Hacker News Reader

Comment by fleshdaddy | Hacker News Reader

Often times when this stuff comes up I think it’s Microsoft’s organizational structure that’s to blame. Namely that each team operates like their own little company in many ways. So the team and PM for minesweeper forget they’re just a small part of a broader ecosystem.

View on HN

At some point I hope there's an interesting documentary or memoir on whatever happened to Microsoft's Carbonated Games, because in my mind as an Xbox fan from the early days of the 360 that's maybe where some of the interesting bodies were buried. At the time as an intern in an entirely different division, Carbonated Games seemed like it was built out of PopCap envy. (Today it might be called King envy, with the irony that Microsoft now owns King.) It seems like there was an idea to take casual games seriously, and they had some incredible talent. Hexic was designed by Alexey Pajitnov (of Tetris fame), who had been working for and was seemingly under-utilized by Microsoft for years at that point (other than Hexic his biggest known contribution to a Microsoft product was 1997's [fantastic] Microsoft Puzzle Collection aka Microsoft Entertainment Pack [5]: The Puzzle Collection).

I don't have any clue how or why Carbonated Games blew up (other than jokes about maybe they were a bit over-carbonated), but the only official game they released was Hexic and a few later versions of Hexic.

There was a sense that Carbonated was going to be the first party developer in charge of things like modern Solitaire and Minesweeper. For whatever reason that Carbonated blew up, when it blew up Microsoft let a second-party relationship (Arkadium) sweet talk them into that catbird seat. It's an incredible revenue stream for a privately held company and seems to be an incredibly favorable contract that lets them keep using Microsoft's brand.

Should it ever finally come to light, I imagine that the full story of how Carbonated blew up and Arkadium was waiting in the wings for that seems likely to be some binary of either a completely dull story of bad budgeting and worse contracts or an incredible story of international intrigue, bribes, backstabs, and betrayals. (We already know Alexey Pajitnov is a player early in the story, and his Edgerton-led tale is in recent amusement media, but also more recently Arkadium got into a lot of hot water because the majority of their development staff were in an office in Crimea. There's a lot of interesting questions to be had there.)

There's a reason the Microsoft org chart meme exists.

https://www.globalnerdy.com/2011/07/03/org-charts-of-the-big...

This. Have each department be responsible for their own P&L and out the window goes whatever (brand, vision, ...) glues your organisation together.

That’s been the case at most medium and large tech companies I’ve worked at. The incentives always seem structured that way.

Capitalism only works this way. Why are people constantly surprised.

Having a capitalist structure inside a company is neither mandatory nor common.

Indeed, it’s commonly said that the structure of any given software reflects the organizational structure which built it.

Sounds like a fancy handwavey excuse for organizational blindness.

If I showed up for work in a top hat, gold watch and a lovely lavender evening gown under a piss soaked parka while wearing clown shoes, I would be asked politely but firmly to go home and come back in a presentable fashion for my job.

The MANGA companies do the organizational equivalent of this on the daily and rather than excusing them from the gala people line up to dance and hope that some of the leftover urine dribbles on them.

It's pure insanity that we as a society have no uniformly and completely recoiled in horror from them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com