Thursday, July 01 2010
The state of the union
The writing is on the wall for Microsoft. They have posted diminishing revenues since 2008 and have consistently not been phased by it. The situation has become so dire that rumors have been circulating about some of the best talent that Microsoft has (like Jay Allard, among others) are readying to leave because of disagreements with CEO Steve Balmer. Now one can say that’s not unusual given how long Allard was with the company, but I’d still be curious.
Having worked with (and for some time at) Microsoft over the last five years I saw a pattern of hubris, failure to communicate, and downright incompetence. It’s this pattern that I believe has led to recent developments such as three different mobile operating systems.
When I speak with current and former employees the company is the butt of at least a couple of jokes, but overall they are pretty indifferent to company affairs beyond the scope of their own group. This is merely a symptom of a larger corporate structure issue, put simply: Microsoft operates like a feudal society
What exactly does that mean? It means that there are a set of managers (probably with seemingly esoteric titles) that are hell-bent on protecting their little part of the hierarchy that they have been able to conquer over their 8+ years with the company. It’s not entirely their fault though; it is the seemingly endless death march of “reorgs” and exceptionally deep corporate structure that has caused this behavior.
Pulling a Dominos
The end result from the above mentioned pattern of is that the Microsoft brand has become diluted in the overall public perception so when good products (like Kinect) are released the general public is almost apprehensive in getting on the band wagon for them. This is because Microsoft has never apologized for any of the confusing marketing, licensing or branding (seven different versions of Windows 7?); their hubris is complete.
Now what I mean by “pulling a Dominos” is to clearly address and publicize a change happening within the company and product(s). This could be directly addressed several ways:
- Replace Balmer as CEO with Steve Sinofsky
- Lay off 25%+ of the aforementioned esoteric job titles
- Take a ‘mission critical’ project open source: IE9? WP7?
Iterating on products may pay their collective bills, but without systemic openness and/or innovation it’s hard to address any significant product or organization changes.
I suppose time will tell; open source project ftw?