Microsoft.com - Careers: Linux/Open Office
careers.microsoft.com
careers.microsoft.com
Sounds like something I heard about GM last year. Their managers had no idea what the competition was like because they all "had" to drive their own cars.
I can imagine that this must be a hard thing to overcome in a car company. When you work for a car company, you want to be proud of your product so you want to buy from your company. However, most families have at most 2 cars, so you have very little incentive to buy and really understand a competitor's product.
I can see how in Microsoft you have the same forces at work. When building infrastructure or programming there is so steep of a learning curve regardless of what technology you choose that it is all but impossible to really understand all possible choices. Couple that with the inherent Microsoft desire to dogfood everything, and you get a lot of people understanding only the Microsoft way. Once you start going down that path, it's very easy to create your own mini-languages. It's all very incestuous, and not a good way to run a company. I think this is why Microsoft seems to have a hard time understanding Apple and Linux.
I don't actually think this is the case. More than half the people I met at Microsoft over the summer use iPhones (the rest generally had a Palm Pre or an Android phone; I met maybe 2-3 people with Windows Mobile), and many of them have Macbooks for their personal laptops. It was also quite common for people to use Google rather than Bing (though Softies are generally quite enthusiastic about Bing). Linux use probably is lower, simply because they use MS development tools to develop for MS platforms, but I certainly didn't get the impression that everyone at MS only uses MS products.
FWIW, I have heard from friends at Apple that using competitors' products there is frowned upon...
So not only were they less aware of what they were competing against, they had a false idea of what they were competing with.
A more non-dogfood arrangement is hard to imagine.
Additionally, he tells a story of someone bringing a speaker to an executive meeting who had deep knowledge of the Japanese auto market. They were allowed to speak, so long as they did not talk about Japanese autos or the Japanese auto industry.
I don't see MS as being in that sort of situation. However, as a very large successful organization (whose early genius builders have moved on), there are cultural perspectives that are hard to shake.
If I was Microsoft, and I wanted to change perceptions of my company, I'd start by changing the reality. Perceptions of MS are poor largely because the reality is poor. But MS want to change the one without the other. This is called bullshit, and is unlikely to work for an organisation as much in the public eye as MS.
Part of the reality of MS is that they have a very healthy cash flow from the products that are sold in an institutional fashion, that is, to the enterprise and preloaded on consumer devices. Any organization in that successful situation can't innovate like we have come to expect small companies to do--serious changes in their "reality" will threaten territories that are bringing home the bacon.
And it has to be a difficult proposition to continue to convince people to pay you money for software that, to a first order of approximation, costs nothing.
Microsoft must have an interesting internal situation going on. On the one hand they want to work with open source - at least, that's what they claim. On the other they want to "compete" with Linux. Since there is enormous overlap between open source projects and Linux projects, that must result in some cognitive dissonance for MS employees.
As I understand it, "evidence" is proof that your work was received well by the community you are targeting. Rather than sales figures, "evidence" is the currency of the division that this job is in.
"compete" is a blanket term for "not Microsoft": Mac OS X, Linux, (Free|Net|Open)BSD, Plan 9 are all part of "compete".
If you’re looking for a new role where you’ll focus on one of the biggest issues that is top of mind for KT and Steve B in “Compete”, build a complete left to right understanding of the subsidiary, have a large amount of executive exposure, build and manage the activities of a v-team of 13 district Linux& Open Office Compete Leads, and develop a broad set of marketing skills and report to a management team committed to development and recognized for high WHI this is the position for you!
An example: "KT and SteveB" are probably Kevin Turner (COO) and Steve Ballmer.
"compete": Term used for "not Microsoft" (I came from "compete")
"v- team": This position will have contractors working for them. Contractors working for Microsoft have usernames in the format: /[a-z]\-[a-z]+/. Contractors or "Vendors" have usernames starting with 'v-'
[disclaimer: I work for the company in question :)]
However most people refer to 'OpenOffice' meaning OpenOffice.org, in the same way they refer to 'Linux' and mean a Linux-based OS.