An anonymous Microsoft employee writes about company culture, layoffs, stack ranking, and leadership under Ballmer.
HN commenters recommend it as a great resource for understanding Microsoft in that era, especially stack ranking and what the company should be doing.
Really? The Surface RT is what drove the board to finally act? If that's actually true, it's much more of an indictment of the board and their absolute negligence than Ballmer at this point.
Rewind three years: Microsoft ships the Kin, its lackluster pseudo-feature phone 'built'[1] from the acquisition of Danger, Inc. Microsoft spent $500mm acquiring Danger and then killed off all of their products, and managed to send all of their best employees running to the exits.
Microsoft spent two years building the Kin phones, only to cancel them within months of their release. They probably spent in excess of a billion dollars on the whole thing when all was said and done, and for what? Windows Phone 7 was always going to be the iOS/Android competitor. Microsoft would've been far better off hauling the original $500mm to the middle of one of their campus soccer fields and lighting it on fire. At least then they wouldn't have had divided focus on smartphone operating systems for two years.
http://minimsft.blogspot.com/2010/07/kin-fusing-kin-clusion-to-kin-and-fy11.html
Even worse was the aQuantive acquisition. $6.2 billion flushed down the toilet: http://money.cnn.com/2012/07/02/technology/microsoft-aquantive/index.htm
And Computerworld thinks a $900mm writedown for a product that—despite its flaws—is really a decent v1 is the straw that broke the camel's back? If that's true, the board is the real problem.
[1] My understanding is that Microsoft acquired Danger, canned their…
The source of the conflict is summed up here.
> The central thread here is collective action by principled people who will use copyleft primarily as a tool for rights of users and for the improvement of copylefted projects.
Joint stock companies are about hierarchy and control. Free software is very much not about that. Free software is a syndicalist movement by software developers. Software developers have taken control over computing infrastructure, we develop it on our own terms. We have settled on a decentralized model, which shares openly, without constraint.
People with the hierarchical mindset hate another party taking ownership because that’s something they don’t have control over. They would be happy to have you hunched over a keyboard desperately typing while they bark orders at you, regardless of whether or not that produces anything of value. Linux and GCC are both inspired products that grew in the cradle of copyleft, they are excellent because of their open development. Meanwhile, large corporations are happy silo themselves into unproductive morasses and play ritualistic political games [1].
Copyleft benefits users because it produces better software. Enforcement is the only card to play to make sure that continues. Unfortunately our reaction to licensing has been immature. When asked about licensing, we’re happy to throw up our hands and say “I don’t care about that” (see WTFPL) and carry on with development as if some helpful person from legal will do…
What that means is that if your manager is terminating you with extreme prejudice (but "without cause", e.g. not for stealing from the company), he's not allowed to be a gatekeeper and prevent you from joining another team. E.g. one that knows you are great and your manager is of the "horrible ass-kissing" variety.
Let me supply another comment, which shows how terribly bad some very high levels of managers have become:
http://minimsft.blogspot.com/2013/08/steve-ballmer-is-going-to-frickin.html?showComment=1377380382013#c3322100820840904710
Anonymous said...
O.k. here are my 3 favorite Microsoft "principle consultant" experiences:
1. I had this really brilliant L-62 dev who couldn't believe just how STUPID the "chief architects" (L-65 and up, really were). So, one day, one of them walked into our office and took great offense because we'd changed his slides ...
Without even blinking, he said "you can change the text all you want, but you can't change my pictures, because that's all people look at."
As he was trying to explain to the guy that the "pictures" came from the actual "data" ... I suddenly realized that this moron didn't actually know where charts came from, and I excused myself and waited in the hallway for the really great partner consultant who thought I had a really bad attitude problem, to come flying out, desperately in need of a drink.
It took 10 minutes. I took him out for a cup of coffee so no one saw him shaking, throwing things, and revisiting…
Excerpts from infamous mini-msft blog (in 2005 another msft employee venting anonymously):
"I mean, what has he done or not done that is impacting the stock?"
- along with Gates, made decisions that resulted in the company being found guilty of breaking the law twice(and counting)resulting in fines, restrictions...
- along with Gates, invested over $10B of cash in failed telecom investments that ended up being written off
- failed to make any meaningful investments at the bottom of the market crash when numerous companies were available for cheap..
- invested $10B's in various "emerging" businesses that even years later represent only about 10% of MSFT's revenue, aren't growing at even 10%..
- approved the onerous Licensing 6 program when many companies were hurting economically thereby pissing off a good portion of our customers and fueling the move to Open Source.
- has been at the helm as MSFT failed to take security seriously and then has had to drop everything to play catch up, missed the paid search move and had to play catch up, missed the move to web services and had to play catch up, missed the portable music wave and had to play catch up, let IE stagnate and had to play catch up, and now seemingly can't ship any major product on time even stripped of formerly core features (can you say Longhorn, CRM, SQL, VS, etc. etc. etc?).
Continued...
http://minimsft.blogspot.com/2005/03/old-school-competencies.html#c111169237226667511
There was plenty of news coverage of the Windows test team being eliminated at the time of Microsoft's 2014 layoffs:
"Under the new structure, a number of Windows engineers, primarily dedicated testers, will no longer be needed. (I don't know exactly how many testers will be laid off, but hearing it could be a "good chunk," from sources close to the company.) Instead, program managers and development engineers will be taking on new responsibilities, such as testing hypotheses..."
https://www.zdnet.com/article/beyond-12500-former-nokia-employees-who-else-is-microsoft-laying-off/
There were also a lot of insider comments from affected SDETs on the notorious (at the time) Mini-Microsoft blog as well: https://minimsft.blogspot.com/2014/07/18000-microsoft-jobs-gone-eventually.html
The burden of testing software was shifted over to developers after the layoffs. If you check Microsoft's job listings, there isn't even a category for software testing positions anymore.
Ballmer may be the best example of a Shaved Gorilla currently living, but I think he became the official scapegoat of Microsoft when they put him in charge.
Things were already going horribly wrong, and they put a despot in charge to soak up the blame for all of the terrible things his peers, subordinates and predecessors were already cocking up. The next person has a comparatively easy job of leading a Renaissance, assuming he didn't manage to run it into the ground in the interim. Which he nearly did.
I really miss http://minimsft.blogspot.com/ and not just for the schadenfreude. There was quite a bit of wisdom to be extracted from hindsight is 20/20 commentary, when you're an outside observer.