Reflections on My Career at Microsoft
medium.com
medium.com
"But my former female colleagues who reviewed this document in advance of its publication are unconvinced. None of them report feeling emboldened by the new Microsoft. They continue to withhold reports of discriminatory management practices. They relate stories of reports of abuse going unpunished and continue to fear reprisals for speaking out. In fact, multiple reviewers noted, independently, the irony that the only reason I am comfortable enough to speak out is that I am a “50-year old white dude” and, thus, girded against reprisal from the body politic. So they remain silent when, in fact, they are among the voices Microsoft needs to hear the most. Apparently, Microsoft has dipped only a single toe in the river that flows to the future."
https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2014/10/10/microsoft-ceo...
That’s an amazingly stupid comment from an obviously very smart person (Nadella). I’m quite sure it’s not true for women who do not ask for raises, but in my experience it’s not true in general either. Most HR systems tend to produce, promote and reward a certain kind of behavior - and that behavior is seldom very value creating.
Paraphrasing Nadella I’d rather say “All HR systems are short term inefficient, and most are long-term inefficient. Some are even outright ruinous, at least for the company and it’s shareholders, who (unlike employees) have no escape.”
Pitting employees against each other. The masters recruiting spies from among the ranks to report dissenting comments from the servants. Cutting back on coffee breaks. Not being allowed to report actual time worked because you're an exempt employee so your boss can say, "I'm not aware of any overtime being worked." Uh that's because you won't allow me to enter more than the minimum.
This happens to more than just women. Instead of pitting one bullied group against another, bullied people need to rise up against a system that rewards bullies at the expense of the employees with integrity!
Companies are losing SO much value from their greatest employees because they are afraid to be noticed. You do something great for your employer and everyone else says, "Show off." or "You're making the rest of us look bad." or "Overachiever".
They force great employees to be mediocre. Even managers do the same thing. If you find a problem with your boss's code -- watch out!
This is not a problem women experience. It's a problem people experience.
If anyone thinks this is a problem exclusive to men, conservatives, or whatever group it's en vogue to pillory they're flat-out ignorant.
I've seen women in power be utterly despicable to their fellow woman. I've seen #woke managers belittle the pious.
The real test of character is, when discussing these issues, do you assume immutable aspects are to blame or do you consider alternative realities.
Maybe "those people" are bad for being "those people," maybe they just suck.
Edit: The no comment downvote brigade is here, go ahead and flag me too.
While you're at it, leave a comment telling me you're downvoting me because I said something about it.
The reality is that corporate culture has incentivized and rewarded certain behaviors (manifesting as sexism, racism, bullying, extroversion, whatever ) over and over again and people are slowly pushing back.
It took a while for 'executive' to not only mean "older caucasian male in a suit".
For all its thorny parts, the increase in exposure of these issues will help more employees realize the power imbalance and try to define a better and more inclusive corporate culture
https://hbr.org/2018/03/women-experience-more-incivility-at-...
We can't go on our individual experience, the only way to understand women's perspective is to listen to what they're saying and how they're treated. The past few years has made it pretty clear (although there were certainly reports even before then) that women have faced, and continue to face abuse and discrimination to a degree that men don't.
What you're saying sounds to me like the "All lives matter!" response to the "Black lives matter" movement.
Sounds like a poor recipe for civic cohesion.
>The past few years has made it pretty clear (although there were certainly reports even before then) that women have faced, and continue to face abuse and discrimination to a degree that men don't.
Do you have anything to add besides "you are wrong" and (paraphrasing) "women are right"?
The point GP makes about an old boys club that attacks men and women equally rings painfully true to me also.
He's just saying shit. I can make one story up, but I don't need to.
Making up stories that seem likely doesn't make them true, even if you feel that they're right.
Ironic.
The author of the original post believes that MS under Nadella is starting to turn itself around, but he was rebuffed by the people who would know best who have told him that the entrenched culture of sexism hasn't made as much progress as one would hope. And then the comment you have responded to calls out that quote as especially true.
Your response is to invalidate their experiences by claiming that hey, everybody is going through some stuff. But if you cannot recognise that maybe some less-privileged groups have it worse in some ways, you will find it difficult to find allies among them.
I've experienced both sides of this as a transgender woman. As a relatively effeminate man, I failed to fit in with the culture of "cocksure masculinity" as the OP calls it. But as a woman it's a whole lot worse.
The problem has the same cause and hits both genders, but it really does hit women harder. For instance, men might find they need to shout to get their voice heard because 'that's the culture', while women might get admonished even when they do that because it doesn't fit the gendered expectations of them.
As an effeminate geeky dude, I had employers tell me I needed to step up and take more of a leadership role. As a woman, I've had interview candidates assume I couldn't be an engineer because of the way I dress. I had a boss who treated me more junior the more feminine I was dressed. It's way worse.
The toxic boys club culture can totally make life hard for men who aren't like that - but it can be almost impossible for women. The hill is just that much harder to climb, in part because performing those behaviors that would make you fit in with the boys club can get you slammed for not being feminine.
It's important to remember that this isn't just about men and women, that it does negatively impact men as well - but it hits women a lot harder. Voices that don't match get ignored in that culture, but if you're a man it's much easier to make your voice sound like what the leadership expects.
https://i.stuff.co.nz/business/money/96443300/the-names-the-...
Where a male and female colleague swapped names in all correspondence, and she (with a temporary male name) was astounded at how easy work was, while he (with a temporary female name) was perplexed by how much harder his job became.
And I'm guessing you have seen:
http://www.econ.nyu.edu/user/wiswall/research/schilt_wiswall...
"In 2006 American economists Kristen and Matthew Wiswall performed perhaps the ultimate test. They examined what happened to the pay of and status of employees who'd changed sex."
To briefly sum up a very complex issue on which I have a lot of feelings, I find that it's more common for transfeminine people (vs. transmasculine ones) to wind up in a kind of "uncanny valley" of gender that some people struggle and are uncomfortable with. I think that with growing visibility and acceptance this is probably improving, but it's still very real.
I think a result of that is that comparing MTF vs. FTM people is that it's not a good comparison of women vs. men in the workplace. The fact that society has a much more negative view of transwomen confounds the entire thing.
There's also, very anecdotally, a pretty sharp divide in how more passable transwomen are treated vs. less passable transwomen. I think I'm in the former group, but it's all very complicated and not something I fully understand myself - how can I really know how others see me?
I am a middle aged guy in NZ with a fairly broad social range, that includes a few MTF transsexuals§ by association.
Within their social circles and far wider than that, everyone is aware that they are a transsexual, and I perceive that they often get lumped into a third category (that isn't male or female).
Strangers will be completely natural towards a non-obvious transsexual (where acquantances might not), but then a stranger that becomes a friend will struggle later when they find out they have been "deceived" (which subjectively can't be argued with?). Surely that must cause a lot of friction.
Also the acronym LGBT defines "different from X" where I don't know a good word for X either...
Hopefully you have a good bunch of friends and family that don't judge you or stereotype you.
As far as the study went, they would have to find a subgroup that worked as female (or v.v.) without anyone at work knowing or finding out (remaining cryptic at all times). Even then, there is a sampling bias for only those people that act on their feelings and have major surgery, and presumably a major emotional disruption to life for most of those.
> a pretty sharp divide in how more passable transwomen are treated vs. less passable transwomen
Is the divide wider than that between a "pretty" woman and an "ugly" one (sorry again, awful word choice, but I don't know how to rewrite that so the meaning stays clear).
§ sorry if transsexuals is an offensive term, I'm using what my peer group would use, and I have no idea how to safely use the words you use.
This is what I mean by the "uncanny valley of gender". Some people, btw, do identify as non-binary and intentionally wish to be seen as neither male nor female. For most people, even transgender ones such as myself, people pick a gender and then unconsciously roll with that in how they relate. When people can't figure out which way to relate, it can make them uncomfortable and cause friction.
> Strangers will be completely natural towards a non-obvious transsexual (where acquantances might not), but then a stranger that becomes a friend will struggle later when they find out they have been "deceived" (which subjectively can't be argued with?). Surely that must cause a lot of friction.
They haven't been deceived! I am a woman, and the type of woman I am is transgender. While it does surprise people, in my experience, it's just kind of an interesting point and then we move on. If it's not a sexual context it really has nothing to do with anything, and so people don't care - they just keep using script they initially picked. Similar to my age - most people think I'm in my 20s, but I'm in my late 30s. They're surprised, but it doesn't change anything so we go on.
> As far as the study went, they would have to find a subgroup that worked as female (or v.v.) without anyone at work knowing or finding out (remaining cryptic at all times). Even then, there is a sampling bias for only those people that act on their feelings and have major surgery, and presumably a major emotional disruption to life for most of those.
This is very true. Transgender people have to feel that they can transition, and a great many don't. I haven't seen any study (and I'm not sure how you'd even construct one) between transgender people who seek transition and those that don't. I definitely live in a much more acceptable environment (in San Francisco) and had the financial, social, and emotional means to do it. A lot of people lack in some of those areas and suffer, sometimes greatly as a result. Access to transgender medicine varies tremendously.
> Is the divide wider than that between a "pretty" woman and an "ugly" one (sorry again, awful word choice, but I don't know how to rewrite that so the meaning stays clear).
I would say yes. Again, it's (in my perception) that uncanny valley of gender. An unattractive woman is still seen as a woman (though her social value is often greatly diminished by it). Whereas non-passable transwomen people aren't clear how to relate to, and it makes them feel uncomfortable.
> sorry if transsexuals is an offensive term, I'm using what my peer group would use, and I have no idea how to safely use the words you use.
Transsexual is a term that's dated to the point where it comes off as ignorant. We use "Transgender" as a blanket, inclusive term (not everyone changes their genitals, which is what makes it preferable to "transsexual").
I think a lot of this is simply a combination of of not crediting gender identity (such that transmen are viewed as women, and transwomen as men) and viewing both as gender non-conforming and presumptively homosexual, combined with asymmetric views on homosexuality and gender non-conformity between men and women (which embed misogyny, since men are the superior gender, it is less acceptable for them to fall to conform, while women who are non-conforming are, while violating a norm, adopting features of the superior gender, which is less contemptible.)
... but how do you know? How could anybody know that?
As a cis male, one way to do this is to represent yourself as female, and see how much more you get questioned. You don't have to go so far as to cross-dress -- you could simply sign an email with a majority-female name in the signature.
I want to see an actual study, because my anecdata doesn’t match the claimed experience.
Yes, if we distort bullying out of all sense to just mean "different treatment"...
In that sense, a rich person who receives more attention, the best seats in the house, VIP treatment where they go, are also "bullied".
First of all, this is a different demographic. Second, workplaces have a totally different dynamic.
From that position you can then try to practice active listening. You’d need to develop a rapport with people—lots of people, both people who see things similarly to you and especially people who see things differently. You’d have to be gentle with other people’s ideas so they feel safe telling you what they really think.
After doing that for some time, and ingesting stories from whole populations of people, you would begin to get a sense of the breadth of experiences beyond your own.
At the risk of sounding flip, I'd say a lawsuit generally works.
I'm expecting a massive backlash against the "culture-forward" style of running a company as the article describes. There's always been a lot of cynicism around things like company values, but that cynicism appears to be increasing at a rapid pace with a meaningful portion of employees (see all the recent articles about Google's internal culture). It doesn't have to be a majority of employees, 20-30% is plenty to materially affect an organization.
Personally, the reason is that a company ultimately isn't "culture-forward" unless if it's willing to take a financial hit in order preserve its culture. Few companies are willing to do that, and that's OK, we are a capitalist society after all. It just isn't OK to hammer culture like its the most important thing while twisting themselves in logical knots to justify highly-profitable activities and actions that the employees call out as being counter-cultural. Some of those conflicts become public & newsworthy (ICE contracts), most of it doesn't (retaining that effective asshole).
Importantly, whether or not senior leadership agrees with the vocal (often significant minority) employees is besides the point. It's a communication issue -- they've created an expectation that isn't being matched -- not an issue of truth. Many of these "culture-forward" companies are losing the ability to tell their employees to "shut up and work" because they've explicitly said they don't want day-to-day work to operate in that manner. But for some reason senior leadership hasn't figured out that they can't operate like that anymore either when they push a culture like Microsoft has.
I think the end game here is companies like Microsoft painting themselves into a corner where a big, big, fight over unionization is all but inevitable. Knowledge workers want a seat at the table precisely because companies have told them they should have that precisely because it improves the bottom line on a small team to be self-organizing (see: Google's project aristotle for more).
>Bruised and battered by the consent decree handed down by the DoJ for the very same ambition that brought it to dominance, Ballmer’s Microsoft was sales-forward and CAUTIOUS.
>It was... nervously clutching its pearls at the approach of Google in its rearview mirror
People bash Steve Ballmer for missing Search, Social Networking, Smart phones, Tablets and one other thing. They claim he had his head far up his rear end to see the competiton. He's called a buffoon and other names but ignore the fact that...
Microsoft was Caged. Had it's wings clipped. Had a huge target on its back. In case you did't know, any complaint by say Google in its early days and Microsoft would have been broken up!
This is the real reason behind's Ballmer's failure.
Gates hated politics, kept Washington at arms length and that cost them. In fact, if Gates had lobbied just a little bit, there would have been no case at all.
And that's why Google's lobbying like crazy cos it's life actually depends on it.
I do hope MS becomes a nice place for women to work, as a white guy I hated it so hopefully in the future they can do better.
If the market judged Microsoft by its earnings, it's stock would have been up. The internet, mobile was the blockchain and AI of the era.
He inherited a company that was incredibly powerful and that power only diminished during his tenure.
https://www.theverge.com/2013/7/11/4514160/steve-ballmers-re...
Also of interest in that memo is Amy Hood being put in charge of the Finance Group (truthfully she had already been CFO a couple months when the One Microsoft memo came out), which Satya appears to be getting credit for in the original article. She was appointed CFO a year before Nadella became CEO.
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what did he perform? can you expound more?
Yes, I am sure it had nothing to do with him lacking the basic vision one would expect in any tech CEO and saying idiotic things like "no one would buy such an expensive phone" (about the iPhone).
If you look like a buffoon, you act like a buffoon, and you talk like a buffoon...
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.
This is something that people keep saying but he way actually right and at this point this is just an Internet meme.
I remember that moment. The iPhone costed $800 with a phone plan. Insane. Nobody does that even today, so in that regard he was right.
Only after the iPhone 3 and $200 phone with a contract did it ever start selling.
Seriously, if price wasn't a problem and Ballmer was wrong, why did Apple even drop the price?
Truth is this wasn't that long ago, I still remember it, and the price drop was a huge deal to a lot of people.
Articles like these were everywhere.
Electricity, the internet, eCommerce, iPhone, even Bitcoin weren't obvious hits in the least. If the success of bitcoin was guaranteed or obvious, In 2009, I'd have bought 111,111 bitcoins for $100 at $0.0009 per bitcoin.
Now, I'd be a billionaire.
It was aleeady a success. Then it became a world beater.
Lower prices definitely had benefits, but 3/4 of a billion dollars in revenue clearly shows that many people would buy such an expensive phone.
So much this. During orientation on my first day a representative from legal came in and told us, among other things, what types of metaphors we were allowed to use in emails. "No football metaphors, no explicit or implied violence, we do not 'crush the competition', we 'work hard to show customers how good our products are'."
Hard to get a team amped up about working in an exciting new space when you are literally not allowed to get a team amped up.
Then again, right before the iPhone launched, a market research report went around the mobile division that showed "consumers in the US will never pay for their phones, they are too addicted to free subsidized cell phone deals."
Long ago when I was just a couple years in, I was "corrected" when I said we should stop shipping bad keyboards and relying on OEMs to make the keyboard not bad. Someone rather senior told me that wasn't the reason at all as to why we were shipping a sub-par keyboard. I never was told exactly why Windows Mobile 6.x shipped poor quality on screen keyboards.
Exhorting the team to "crush the competition" or "dominate the market" is not necessarily the best way to amp up a team. In fact, I'd argue it's the worst possible way, since that means that playing dirty patent troll tricks or financing things like the SCO lawsuit is a legitimate way to "win", as opposed to winning by delighting the user.
I worked on a consumer product in a highly competitive space. Our competition released products that dropped frames and had laggy UIs.
The discussion wasn't "We're going to make a smoother UI so our users have a wonderful and pleasant experience." it was "Hah, how the hell, they have literally 20x the CPU power, a GPU, over 1000x the RAM, and they are dropping frames? Let's show'em how its done!"
In certain domains, and when trying to perform at certain levels, you need every single human emotion you can draw on to get enough energy to find the motivation to do amazing work.
Is that needed 99% of the time? Nope. But MS sure as hell could have used someone pissed off about their mobile experience being terrible about, oh, say, 3 years earlier than what did happen.
Another example. Gmail launched 2004. Imagine if 2002 a senior leader at Microsoft had burst into a meeting of the Hotmail leadership team and started shouting "Why the hell do other email providers even still exist? And why the fuck do I have to still delete emails every couple of days? I want every other free email provider out of business right asap. Lose money on it, I don't care, just make us the best!"
But instead, someone at Google got upset about the same problem and made a product that completely dominated the entire consumer email market.
If you go into a competitive space (especially consumer!) with the idea of "we'll look at the market research and do what is needed to establish a place for ourselves" then no one cares about you.
"We're going to make a product that makes everyone else on the market look like incompetent jerks" is an actual mission statement that can be used to get things done.
The competition has a painful first run experience? Yours isn't better, it is perfect. Why? Because screw the competition. Your competitors have fat profit margins? Yours are razor thin, because screw the competition. There product has an industrial design comes in black and ugly grey, you have designer colors, because screw the competition.
If you are a multi-billion dollar company, and you have the resources to do everything better than anyone else in the field, then you either perform at that level, or you lose.
The iPhone launch was to be a tour de force of this ideology.
"They have ugly plastic buttons sticking out everywhere, we have metal and glass. They have a crappy joke of a keyboard, we'll reinvent the entire idea of an on screen keyboard. They have a shitty sales experience in stores? We'll partner with one carrier, and train the living daylights out of their sales people. Their UI is hard to use? We'll launch a world wide ad campaign where we show subtly people how to use the device during the ad."
I was at MS at the time. The idea there was "We'll let our OEM partners decide on how best to differentiate their product, they are after all the ones doing the main value ad and we rely on them for manufacturing."
Apple said screw that entire model, they just made it themselves, and they made it amazing.
There is an incredible energy on teams motivated by the ethos of doing the best and steam rolling the competition through sheer excellence. I'm not advocating for dirty business practices, but holy hell, telling your engineers "do good enough" is going to get you "good enough." When they wake up and go to work and the entire office is saying "we're going to make a product that puts everyone else to shame", you get a great product.
Curious, what was the attitude like on the early Band team? I absolutely loved it, and was active on the beta, but didn't have a front-row seat to the early development.
I wasn't allowed to tell people I was interviewing what the job was for. (Most people figured out that an entire floor of HW and Firmware engineers were working on Hardware.)
I had to convince people to join me by telling them about the team and about why they wanted to work there.
I said things like
"this is a classic Microsoft team, we're going to take something that is elite and expensive and make it affordable for everyone, fuck elitism, Microsoft makes products everyone can use."
"We are understaffed and underfunded, this will be the hardest you've ever worked in your life, but we are making something that is fucking amazing and you'll be telling stories about this for years to come."
"Want to build an OS? How about an entire graphics system? Say yes and I'll have you at a desk next week doing stuff you never thought you could do."
The Band was critically under funded, I was told that it was under 60 million across all the years we were active. Apple Watch famously had a billion.
The energy was insane. We were a startup within MS, no one else knew we existed but the C-level leadership and maybe their directs. My team went to Ikea and got our own desks and put them together late one night. We stole (!) a TV from another team someplace in the building, wheeled it into our work area, and watched Twitch Plays Pokemon.
The firmware team wrote a runtime from scratch. Then my team took an off the shelf UI toolkit, rewrote almost all the drawing routines, rewrote the font rendering, and rewrote another ~60% or so of the remaining code, and made a butter smooth v-sync'd UI.
We had 96 MHz and 256 KB of RAM. 30 FPS locked, the UI could run at well over 60 but we had limited bandwidth to the display controller.
One day I read an article about touch latency on various mobile OSs. I said fuck it, we can do better than any of those. We optimized our touch system, max of 2 frame latency, min of 1. An amazing team from MSR came in and wrote us a machine learning gesture recognizer that also did motion estimation so that the screen tracked your finger almost 1 to 1 compensating for errors in the touch sensors.
Very understaffed, everyone did many things. Early on a bit of dead weight tried to attach itself to the project, it got cut eventually.
Lots of bad decisions. The team spun out of Xbox Accessories. No one there knew software except Firmware, I was hired on because I knew UI, all their other software engineers had no idea. UI was the green light on the Xbox 360 controller. Amazing firmware engineers though. Lots of issues around the cloud and mobile apps, they were started much later than the rest of the product and never had time to go through proper planning, esp. for the Band 1 launch.
Our design team was balls to the wall amazing. Our lead designer put so much thought and care into everything that was on the screen, it blew me away. It also taught me how much a real designer cares about their work. If I am lucky I'll get to work with a designer like that again in my life.
The battery life would've been a day longer on Band 2 but we had a shitty accelerometer chip that couldn't do step counting on its own (or maybe it could but it required a lot of programming to get it to that stage, I never was made 100% clear on that), so we had to take raw data and process it with the CPU. Horrible waste of power, I always was sad we never were given the time to add that extra 16-20 hours of battery life.
Everything we did we wanted to do better. We had very limited hardware, so everything had to be magic in code. The EE team did magic in hardware for sure, the screen portion of Band 2 was less than 2/3rds the thickness of the Apple Watch v1, so they had very little space to work with.
Every decision was "how can we do this better than anyone else?"
As a user it changed my life. I will never not wear them (on the Versa 2 now), and have years of actionable health data that has been life changing. And it's still so obvious to me that this is still the very, very early days of wearables and consumer biotech.
I was heartbroken when it was discontinued. I would love to read the high-level strategic thinking behind that. I understand perhaps the thought was Apple Watch would be tough to compete against, but the Band was years ahead of Apple (the first couple generations of Apple Watch completely missed the key point that the killer app for watches is health) so I like to think it had a chance, but more importantly I thought it was a fight worth fighting because of how much impact these things will have on people's health. It was also just inspiring that a new product like that could come out of Microsoft, and sad to see they didn't give it the 10+ years it deserved.
1. It was the time of "One Windows". It didn't run Windows, and Windows wasn't going to ready to run on a wearable anytime soon.
2. It was expensive to manufacture. Curved screen, curved batteries, 2 rigid bodies. Everything about the industrial design was completely custom. It was amazing we even pulled it off at all.
3. Microsoft is afraid of entering new HW territories, HW tends to lose a lot of money.
4. Windows Phone died, which shouldn't have had an impact but it kinda did mentally. Users were actually evenly split between all three platforms, (which means Windows Phone users loved us!)
5. No one was willing to put in the actual engineering effort needed to do it properly. The entire team was burning out and we were bleeding people. Consumer hardware is not supposed to be at a 1 year cadence with only 1 team doing everything. Doing it that way also means you don't get a chance to make any dramatic changes, we had to only make small iterative improvements because if you only have 8-10 months to get boards up and running, get software ported over, and then finalize everything, well, you are working insane hours just pulling that off.
Correction: Nadella is afraid of entering new HW... He came on board with a chain saw and cut like crazy
Every single large company I've worked at has had mandatory training classes where lawyers explain why you never, ever say or send e-mail with anything like that. If that ever got out on the front page of the New York Times, or worse yet, as part of a discovery effort from the FTC or state attorneys generals investigating abuse of Monopoly power.... well, it would be bad.
If there is anything like that from Zuckerberg, "I want every other social media company out of business ASAP" which is subject to legal discovery.... we'd be looking at a very nasty consent decree lasting years at best, or a forced breakup of Facebook, at the worst.
Yup, I went through the same training.
> as part of a discovery effort from the FTC or state attorneys generals investigating abuse of Monopoly power.... well, it would be bad.
It depends though, losing money to acquire customers is sometimes OK, sometimes not.
How many years did Google lose money on Youtube?
Sometimes making the best technology requires going in heads first, not worrying about profit, and deciding that if you make the best product, you will eventually find a way to make some money. After all, Google had no problem monetizing Gmail, and it doesn't take a genius to think "hey, storage prices keep dropping, offer users a gig now and we may lose money, but that'll stop as prices for storage keep going down."
It isn't like Yahoo in their heyday couldn't have made the same decision.
Also, I never suggested sending that in an email! But telling the team that they need to make a product so much better that the competition has 0 hope? Well now the team has a mission statement, and one that they can go use to attitude adjust anyone who is too complacent with the status quo.
If some executive wanted to start threatening data center providers or cut off network peering agreements, yup, line way too far.
But if someone wants to make a REALLY damn good product, to the point that it is so good by the time everyone else catches up it is too late, well, more power to them.
The desire to achieve market dominance by making an insanely better product is often the means by which technology progresses.
This is why it's so bad to say anthing like, "I want to drive the competition out of business", or "I want to dominate the market". Even if you don't send it in e-mail, suppose you say it at a department meeting, and someone takes a video of it? Now if they ever get disgruntled, they can take that video to the FTC, and now you're in a heap of trouble.
There are plenty of other ways of motivating a team than trash-talking the competition. If you have a team where the only way to really motivate them is to curse and use that kind of war-like language, I'd argue that such a company has a massive culture problem, and it's certainly not a company I would ever want to work at. Not because I think the stock is at risk of pluging after the FTC announces a anti-trust investigation (although that would be a real risk), but because I'd find such an atmosphere positively toxic. It's something I'd expect of the Uber "bro" culture, and no, I'd never want to work there.
Of course, but it is constantly debated line.
To go back to Email, "we'll be losing money until the price for storage drops" is that predatory?
"We're losing money because we haven't ramped up our partner ad program yet." Predatory?
There are many cases where a large pile of cash can help establish a business, and help create a higher quality user experience and a better product, precisely because there is the chance to not turn a profit money for awhile.
> but because I'd find such an atmosphere positively toxic. It's something I'd expect of the Uber "bro" culture, and no, I'd never want to work there.
I never encountered the Uber bro culture, but I have been lucky enough to work at teams where we wanted to do better than everyone else and where that was our mission day in and day out.
Part of that was looking at the competition and seeing how badly they were shafting users on price, and getting angry about it and funneling that anger into making a better product.
> This is why it's so bad to say anthing like, "I want to drive the competition out of business"
The goal is always to make a product so good that there is no possible competition, and that is of course perfectly legal to do, just so long as the competition is driven out of business solely because of consumer's making a free choice as to which product they want to buy.
> they can take that video to the FTC, and now you're in a heap of trouble.
My understanding is that the trouble only comes if the company has actually done something illegal. If the CEO says they want to dominate the market, and someone in sales goes and starts bribing people, huge problem. If the CEO says they want to dominate the market and the supply chain and engineering teams find a way to shave 30% off the product's price, or the software engineers and designers work together to make the product 10x more usable than anything else on the market, then there isn't a problem.
The issue that comes up of course is that if the CEO does say anything that might be seen as encouraging someone to win at "any cost", and any single employee takes those steps, then yeah, obvious legal problems.
But the overall fact is, in competitive winner-takes-all markets, the goal has to be winning big, and everyone needs to be aligned behind that goal, and everyone on the team has to believe in that goal.
As you said earlier, "[pricing] is a constantly debated line". Suppose a search engine displays the lyrics on the results page, instead of requiring that the user click a link and go to some advertising-laden lyrics web site. Is that to improve the search user's experience, by giving them the answer right then and there? Or is it predatory move against the song lyrics web site? As you say, "it's constantly debated".
But if you have the CEO, or the product manager, saying, "I want to crush the competition; see them driven before me; and hear the lamentation of their women" (apologies to Arnold Schwarzenegger and Conan the Barbarian) you've just given a weapon to the FTC as to the intent of that "constantly debated line". And G-d help your company if that lands on the front page of the New York Times.
Also, even if you win the anti-trust lawsuit, the distraction and the legal costs are high. I'd argue that even if you ignore the toxic atmosphere argument, from a purely pragmatic and practical perspective, It's Just Not Worth It.
Want to motivate the team by asking them to build the best product ever? Sure! I'll note, by the way, that just because you have the objectively better, say, search quality score compared to all of the other search engines out there, that doesn't necessarily mean that the other search engines will go out of business. People choose which search engines to use for many reasons, and not just search quality. (Many people who use DDG admit doesn't always give the best results; but they use it because they hate Google, and it's "good enough".)
So it's actually better to come up with an objective quality metric, and constantly challenge the team to make it better, every year and every quarter, regardless of whether or not they are better than the competition. If you don't, you end up resting on your laurels, and that's no good either. So you align the whole team on making the product better, and delighting more and more users, regardless of whether or not you have the best product, and certainly not because you want to drive the competition out of business.
Take Microsoft Office, for example. For a long time it was the best, or at least most commercially successful, office suite. How do you challenge the team if your only focus is, "drive the competition out of business"? And what if your competition is the Open Source "libreoffice", which by definition can't be driven out of business, and is getting better year after year, with the end user of cost of zero dollars and zero cents staying constant?
I can easily imagine this. The outcome would be that I would go outdoors, raise my hand, and ask "Any company out there willing to pay me to leave?"
Tell me: Did Google have a senior leaser burst into a meeting and start shouting "Why the the fuck do I have to still delete emails every couple of days? I want every free email provider out of business right asap. Lose money on it, I don't care, just make us the best!"
Is that how Gmail became dominant?
If your goal is to only employ one type of person - uber competitive type who cannot motivate themselves without wild pep talks - you're going to miss out on a lot of talent. I'll happily employ bright people who don't want to work for/with you.
Always problematic to assume that what works for you works for the majority.
All employees of large (tech?) companies have received exactly the same message from legal.
Tim Cook is the opposite of that in every way. He delegates, he wants efficiency, he is much more conservative in where the products go. Yet the culture of yes still exists.
The answer to all of these big corporations is just we need different theories of management and apply them across the board. Fire those unwilling to play along and grow a culture of collaboration.
Gosh that sounds like an oxymoron
I can see a misreading of the original. This is my understanding.
Usually these uber-productive individuals are required and necessary during the early stages of a corporation where you literally need that kind of productivity to survive. Once an org matures though, there is no such requirement.
(I disagree with the whole thesis though - I think Apple suffers greatly from Steve not being here now.)
If you don't see the irony in that your an idiot.
But his definition of "made men" seems very vague and very convenient. The people who Nadella appointed to higher positions were almost entirely people who had been at Microsoft for many years. Why are some "made men" and some are not? The definition seems primarily about whether or not the author liked them personally.
On one hand, it is sort of a good idea if you can truly pick the "winners" (and some of the people who went through the program did amazing things!) but, well, in hindsight I think everyone reading this can see how internal biases would be reflected in who got picked for the program.
I don't know too much about the program, and I don't even remember now what is was called, but engineers who'd been there longer would talk about it sometimes.
HiPo -- for junior to mid level -- special training, networking, and seminars. MiniMSFT comments section mentions this from time to time.
Bench -- for mid to later career, usually on the way to "partner" or above level -- same as HiPo, but may be asked to work on a project with others in Bench, may see attention from VPs mentoring the group.
Neither one had any official impact on ratings, rewards, or career velocity. What they did do, however, was establish an elite and help that elite network across the company.
> Neither one had any official impact on ratings, rewards, or career velocity.
Ah interesting, my understanding was that people who can gone through HiPo were sorta blessed. Then again I guess in theory the people who get selected for HiPo should already be doing the work to make their career velocity look good.
I saw all sorts of interesting stuff while I was at MS. It was a crazy place to work. It was sort of like working at a company that does everything 5-8 years too early, and then tries again 2-3 years too late.
* Tablets * eBooks * MP3 players * Smartphones * Smart TVs (Micorosft bought Web TV in 1997!! That is what, 15-20 years too early?) * Tablets again * Cloud based document syncing (See: What Sharepoint tried to be)
They also made some sort of automation creation tool for business users that, IIRC, got cancelled after one release and replaced with something else. I only know about it because I signed up to do internal user testing for it.
This is on top of all sorts of crazy one off projects. (In 2011 I was on a team attempting to make an autonomous household robot! How long before those become a viable thing outside of Roombas?)
Interesting read anyway.
Seriously though, these sort of transitions take time, and people always underestimate just how much time. This is a huge cultural transition and you can't just fire all of the made-men one morning and usher in the new leaders to take there place. There is a real transition that has to happen on multiple levels and rushing it risks putting people in place that aren't yet up to speed.
I'm honestly surprised at just how fast it happening. And it is happening -- and quickly.
The fact that there are so many terrible managers still hanging around is like sludge in a jet engine. Once cleaned out (and that seems the direction they're moving), the company will hopefully skyrocket even further.
Come on, I understand the criticisms of botched updates, but Microsoft under Satya has been anything but boring - the incredible push towards open source is something many thought could never happen!
WSL and the upcoming WSL2 are likewise anything but boring - Linux! In Windows!
"At its core, Microsoft is a company that makes its money the old fashioned way: by creating products of value that people willingly part with their money to use. They stand as a bulwark against the data mongering and user exploitation that Google and Facebook see as the future of humanity."
Microsoft has always made its money by creating, maintaining, extending and exercising monopoly power. I don't have a reference for this, but as I recall, after the antitrust verdict, Microsoft "offered" to give schools free copies of Windows as part of its "punishment". I guess that really hurt them to have schools sending out all documents in Microsoft Office format. Only the latest versions of course, so that it created incompatibilities with every parent's version of Office, forcing everyone to upgrade if they wanted to read a note from their kids' teachers.
Since the Pentagon recently bought $10B in Microsoft products, I hope they consider that having a sole supplier is a national security issue, and force Microsoft to at least release an open spec of all Office document formats, and force them to update this spec at the same time product updates occur, if not months before.
It may be too late even for that since Office is now running in a Microsoft cloud. Maybe the Pentagon just bought $10B of Microsoft cloud services. In that case, the format doesn't even matter any more, because every document is born, lives, and dies on a Microsoft server somewhere.
Sure glad they aren't doing that "data mongering" thing.
Call me skeptical, but there's not a whole lot of products I willfully pay Microsoft for. Most of them I pay for with a strong feeling of resentment that I have simply no other choice, since there are no competitors to the market or the lock in is too strong.
Instead it is usually more like "Oh shit, a new Mirosoft product, I hope I wont be forced to buy it to stay compatible".
The original Surface Pro was decent, but generally slow and bulky. The first Surface Book, on the other hand, is still a great, versatile piece of hardware several years later.
Of course, YMMV - a tablet alone doesn't cover everything for me, but for some people needing a keyboard/base for connections may not work out.
When I first heard of the Surface, what I thought it'd be: a bad laptop and a worse tablet.
After I read and heard people raving about how great it was for years, what I thought it'd be when I finally got to use one: a great laptop and a good-enough tablet.
What it was when I finally got to use it, very much to my surprise at that point: a bad laptop and a worse tablet.
I don't get it.
I think it's a combination of astroturfing and owners trying to convince themselves they made the right decision.
I wish the battery life was better, and I think Microsoft is missing out by not having the detachable keyboard have a small battery onboard so that you could use the keyboard on the side while you're drawing. But it's my favorite mobile device, and I'm not joking, astroturfing, or anything like that.
They actually did come out with an accessory that would attach onto the keyboard and do that, but it also was discontinued a long time ago.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-quietly-discontinues...
I assume both devices didn't do well enough on their own (otherwise they'd still be made today) to justify creating one that did both.
Many of Microsoft's products are simple and boring at first glance. However, when you really want to flex it to do something powerful, the features are usually there. Their products have so many years of development in them and it shows because their products stand the test of time, particularly in the enterprise. I'm glad there are lot of other vendors entering the market though as it keeps companies like MSFT innovating.
I've used it heavily for years, and I disagree with this assessment. I avoid it whenever I have the option.
In my current job we don't have either and its utterly frustrating how bad the alternatives are.
I've been using a dedicated GPU (switchable) model of the gen 1 Surface Book for four years, and (other than that gigantic hiccup where Intel screwed up the power management on their chips) I've loved it. Plays many of the fancier video games, battery life on the scale of 5-7 hours under web browsing workloads, great screen, and with WSL2 I get most of my Linux development needs covered as well. I can detach the screen and use it while I'm flying. I can break out the stylus when I need to draw diagrams in meetings (or... when I'm dungeon-mastering for D&D).
I have met many, many people who gladly pay for Office (specifically, Excel) or Visual Studio, so much does it increase their productivity. I'm not one of them, but I'm not an accountant and the code bases I work with are small and don't require VS's incredible tooling.
There are also adherents of the cult of Visio, but I honestly can't fathom what they see in it.
Microsoft can be faulted for many things, but the reason it is so successful is that it made some really good products that still haven't been surpassed.
Visual Studio I'll slightly disagree on. I resent it. When VSCode, an electron application, can run lag/stutter/micro-freeze free and Visual Studio an IDE written in C++ cannot you know the codebase has become unmaintainable. This isn't a recent phenomenon either. This has been a nuisance in VS 2015, 17, and now 19 (16.4 Preview).
I'd love to switch to VSCode but the csprojec/C# support isn't there yet. I don't need a forms builder, server explorer, EDMX designer, test explorer, and all the other bells and whistles VS offers. I use VS strictly to write code (C# MVC/Web), run, and repeat. The refactoring tools/Intellisense/IntelliCode/QuickFixes are awesome but if I could trade them all for a lag free experience I would in a second.
I'm using a i7 (6th gen)/16 GB of RAM/SSD. I have no extensions except the built-in ones and Web Compiler/Bundler & Minifier. It doesn't help.
I agree. Visual Studio has a tendency to make me actively angry.
However, the developers I've spoken with who love it tell me that it has some insanely good tooling that is just unmatched by anything else. I'm not even in a position to know what they're talking about or why it's so important to them, but that doesn't mean they don't know what they're talking about.
For whatever reason I have the opposite experience, VScode input lag is painful at times and VSPro is minimal. As you know once you master an IDE, keyboard shortcuts and common keywords are typically being entered at 200wpm+ in bursts and its quite noticeable. Initial startup is definitely poor for both.
> I don't need a forms builder, server explorer, EDMX designer, test explorer, and all the other bells and whistles VS offers.
Same. CodeLens gets immediately disabled. Makes me wonder if there would be a way to hack up a stripped down "VS Lite".
While the Ballmer years saw the company coast along on its old crown jewels, missing nearly every opportunity, Nadella's MSFT has shaped up to be one that is building a few new kingdoms - in the cloud space, open dev tools, new consumer hardware (see the upcoming Surface lineup) - it's definitely not the Windows + Office company of old.
"Treating the culpables as untouchable sends a message to the current offenders that these behaviors are in bounds and those who practice them suffer no lingering effects. It does nothing to stop the fiscal regularity of companywide memos condemning ongoing sexism, racism and bullying. It does nothing to stop the revolving door of the majority of new college hires leaving the moment their signing bonuses become permanent. It does nothing to stop the cycle of sucking up to those in power in an effort to gain power for oneself."
I really thought the age of the web would spell Microsoft's downfall. I couldn't see past the desktop. But Satya found the cloud and brought back the mojo. Excellent move.
This statement is so true, its golden.