I can't help but wonder how effective those memos would have been if he'd been more direct, rather than use manager-speak. Passive voice just doesn't work when you want to get people to take action.
Certain of our competitors' products and their rapid advancement and refinement of new usage scenarios have been quite noteworthy
could have been:
Our competitors are out-innovating us, and we're losing to them. I hate to lose and you should hate being losers too. So this is what we're going to do.
Typical at large, highly-corporate places I'm afraid.
I recall during one of my first internships (at Siemens, not Microsoft) my first task was to go over test results of electric motors being developed. I drafted an email with my results and fired it off to a number of people.
A short while later I was ushered off by one of the senior project managers. "Why'd you write that email?" "Um...?" "You don't call these things PROBLEMS, you call them ISSUES. Do you understand? You call them problems, people are going to think there are problems!"
And that was the moment I decided I wanted nothing to do with traditional engineering and the automative industry... unfortunately I had another 3.99 months to go on that internship at that point. The rest of the internship didn't go any better, and is still a massive source of antipatterns I still draw from today.
Funny note, those "issues" ended up costing the company millions in a product recall. Maybe they should've been called "problems" instead ;)
The neutering of language into corporate-speak is still one of the biggest red flags I look for when interviewing...
I spent the summer at MS on an internship and I think I can say with confidence that calling things as they are is just not something one does at Microsoft. Will it could be the intern cocoon I also observed non-intern targeted communications that showed the same behaviour.
Once I spent time with people they got more friendly and open. Yet if you do get a good conversation going you can expect the managers at the table to hang out of it. The managers always watch their words. Likewise if you talk to a random person in the cafeteria they will toe the party line.
In contrast one is safe to criticize Microsoft products provided they have been dropped or replaced. No love is shown for Windows Mobile or the Kin.
When you do criticize current practices/products in public there was an unwritten rule that one should always reference the competition. No one calls it out in words like "We can do better!", "This is user hostile!", "We're being to greedy by doing X!". Instead it is "We should focus on X because our competitor is going well on Y". Also "competitor" is always left non-specific, just like it is in your quote.
As such considering Ray Ozzie's former high org chart position I must congratulate him on saying as much as he did.
I was an FTE at MSFT for a few years. I disagree with this assessment. In many contexts Microsoft has a culture of tearing apart other people's ideas, I suspect rooted in the legendary BillG rants ("stupidest idea I've ever heard", etc.) and the overly internally-competitive culture. Additionally, rank and file routinely complain about Microsoft being bad at marketing, Microsoft being bad at consumer messaging, Microsoft building products for the Redmond bubble and not for humans, etc. etc., and the internal dogfood aliases are full of this stuff as are hallway and lunchtime discussions in many places. Not to mention all those people carrying iPhones who used to joke that it was "competitive research".
That's not to say that there aren't koolaid drinkers and that it won't ever be politically unwise to directly criticize your colleagues... But it's a diverse place, and, in my experience, cynicism exists in a big way there.
I agree. I've been working in Windows Embedded for a couple years now, and I work with some people in management not afraid to speak their minds to others on the team. Sometimes the way they react or phrase things helps me think from their vantage points.
Interns do seem to be treated differently though. Not many criticisms are voiced around them.
The /good/ managers called things "problems" and knew how to manage people well.
The /bad/ managers never wanted confrontation, were afraid to raise up problems, were autocratic to their reports and nebbishes to their own managers, and never tried to grow their people.
There are managers I regret leaving behind, and managers who I was very happy to see the back of.
Might be true. I had access to the internal social network but I did not try subscribing to mailing lists.
Its good to hear not everyone got the same impression as me. On the other hand they may have been observing more private conversations than I am referring to. Still I cannot at all claim more experience than former full timers.
From experience I can say that contrarian leaders in large & established companies walk the fine line between pushing for change versus self-preservation. There is an enormous amount of pressure/politics/resistance they face from the "old guard".
If they are too blunt and direct in suggesting change, their established rivals paint them out as someone who "does not understand or value the organization's history", or "does not get the culture" etc.
The CEO often prefers to sit on the fence, without putting his/her entire weight behind the contrarian. Because s/he does not (or cannot) risk antagonizing the majority of the old guard. In the absence of a CEO's or board's full support, the contrarians start getting stymied in their plans as time goes on. Their words become less sharper, their plans less disruptive and their canvas much less "blue sky". Till comes a time when they prefer to just leave rather than tilt at windmills.
I think he was trying to get the message across without getting himself fired - at least in the first note. I'm not sure if it would have made a difference.
IMHO - Microsoft could have gone too ways. They could have gone full cash-cow, returned even more money to shareholders, and watched the franchise slowly shrink. (The IBM model, who seem to buy more shares back every year) Or they could have gone full-on towards R&D and killing their sacred cow with a better push into the post-PC world. In muddling between the two they did the worse of both worlds: they missed a tech wave, and punished their shareholders.
yet another memo. whenever you see such memos leaking, you know the company is in a bad shape. RIM, Nokia, MS - lots of famous memos, full of corporate speak and calls to action to do something with services, quality, paradigms and fundamental values of tectonic shifts.
effective leaders deliver products that customers buy. ineffective ones write memos to other "leaders".
Microsoft does deliver products just because they got flak from Apple fanboy tech- press. Windows 8 is over 110 Million installs, I am not sure what other product from Microsoft you are talking about SharePoint, SQL Server, C# 5.0 .. yes, when Google is spaming Y-combinatory with daily Go post, Microsoft is actually developing a language that is 10 years and evolving.
Go actually gets a lot more flak here than C#, at least in my experience. The comments on Go are pretty polarized: a lot of people love it, but a lot of others hate it for not incorporating modern PL theory or having a weird GC. When C# /.NET is mentioned, it's almost always positively, as a remarkably well-designed system, what Java should have been. It's just not as sexy as Go or Node or (to some) Haskell. I want to say it's almost invisible by virtue of simple competence, but that might be going too far.
I wish they'd write an official set of native MS SQL drivers for Linux, like they did with the PHP SQL drivers on Windows. Yes I know there's FreeTDS, unixODBC etc, but the level of faff getting it to work just so never fills me with confidence.
I'm happy that Linux doesn't have MS SQL drivers. The increasing cost of SQL Server licensing is the driving force towards PostgreSQL for many of our projects. The larger clients can afford the costs and seem to enjoy being treated as cash cows by Redmond.
win8 has currently a lower adoption rate than vista. winrt is so great no one wants to build hardware for it anymore.
the components you cite, sharepoint, sql server, are bought by IT departments that went with windows. once you switch to linux you do not have access to those tools, regardless of their greatness. and yeah, most of those tools are bundled in CALs anyhow, Sharepoint without SQL server?
What a silly claim. There's no question that the last decade at Microsoft is full of faulty assumptions and bad execution. But these memos as visionary? Feh!
2) October 2010 is right about when Windows Phone 7 shipped, and therefore a year after the "reset" of the previous phone effort. At this point, "devices" is obvious to the point of "duh".
3) There's a world of difference between saying "X is important" and "X is important, therefore we should do Y".
> "The PC-centric/server-centric model has accreted simply immense complexity,"
This is presented as an insight. There is so little context given here, so maybe I'm just missing something, but it sounds much more like bullshit to me.
What exactly is less complex about "post-PC" or "post traditional server"? On the client, minding battery life and constantly dealing with connection loss is much more complex than an always-powered, always-connected PC. On the server front, managing VM instances is in many ways more complex than just running a single server, or a smaller set of them. People add these complexities because they give them something in return. But it is adding complexity, let us not deny it.
I never followed Ozzie too deeply, but this style of throwing around programmer jargon to make an all-around "nothing" point seems to be his style. I still remember hearing him say something along the lines of "RSS is the Unix pipe of the web". I tried to give him the benefit of the doubt when I heard that, to stretch my mind somewhat to believe that is actually a thing... But let's face it, the analogy is nonsense.
Of course it doesn't get less complex. If anything the opposite is true. And that's precisely the point, if I got his points right.
The sheer complexity of modern computing devices and infrastructure, couple with the abundance of broadband Internet access, have resulted in the proliferation of "appliance-like" devices and cloud-based services. After all most of the time consumers want to view photos on their smartphone and not to deal with the file system. In the same vein, IT would rather fire up an EC2 instance than having to manage a physical server in their data center.
In my view, that's the gist of the post-PC/post-server centric world -- what on the surface today are pushed down to the inner layers, hidden away from users.
Not really buying it. First of all, you're just comparing desktop Windows with embedded versions of Linux and Mach/XNU. Secondly, the latter two systems are not exactly free of cruft and legacy either.
You know, I let it slide when the comment you replied to said it, but I disagree with this one. IMO most people who criticize Win32 just aren't familiar with it. I've heard plenty of people dismiss objc on similar grounds: simple unfamiliarity becomes "this is bad". Once you get over the initial learning curve it's quite easy to be productive with it.
Kernel32 user32, advapi32, etc. Are you really going to tell me that the namespacing and naming convention for their API, which mind you, used handles and annoying type defs, was anything spectacular. I really hope you are kidding.
I reverse engineered windows for years, know a huge amount of documented and undocumented api from ntdll and so on. The API is water trash, you lose when you question my know-how on this topic.
I was on the Windows team for a few years. I have seen the source code. There is cruft as there will be with any project of its age, but it's not nearly as bad as people say, especially if you can navigate it well. There are some good ideas underneath. COM is generally a good idea. The mental model of message pumps and window procs doesn't really have deep flaws, and lots of UI frameworks on other platforms have the same ideas under the hood. You mention ntdll, it's a shame more of that isn't public, because those APIs are often cleaner than their public equivalents.
Microsoft used to completely dominate everything, and now they dont, so people think they have 'failed' in some way. But if you look at their profits they're still making out like bandits. Over the last 5 years they've made a ton more money than everyone except Apple. So perhaps Microsoft did the right thing by not jumping in the direction Ozzie said straight away?
I'm not a business analyst or anything related, but I think the issue is that in this day and age even huge profits don't mean a thing even when it comes to a business's future. Just look at Nokia, which was dominating its market 7-8 years ago, or Blackberry/RIM.
You really do have to be paranoid to survive, and the memos in the article are an example of that.
We don't really know what a successful tech company looks like over longer than 5 or 10 years, because no-ones ever stayed dominant longer than that. Perhaps IBM is the only model - greatness that fades to a reasonable profitable longevity. Perhaps thats the only way to go long term?
The iPhone is bigger than their whole business. I don't see how this can be anything other than a huge failure for MS. The PC market is declining year over year and all the growth is in mobile, an area where MS is a bit player. And they were in the smartphone and tablet markets way before Apple! How is this not a disaster?
RIM made money for a while too, but in the end they were doomed. I don't think that is true of MS, because they are just too big and do too many things. But people arguing that everything is OK because of the top line, I don't get.
Ray Ozzie at least gave Microsoft Azure, which honestly if they didn't have that much at least they would be nowhere on the cloud. He was working on things like syncing files, email, office integration, etc.
Basically stuff like google docs, dropbox, heroku, etc. were all trying to be made in Microsoft's image under Ozzie and they all sort of ignored him. Now Microsoft is scrambling with SkyDrive, Office 365, Windows 8, Azure, etc.
Microsoft also pushed out J Allard who had vision to compete with iPad. His team was also responsible for Xbox and Zune. Between Xbox you get the blueprint of how to deliver services people love and evolve with over time. With Zune you got the beautiful Metro design that Microsoft finally embraced. The Zune player was pretty much the blueprint for this style and it was outstanding software for a Windows app.
Microsoft 20 years ago was about finding brilliant people and letting them build brilliant businesses under the Microsoft umbrella. At some point around 2000 the name of the game is to make all things Windows and Office and that kind of protectionism pretty much put Microsoft consistently 3-5 years behind in areas that matter like Search, Mobile, Services, Cloud Infrastructure because they couldn't see how that benefitted Windows and Office.
Certain of our competitors' products and their rapid advancement and refinement of new usage scenarios have been quite noteworthy
could have been:
Our competitors are out-innovating us, and we're losing to them. I hate to lose and you should hate being losers too. So this is what we're going to do.