Microsoft employees "leaving in droves" during Ballmer's speech

I have a good friend that worked at Microsoft in the R&D labs for years (he was one of the leads on Synth and all that photo-rendering fanciness that eventually found its way into mobile Win and had a extremely popular iOS app for a while) and he gave us the low-down of how Microsoft works from the inside recently.

* Balmer doesn't lead, he believes in "survival of the fittest" in the more jungle sense of the word. While he doesn't actively pit the product teams against one another, he encourages them to battle with each other and only come to him with the result, never with the conflict or questions about who should do what.

* As a result of this, the teams HATE each other. The Dev Tools team hates the Windows team. The Windows team hates the Xbox team. The Xbox team hates the MSN team and so on. There is a particularly odd level of animosity between the devtools and windows teams.

The Xbox doesn't even run a special version of Windows, it is a custom OS built with some of the core kernel, but very little else. This created a lot of conflict between those two teams as well.

Every team feels like they are 6 months away from being cut and as a result try and block any effort any other team makes at impeding on their turf.

* The company has shed most of the strong/independent/curious lead devs by now a many found it impossibly pointless to work there.

Discovered a new way to make NTFS faster? Too bad, it's not going in the mainline. Found a new way to make DX render faster on modern hardware in low-powered systems? Great, now go sit at your desk and shut up.

There was no nurturing of new ideas because of this "protect your turf at all costs!" culture that Balmer created.

My buddy talked for about an hour... it was fascinatingly horrible to listen to, but it seems while BillG was the benevolent dictator type much like Jobs was, Balmer is the polar opposite in every wrong way.

More like a absentee father that loves watch you fight with your brothers, but otherwise doesn't really care what you do.

Paul Thurrot is reporting that comment is misleading:http://www.winsupersite.com/article/paul-thurrotts-wininfo/m...

The summary is that according to 2 individuals who claim to be employees who were actually at the meeting, the meeting ran as usual, and the people who left early did so to traffic. I wonder when the tech reporting industry will tire of reporting Microsoft's death?

I admit to not liking Ballmer from what I've seen, but how much can one person really control a company? Would Ballmer walking out tomorrow really change enough? If products really are uninspiring enough to employees, etc. then that has to be the fault of a more general group of people: at least spanning several executives, managers of product teams, and the behavior of many employees. To some extent many of Microsoft's senior employees are now reaping what they have sown in recent years. Ballmer will surely be blamed, and isn't blameless, but a lot more would have to change to make a difference.

" She rolled out cuts to our bennies last year just after the company meeting, what’s next???"

If that's true, I'm not surprised that nobody is happy at this meeting. The company has set an expectation of pain, marked by the date of this meeting. Why would anyone be happy about it?

This submission should be flagged. Its source are random blog comments on a random blog.

But I'll take this opportunity for an Ballmer rant. I don't like Ballmer, but I can't tell if his leadership style is hands-off or impotent?

The company is raking in money. Certain product groups are doing fantastic, but others are floundering (and sometimes climb back from the grave, eg. Windows Phone). The various groups inside Microsoft are notorious for lack of communication and cooperation.

Maybe I have my answer. I'd certainly like to see a new leadership that killed the "embrace and extend" mentality and forced an emphasis on adopting open standards (which currently attempts to come up from the bottom (engineers)). If the shenanigans stopped, things could really take off. They have solid products, it just seems like the mentality and corporate/marketing actions of Microsoft sabotage it all.

Note: I'm not a MS basher by any means, take a look at my comment history.

I realize that I may be being overly critical of a site called 'winrumors.com', but this is thin gruel by anyone's standards. Because I work at MS, I don't want to flag it, but please, someone without a conflict should flag this.