Microsoft's office: Why insiders think top management has lost its way

As a recently departed (read 5 months) ex-PM at Microsoft, I think MS's problems, at least in my division, stem from three things: a lack of vision/leadership, too inward of a focus, and the ridiculous bevy of meaningless communication. I think the article touches on each of these in a certain way, but not exactly in the same way I mean them.

One thing I noticed about the middle management at MS was that they never defined a direction. No one ever set out a vision. The result of this was that each little section of a product would decide what the best possible direction for the product would be and build features to that vision. The summation of this effort is a frankenstein product with a user experience that is equally as scary. No one worked together unless they were forced to and even when they did, they never really worked toward a common goal. Based on my experience, I believe that a single charasmatic, intelligent, and visionary person could have easily turned our division around. All it would take is strong leadership and a crystal clear vision. We had neither.

The article makes a point of MS being focused too much on itself, and I wholeheartedly agree. One of the things I was praised for was knowing what the rest of the tech world was doing (I worked on VS). What astounded me was how little others knew about non-MS technologies. We were beaten to the punch by other products nearly every time because we only ever focused inward and not on what the world itself was doing. Moreover, when people did look out the window they focused on the wrong things and instead of trying to innovate saw it as a need to start chasing tail lights.

Lastly, I got several hundred emails a day as a PM. Despite that deluge of written communication, I felt that no one was really ever saying anything of value. Sadly, most people aren't great communicators and the result of a culture that promotes a ton of communication is a torrent of useless discussions that take away from what really matters. It seemed to me that most managers were there solely to deal with the fact that no one was working together or communicating properly. I would argue that at least 1/3 of a person's workload at MS is the direct result of this inability to communicate and it absolutely destroyed many of the efforts I would've liked to have seen succeed.

I don't believe replacing Ballmer is some magic bullet. I think the company needs to be 1/10 of the size to reduce communication and to get people working together. I think it needs someone with a vision for the way things should be that isn't based on what's already out there. And I think Microsoft has a chance if it could only take a step back and see that it's no longer an innovative company, but instead a peddler of last year's model.

The fundamental problem at Microsoft is that building your career is a better (more lucrative) use of your time than building your product. You can be successful there without ever making a successful product. Microsoft acquired my startup and I spent 2 years there wondering what the hell was going on until I came to that realization.

Some good quotes from the comments:

"I personally know two women got promoted to be managers, not because of their performance, but because they each is a higher manager's mistress. In short, Microsoft's is a fear-based culture. How could Microsoft not fall rapidly?"

"I'd attend a meeting where we needed 3 or 4 relevant people to discuss something but 30 or more would show up, to represent their group's interests, even if they had no real idea of what was going on. It was nearly impossible to reach any consensus, all decisions ultimately got made by whatever interested PM had the most clout - often not the PM with the most expertise or relevance"

" I recall the sole-sucking Business Process Reviews we'd go through. The culmination would be a Bill/Steve meeting. It was the 30 people developing 98 slide powerpoints with 2 point font (again, no exaggeration). It was game over for me once I sat through that."

"""

Yet Ballmer & Co. remain in denial, they say, because the great gushers of cash Windows and Office generate means they don't feel the urgency they otherwise would –shielded from the pain of its many disappointments by two of the more successful franchises in the history of business. """

That reminds me of an article about Pixar (which I can't find now) which talked about how the management team are especially careful to seek out problems when the company is being successful. If stuff is going well, it's easy to gloss over problems with morale, teamwork etc.

To quote Steve Jobs: "The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste. And I don't mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way, in the sense that they don't think of original ideas, and they don't bring much culture into their products. "

This is so true. With other leading companies, you'll often see a product and it'll be so well designed and everything will be so thought out, that it'll bring an instant smile to your face. With Microsoft's products, on the other hand, you're often frowning the minute you open them.

Just today, I fired up Entourage (MS Outlook for Mac) over a really flaky connection; and the first thing it does is update the Bulk Mail folder. Really, Microsoft? Would that be my first priority when I open an email client, to see what new junk mail has arrived? Then it proceeded to update other sundry folders, and near the end it did it update the Inbox (which is what I was waiting for).

One of Microsoft's biggest problems that contributes to their insular view is that they are located in Redmond. They're insulated from the rest of the highly competitive technology field (except for Amazon). This works out great for them when it comes to retaining talent in Redmond as employees are usually not willing to uproot their lifestyle to head to 'greener pastures'.

Contrast this to how Google handles compensation and employee retention. Granted, Google is a much smaller organization and can afford to be more nimble, but part of it has to do with with the fact that being in the valley means that its incredibly easy for talented, motivated engineers to move to the next hot startup once they're dissatisfied with their current job.

In Redmond, however, these options don't really exist and creates a culture of stagnation. People goto their jobs because they have and leave as soon as it is culturally acceptable.

I fear a lot of Microsoft's future as I just don't believe that they are able to recruit top young talent anymore. Not only is Microsoft not a "hip" place to work anymore, but their compensation is generally below market. Its pretty standard for funded startups to give more BASE salary than Microsoft. Google's base is roughly 50% more than what Microsoft pays. New hires at Google make more money than level 64 Microsoft engineers (5 levels from starting).

Microsoft will continue to execute and create good products, but until their internal culture drastically changes they will slowly slide into irrelevance.

What I found most interesting about that article was how, unlike most articles on CNN, the comments were dominated by people saying approximately "Yes I actually worked there from xx to yy and I fully agree with the substance of this article."

I've often thought that Microsoft would have done much better if the justice dept had broken it up. Being everything to everyone just doesn't work as a business strategy. But separate Windows/XBox and Office/enterprise apps companies could focus on their respective markets.

I still don't get how all these articles frame the debate as Microsoft playing catch-up with all the "innovation" coming out of Apple? I get the management culture and internal struggles and "analysis paralysis" that comes with the cover-your-butt mentality, but as far as I can tell, Microsoft is one of the very few companies that has entire departments dedicated bringing cutting-edge technologies to market. The only other companies that comes close(that I've seen) are Google and perhaps Philips. Talk to researches at elite technology schools, and I would venture to guess that they would put Microsoft far ahead of Apple, and maybe Google, in the innovation race. However, if you talk management or P/E people, they would probably give you a different answer. So I guess I'm in agreement that there's an internal problem at Microsoft, but that it lies with the culture, not the actual scope of their ability to innovate.

    A survey of more than 1,000 Microsoft employees 
    conducted in October by Glassdor.com showed that 
    only 51% of them approved of Ballmer's performance 
    as CEO.

I'm familiar with these types of corporate surveys -- the questions are more likely phrased with bias, like "Do you agree that Ballmer is a good CEO?" (careful, he's watching your answers).

And then they do an all hands in which results are discussed with team-level granularity to keep anonymity, but if the team has 5 people, out of which you're most likely to speak your mind (and everybody knows it), then everybody knows it was you who criticized the CEO.

I've seen such a survey end up with 80% in favor of everything, even though the people were actually discontented with the way the company was being managed -- 51% is pretty bad ;-)

"Windows Everywhere" is a bad strategy for Microsoft. I still don't think Windows Phone 7 was a good name. Why didn't they just go with Microsoft Phone or something?

It seems like most of Microsoft wants Steve Ballmer to make a major change to Microsoft. I'd really like to see him follow the "New Detroit" idea and announce a major re-thinking of the company. But, I'm sure he won't. They'll complain, his approval ratings will get worse, Microsoft will decline, and he will stay in denial. Peter Drucker is rolling in his grave.

everybody/everything is subject to natural lifecycle. At 35 one is completely different from the one at 15. The complex living system like a large company is subject to it as well. You go through life, you change, you age [the undead of course are exception from the rule, like vampires or IBM]

This is the natural end-game of being a hugely successful company: you box yourself in. You make so many rules about what can happen and how it all has to work that nothing can escape.

They have to break up. I just don't see any other way around it. Each little new idea that might help somebody competes with dozens of special interests all looking out for some little fiefdom or concern that may or may not be important -- nobody knows. The place becomes a huge echo chamber where outsiders can't be heard except through marketing studies and sales staff reporting through the chain of command.

I wish this situation was unique to Microsoft, but it is not. Any large shop that makes software ends up creating their own prison.

The open question is whether Google and Facebook will also end up in this same spot.

Google has apparently taken this lesson to heart. With Page taking over, it looks like his goal is to allow each group to act more independently, like startups, and to reduce the management structure so teams have more flexibility to do what they want to be successful.

>its people knew the competition so intimately that the best product managers could rattle off the birthdays of the CEO's kids.

That's not competitive research, that's stalking.

Microsoft lost its way once Gates left. He was the visionary that started the company, and Ballmer was just a businessman. They need a visionary to lead, and from what I've read they need to do away with the internal turf wars. I know I've read a lot of blog posts from insiders saying that great ideas get smothered by other divisions all the time when they feel "threatened" by them.