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Comment by throwawayms4 | Hacker News Reader

Broken incentives, clueless trend-following leaders.

For the last year or so all orders from leadership have been "build more AI, show AI usage" even above things like stability and reliability.

There was no recognition from leadership over what use cases worked or not, and they appeared to believe their own hype.

To complement this, there is near to no long-term accountability for upper leadership for failure, so even as features underperform and strategy turns out to be a flop, they will continue to make millions a year, having layoffs every 6 months, and then acting surprised pikachu when morale is down and top engineers are looking to the door, since salary is barely competitive even if you are a top performer getting special stock awards.

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From what I remember, Microsoft almost missed the Internet, then Gates turned the whole company to focus on it until they dominate in that space. They have since lost this dominance to Google, to the point of using Chromium for their own browser.

When Mobile came along, Microsoft completely missed. Ballmer laughed at the iPhone when it was released and didn’t take it seriously. By the time they started trying to make moves it was too little, too late. Mobile has shifted how people use computers and other than have a few apps and enterprise management, Microsoft is largely absent.

How much of this push behind AI is a desperate attempt not to miss another transformative shifts in the industry?

They didn't miss the internet they actively tried to stifle it

I suspect there's some truth in that, but I suspect it's very banal. Current leadership does not have the "political leeway" nor technical conviction or strategic insight to buck trends on instinct as past leadership did, and thus will err hard on trend following, especially given the foaming at the mouth the investing and thought leader population was doing around AI over the last few years.

> "They have since lost this dominance to Google"

A lot of which had to do with being under a consent decree.

> "When Mobile came along, Microsoft completely missed."

By "missed" you mean that MS was at the top of the mobile phone heap after defeating Palm Computing when the iPhone came out and swept Windows Mobile, Palm, Research In Motion and everyone else away.

I expect the GP was referring to missing the boat in responding to the iPhone after it swept away Windows Mobile.

Microsoft was late to respond, eventually bought Danger and released the Kin phone before cancelling it within weeks, and only released Windows Phone in 2010 a solid 3 years after the iPhone release.

Windows Phone was actually pretty nice to use, but they were already too late to the scene and didn't have a chance to steal ground from iPhone or android who already had solid app ecosystems.

That still isn't missing the boat. The pivot to the improved UI in Windows Mobile 6.5, the last of the old school Windows CE based releases, and skins by OEMs like HTC was IIRC in response to the iPhone's successful UI innovations.

And let's not forget that Google specifically interfered with access to their services on Windows Phone to hamstring it.

Huh? MS did ok in the nascent consumer market. RIM owned commercial, completely.

I had an iPaq in 2004 when we got married. It was like living in the future, where the future was a scaled down Windows 98 box. We took a one month road trip and was able to Priceline hotels on the road as we explored. Amazing device but not an iPhone.

Ballmer was so butthurt about iPhone he would berate people who appeared before him with one. As a customer, my boss and I were invited to a meeting with high level Microsoft people and asked to not carry iPhones out of respect.

>>since salary is barely competitive even if you are a top performer getting special stock awards

People sitting outside FANG/NAMAMA still drool over those barely competitive salaries you speak of.

My reason for saying that was not to say the employees are not well-paid in an absolute sense. It's that the reality is that caliber of employee has options, and Microsoft does not work to retain them, which results in undesirable (from the company's perspective) attrition.

Thanks for sharing. How long have these leaders stayed in MSFT? Were they strong engineers or PMs?

This is a hard question since there are a few patterns I've seen. Often they're long-term microsoft, more often PM than engineering, sometimes external. But I suspect that's not the dominating consistency, with a similar statement to technical skill. People who get to a high level here get there for the same incentives I mentioned above. They are risk averse, political, cowtow to their leadership, and know how to play the game.

Thanks for sharing. Guess the 80s-90s hungry MSFT was long gone?

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