Inside Google's Civil War

I think that Microsoft's past issues and conflicts with the tech community at large are now becoming significant strengths.

I had the chance to sit in on a conversation held with Satya Nadella a bit more than a year ago at a top US university. One of the questions asked of him by an undergraduate student was why work for Microsoft when other tech firms / startups were doing cooler things [1] and might be better respected. His answer was that Microsoft was all about helping other people build things, whatever the appearances, and in 2018 isn't that what's really cool? Which way did 2019 and 2020 look like they were going? He also described some of tech's challenges as an industry and how Microsoft had adapted it's culture to these without losing it's soul.

I thought it was a poor answer at the time, and still think its credulous, but it seems increasingly on the money in terms of addressing the moment we find ourselves in today. In the context of the recent CNBC article about Facebook's lower offer acceptance rate [2], or Google's own emphasis on the importance of culture [3] for performance, I just can't picture these same artices being written about Micrsoft.

Of course part of the reason I can't picture those articles is because for as long as I can remember bashing Microsoft was the norm , and articles about that would seem trite and irreverent - even if accurate and important. But momentum can be huge, whatever the reason, and a change in momenetum can be incredibly difficult to deal with.

A good example can be found in finance, where Goldman Sachs saw a 40% increase in intership applications from 2012 to 2016 [4], in an environment where the new normal was more negative but stabilized there.

1 - This was more thoughtfully worded, and asked in a fairly self aware way

2 - https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/16/facebook-has-struggled-to-re...

3 - https://landing.google.com/sre/sre-book/chapters/being-on-ca... \ This is from Google's SRE handbook, with that department mentioned by name \ in the Fortune article.

4 - FT , 2016, Goldman Sachs attracts 250,000 student job applications 4a - Pastebin of above article, https://pastebin.com/0gE3nQdK, 1 week expiry