobile has no base to recover from, it needs to fight it's way in from the bottom.. The fact that Google focused on mobile devices first tells you something..it was a wide open market with only propriety OS (Apple, RIM), this was a once in a lifetime opportunity given by....
okay, sorry to use this post, but the big G is knocking on the door and I am very confused about leaving the big M. I know there are few folks here who did the M->G transition and I want to know if MTV is indeed better than Redmond. Personally I dont find WA that big a drag and am pretty happy with it (I think CA is way over rated).
I love my job here for now - lost of exciting time writing features from scratch. Maybe it's inertia, may be it's complacency, laziness..maybe fear ...but someone pls tell me pros and cons of both places.........please!
thanks!
I'm coming for you mini...
Juniper Networks and Nokia, and to a smaller degree Sage, have all been attracking a lot of Microsoft employees lately.
Following Nokia‘s strategy shift announcement, the Finnish mobile phone giant has just announced that it has appointed former Microsoft executive Chris Weber as President of Nokia Inc. (United States), and head of Markets, North America. That means Mark Louison, a long-time Nokia employee who was appointed that role back in March 2007, is out to “pursue new career opportunities”. Weber comes to Nokia from his own consulting business, but he’s mostly known for his career at, yup, Microsoft. Weber was with the Redmond-based software juggernaut for 16 years – he held several senior executive positions in sales, marketing and professional services. Among his key roles were Corporate VP leading Microsoft’s US Enterprise and Partner Group as well as heading the US EPG National Sales Excellence and Industry Organization. He pledges to “work relentlessly on winning the trust of our customers and the hearts of consumers”. Exactly what Nokia has famously long been struggling with in the US.
I'm married to a long time MS-er, and have been for a while.
From my spouse and our friends, it does seem that morale is very bad, especially in sales and marketing. The infighting is intense.
At the same time, it's pretty clear that the quality of the work is pretty poor. Sadly, a lot of the employees know it, but feel completely powerless to do anything about it. The stories I hear are consistent, and amazing. What a soul-destroying place.
At the end of the day, I just don't think the leadership really cares about the company. There's no pride there. They just fake it, because they know that's what they're supposed to say. Everyone around them knows they're lying, but they have to lie, too, to win in stack rankings.
I don't see any pride or values there. Must be why everyone's trying to hard to get out.
Our private cloud story is a serious joke when half the ISV partners don't support the windows Hypervisor what Jack Shit are we going to create the customer's private cloud on?
http://colors-of-msgtsc.blogspot.com/2009/07/welcome-to-colors-of-ms-india-gtsc.html
Microsoft has so much potential it hurts to think about leaving. I love the work and the people; hate the job and the system [sigh].
I understand the Bing search team is heading to Google in droves.
Our mentality is that we still own 90% of the desktop is evident in management's (there's no leadership visible) collective refusal to value the experiences and opinions of those who have worked in The World recently. "Not invented here" was invented here!
The B's--Steve and Lisa--must go. With an HR organization that relies on web pages to support its employees, no clue (or concern) about growing "people managers", a "contribution ranking" system with no published documentation (also an enabler of age discrimination), and a performance evaluation system that's reminiscent of the "confessions" the North Koreans write for American "spies", MSFT is a sorry-ass outfit. Good benefits do not constitute a progressive HR policy. In my previous life as a business owner, I wrote hundreds of evaluations and less than a handful were surprises to the employee. Not so here--even CIO Tony Scott--an admirable, stand-up guy still living in SoCal, gets sandbagged by his peers. It's bad when CVP's are backstabbing weasels.
An idea: eliminate 50,000 vendors. Make Blue Badges and their managers do the scut work and we'll get lean very fast everybody will be too busy to sit through death by PPTX. At $75K/each, we'd see $3.75B drop to the bottom line. Yes, we'd have to hire 5,000 to backfill, but we'd keep our IP instead of sending away with Accenture.
An idea: how about an analysis of MSFT results without stock buybacks? I'm betting our results wouldn't be quite that rosy.
An idea: KT, aka B. Kevin Turner, for CEO. We've got to get him into the Big Chair soon, before Wal-mart is surpassed by Amazon.com; when that happens, the Walton family will be breaking KT's door down trying to get him to move back to Bentonville. "You're my only hope, Obi-Wan..."
Where's da'Punk?
Kept my comments to myself when I was full time, but openly discussed the toxic work environment with colleagues. I think there was one portion of my career where there were three re-orgs within a year. Had a 50% good and 50% bad experience, all due to my most immediate manager.
MSFT review and work model chews people up and spits them out. Orange is the new blue. You like my work you keep me, you don't like my work, you let me go. Simple isn't it? Plus I have no fear of helping out my immediate co-workers.
As for the tablet thing. Why is there talk of another OS. Wasn't there a lot of work dumped into windows phone 7? Ipad is just a fancy itouch on steroids. Same goes for a couple of the new Android tablets I've seen.
Seems to me MSFT should supersize a windows 7 phone, and continue refining the available apps versus going for a windows based tablet.
A lot is broken in Microsoft; from individuals who grew up inside Microsoft and never learnt about decent business ethics, to a grading system that institutionalizes fear.
When a large part of the organization dreads being a victim of next Wednesday's layoffs, you have a systemic problem.
While this may not float well with the audience here, who seems to only value innovation and leanness, there are other ways of creating successful businesses.
Check out the Ted Talk by Alain de Botton: A Kinder, Gentler Philosophy of Success. Here is my favorite quote:
"The nightmare thought, is that frightening people is the best way to get work out of them. That somehow, the crueler the environment, the more people will rise to the challenge."
What is going on in Bing?
I almost moved to a test team there last year and now everyone on that team has changed their titles to SDE.
... until then - dude. 90K in a major metro area today is jack. I was making close to this figure twenty five years ago!! I know bell boys that made 80K thirty years ago pushing elevator buttons.
The studies on US working wages have been done. Properly adjusted for inflation, an average IT salary today should be closer to 200K
There are two different issues here that you are trying to conflate unsuccessfully.
First, is $90k a comfortable salary or does it mean paycheck to paycheck apartment living? To answer this question, you have to look at the local cost of living, i.e., apartment, car, food, etc. It is completely irrelevant what you or your bellboy were making 3 decades ago. According to Wikipedia the median household income in Seattle (i.e., major metro area) is $62k. If you think $90k is "jack" then how is it possible that most people who live in Seattle make far, far less than that?
Second question, what should IT professionals be paid? If you "believe in" capitalism and free market economics, then the answer is obvious: they should be paid according to supply and demand. And since the market for IT professionals is pretty efficient, everybody's pay is more or less fair. (If you think your pay is unfair, just move to Google, Amazon, Facebook, or any of the many other Seattle-area companies.) Studies on US working wages, rates of inflation, etc. are only relevant if you're in a communist country where central planning decides salaries.
The issue you raise about class warfare is interesting and I agree that things are bad now, because of "crony capitalism" where members of our country's financial elite revolve between government and corporations, give each other obscene salaries, etc. It is an interesting thought experiment to design regulations to prevent this. But it's not a problem that will be solved by mandating higher wages.
@Saturday, March 05, 2011 1:58:00 PM
You don't know what you're talking about. My frank advice is that you take your free market BS and stick it where the sun don't shine. The earlier comments about wealth disparity are generally accurate.
Baller makes how much? The man is clearly an idiot, but is making obscene amounts of money on the backs of countless peon SDEs who comparatively are being paid in peanuts. This kind of crap would not have happened in the 1950s, when adjusted for inflation the Ballmers of the world only made what a Principal makes.
While Microsoft certainly has some issues, it's still a great company to work for. The people in these posts who reportedly work for Microsoft paint it like it's a bleak place to work. It most certainly is not.
Hey SteveB, stop posting and get back to doing whatever the hell it is exactly that you do.
>> I know there are few folks here who did the M->G transition
>> and I want to know if MTV is indeed better than Redmond.
Yes. But you should pass the interview before thinking about that. I've recommended two of my ex-colleagues who I know are _awesome_, and they did not pass. Interviews here are ridiculous, and your years at Microsoft mean absolutely nothing if you can't write fairly complicated code on the whiteboard in the interview setting and convincingly discuss obscure topics in computer science and systems design.
>>Since Who da'Punk has apparently retired, (not letting comments through on his blog often enough to foster discussion), are there other such blogs where discussions on Microsoft can be carried on?<<
Sure, you can create a blog yourself.
If you think $90k is "jack" then how is it possible that most people who live in Seattle make far, far less than that?
Seriously? Are you even awake? Have you checked the number of Americans on food stamps and other government assistance? Havae you heard of a little something called inflation. Theoretically, we are capitalist society - but we are not in Kansas anymore toto. Capitalism has been long dead. 90K IS nothing, if you include rent/house/daycare/food/energy costs/clothing/dental (oh that great dental plan we have - works great if you never need a root canal or something actually done to your teeth).
Interviews here are ridiculous, and your years at Microsoft mean absolutely nothing if you can't write fairly complicated code on the whiteboard in the interview setting and convincingly discuss obscure topics in computer science and systems design.
and you probably won't be able to do that - you've been on a fool's errand for the last x number of years.
Any MSFT folks have experience / ideas about working at Netflix.
I have received an offer but wondering if I should jump the ship given mixed reviews on glassdoor.
By my reckoning, my family needs $3300 a month to scrape by (and this is assuming we have medical insurance - if not, and we are paying for COBRA as at present, increase that amount to $5000). Here is how it breaks down. And yes I am aware that some of these are "luxuries", but as you'll see, even shaving them off makes minimal difference):
* Mortgage - $1500 (we bought before the bubble and have only 8 years left, interest rate 5.5% - we couldn't rent an apartment large enough for a family of 6 without paying at least that much)
* Electricity/natural gas - $170 (on the budget plan. We keep the house at 63F, and hang the clothes to dry in the garage rather than tumble dry)
* Water - $160
* Phone/Internet - $85
* Cell Phones - $85
* Cable - $16
* Gas for 2 cars, both paid for - $200/mo (at current prices. It will be more tomorrow.)
* Insurance for cars - $100/mo (comprehensive through Allstate)
* Food for family of six, never eating out - at LEAST $1000/mo (and rising - I can't set foot in a store these days without spending $50, and hardly leave with a bagful, and I don't buy brand name anything if I can help it)
* Other incidental household or vehicular repairs and medical care not covered by COBRA
No, we're not selling one of the cars. We know our family's needs, including appointments and classes, and 1 car won't do. We can't get out of the cell phone contract without paying a huge penalty. I have no idea how to reduce our water bill further without simply foregoing showers and laundry. Half of that bill is the mandatory sewer cost anyway. We couldn't refinance when interest rates were in the 4s because my husband is still without a job (although he has been getting some very interested callbacks lately, and is now working with recruiters, which means we're moving in the right direction).
When my husband was at MSFT, he wasn't getting anywhere near $90K/year - not even before taxes, and certainly not after. We managed to get by, and even managed to put a little away into savings. Not quite "paycheck to paycheck", but hardly the life of dissolution, dinners out, new cars, sailboats, clothes from the mall, or any of the other suggestions I've seen here.
You know that "standard of living" thing? It matters. When I can't fill my gas tank for less than $50, or leave the grocery store for less than $50, how much is $50 really worth? I've learned to pinch a penny until it screams. My kids haven't *ever* worn anything new from the mall unless somebody gave it to them as a gift. We get everything we wear from the thrift stores, and frankly, we're grateful to have that choice.
It's offensive to suggest that people who can't live well on $60K a year *must* be careless with their money. Maybe their money just isn't worth very much. :(
Since Who da'Punk has apparently retired, (not letting comments through on his blog often enough to foster discussion), are there other such blogs where discussions on Microsoft can be carried on?
Sure, you can create a blog yourself.
I created one at http://newmicrosoft.blogspot.com.
If Who da'Punk let this comment pass through (he blocked my previous attempt to post the link in comments here), go there and feel free to post the comment. I allowed unmoderated posting there, for start.
I made $110K (+ a measly bonus and stock) when I left Microsoft. I now make $160K+ in just base, plus substantial stock and bonus (over 200K in total). Combined with my wife's 70K a year (+about 50K a year she will get when she can sell her pre-IPO stock), that's barely sufficient if I am to ever retire or pay off my mortgage. I don't lead an extravagant lifestyle. We take about one vacation a year, usually in Mexico. I have a house in a nice neighborhood in Redmond (and a hefty mortgage that comes with that). I am extremely financially conservative, so I have no other debt. I have hundreds of thousands of dollars in various investments for retirement / rainy day (as should you, mark my words - those "entitlements" will go the way of dodo well before you retire). I drive a 12 years old Camry and buy two pairs of jeans a year. I buy a new MacBook Pro every couple of years (and hand my old one to my wife, and she gives hers to my kid).
I mean, could we live on 90K a year (that's gross - net would be even less than that)? Maybe. But I certainly would not be able to save (which is unacceptable), my kid's future would suffer (that university is not going to be free) and it would be a pretty shitty life in general.
I don't see why I should be constrained financially after investing 6 years into university education and 15 years into my career while Microsoft ekes out record net margins and pays partners billions. If they ever decide they want me again, they will have to beat my current compensation. I'm not in my early 20's anymore and I have no illusions about "changing the world" for less money.
So I agree that 90K in the Redmond area doesn't get you much. They probably pay this much to L59 new hires these days.
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