Microsoft reorganizes
microsoft.com
microsoft.com
A new CEO was hired to replace an outgoing CEO. The outgoing CEO met with the incoming CEO for an exit interview. During the discussion, the departing CEO stated he had placed 3 very important letters in his drawer just as his predecessor had done for him. He explained that the new CEO would find opening the letters in order most useful when a serious event took place. He also stated the letters left for him had really helped him over his tenure.
Several months passed before a major event came up. The new CEO now remembered the letters and noticed they were numbered 1, 2, and 3. The former CEO had instructed they be opened in order for maximal benefit. The new CEO opened letter #1 and the paper inside had the words “blame it on your predecessor.” The new CEO did as the letter stated and amazingly he was able to avert serious problems and keep his job.
Several months passed before the next serious event took place. This one was growing in magnitude and things were starting to get ugly at the company. There were even calls for the CEO to step down. In desperation, the CEO opened the drawer and pulled out letter #2. With great fear he, opened it carefully to read the word “reorganize.” He followed the instructions and just as before he was saved. The whole company quieted down and went back to business as usual.
After about a year, a third serious event took place and it was much worse than the rest. The CEO knew how to get out of the mess because he had a third letter left to open. With a smile he reached for the letter #3 and opened it to read “write 3 letters.”
http://www.mondaynote.com/2010/05/30/ballmer-just-opened-the...
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/05/25/735217/-Khrushchev-...
The anecdote was cited in the 2000 film Traffic.
In other words, Ballmer wants the company to "focus" on being everything to everyone!
Not a good sign for the business.
--
PS. Compare Ballmer's long, complicated memo to Google's mission statement: "to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful." (Source: http://www.google.com/about/company/ )
"We're a company that does stuff for customers."
Yeah, not helpful in the least.
Bill Gates:
It's very hard to recall how crazy and wild that was, you know, "on every desk and in every home." At the time, you have people who are very smart saying, "Why would somebody need a computer?"
Not saying this new statement is audacious (it feels kind of anodyne to me), just that "hidebound behemoth" isn't the only gene in their DNA.
This isn't ambitious, it's meaningless. Not a good sign for corporate excellence.
What they need is real focus, and it seems they still haven't learned.
That said, it's seriously lacking intent. Being everything to all people, all wrapped up in a single 'strategy' isn't necessarily going to solve the problems related to designing and building great software.
They do make it reasonably pleasant to run Windows as a non-admin user though, and not the impossibility that was in XP.
Unobtrusiveness FTW!
I'm just curious about what actions will follow these words without any prejudice.
Apparently, Microsoft, the world's biggest software company, is no longer interested in software.
I wouldn't call this a great idea, considering "core competencies" and how well their products in the "devices and services" divisions are faring, but it is, at least, forward-looking.
Microsoft doesn't want to sell you Word: they want to sell you the best method of composition. Microsoft doesn't want to sell you Powerpoint: they want to sell you the ability to make the best presentations. And so on.
This leaves business and government markets, as well as gaming, and possibly services / online platforms with advertising-based revenue.
Meantime, Microsoft still have to support their legacy. Even some of the EOL products, which, despite best efforts, still live in places which have the power to command fixes.
The multiple products they offer have always provided high levels of seamless integration.
We will allocate resources and build devices and services that provide compelling, integrated experiences across the many screens in our lives, with maximum return to shareholders.
Even if the corporation's main aim is to benefit its shareholders, that unnecessary line is going to come across as alienating to employees, who probably care very little about how these changes will affect wealthy shareholders.
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/kinectforwindowsdev/newdevkit...
The say more than 50% of the Fortune 500 are now using Azure:
http://www.neowin.net/news/windows-azure-now-used-by-over-50...
These are fairly radical changes as they are getting off the desktop platform amd moving straight into the cloud.
That doesn't mean the article isn't technically accurate, of course, but I'd suspect that MSFT is being very generous with their definition of "using" and counting any pilot project in some engineering team as "using" - in which case I'm sure that most of the fortune 500 have someone somewhere playing with Azure.
But that's not the same as using from the standpoint that we typically think about it.
The way American/Chinese taxes work, actually, I'm annoyed to get stock at all as compensation and wish it would just come in as salary.
If you have something stupid to say, keep it to yourself.
Too bad you don't take your own advice. You would have saved yourself the embarrassment.
We will allocate resources ... with maximum return to shareholders
You have to imagine the meeting where they discussed this and someone thought that this sentence was going to sound to investors like a giant money pit. So in true committee style, they voted for a camel and stuck this odd phrase on the end to satisfy that person.
I would, if I could find any content in it. Still searching...
In other words, Ballmer realizes MS is a heavily siloed company, and that developing in silos is proving counterproductive to any serious attempt at cross-screen UX and platform integration.
How much of that is true, and how much of that is the spin being given to a cost-cutting reorg, is up for debate.
I parse this as follows: PC sales are declining and selling Windows & Office licenses is not going to make it; now the option is either to focus on - Windows Server and cloud services OR - copying Apple; go for closed gadgets/tracking devices with a processor
Copying Apple is a bad choice, very crowded space here / everybody wants to make an IPhone.
In the end this means bad news for Windows Server, however who cares ...
see "PC sales see 'longest decline' in history" http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-23251285
(On the other hand modern laptops nowadays look like tables, they have a touchscreen and detachable keyboards; there is some convergence here, so it is all very confusing)
This is the part I don't understand about the new spin from MS. Sales cycles are obviously extending, but how many offices in the universe don't run on PCs? Surely Microsoft are still making a lot of money selling business software, and in several fields their software remains dominant. There is plenty they could do to improve that business software and/or to adapt it to different ways of working, driving more sales based on genuine added value, but they don't seem to have much interest in doing so. That seems bizarre to me.
We aren't very far apart here. The PC market exists, MS will still make money on it, but the future is somewhere else and we need to be there, especially since we can leverage and invest the money we still make from the PC market today.
For their mission statement to be: "We want to be a significant part of everyone's technology experience".
Now that would be audacious... to re-gain some of what they've lost to Apple and Android, to be there within entertainment, automotive, health and government.
They already are in a lot of those places, but this statement would be a strong signal that they are going to fight every front.
It is interesting in that the focus has moved away from software of any kind to devices and services. It is a bold move towards a post OS, Office, post COTS software Microsoft. But you are right it is about as generic as it gets, change two or three words and it could equally be describing a car company.
They might as well play by the same rules as their competitors.
It's unfortunate for consumers, and I hope that in the long run market forces and/or regulation will open things up again. However, for the immediate future, if your major competitors are running closed worlds and you're the only guys running an open one, there's only one direction that customers can move in.
Google Search, Google Scholar, Google Books and Google Maps are what they want to do to collect the information, and they think they need mobile phones and self-driving cars to make it universally accessible (that, or that is on the fringe. A mission statement has to ride between being too vague and only barely describing parts of the business)
That's such an overused word in marketing language. Everybody wants to "empower users", "empower people", "empower customers", "empower clients". What does that even mean anymore? Are we the downtrodden and unwashed without their "family of devices"? Marketing language in itself is something that really grates my nerves, but "empower" is the worst.
For more discussion of that, and ways to do strategy better, I highly recommend "Good Strategy, Bad Strategy".
Who does a talk, allows questions and doesn't realize this question will be asked? Or maybe he did and thought what he described was some kind of vision. The difference is, if you had asked Steve Jobs what his vision was he would have told you things that you would realize he could achieve and probably have some idea of the steps. What Ballmer said was completely generic and there was no reason to imagine MS needed to be involved in any of it. Worse, there wasn't really a compelling argument to even have what he was talking about (some kind of shitty voice recognition software that sends anything I say to the person I referred to by first name. And this I should trust to the inventors of the blue screen? Right).
"We will be all things to all people by getting rid of anything that is not a huge profit center. Those profit centers will be organized in appropriate silos. Those silos will assign people to product committees for collaboration with other silos on individual products. Each committee will have a leader (Champion) who reports to the layer just below me. This new, tighter, organization will make us leaner and more nimble."
Sounds -- as good as it could for a large organization I guess but there is a lot of contradiction. Greater reach through consolidation? Nimble action through layers of management? We are all One except for these few special cases? Build on our character as Microsoft but emulate Apple? One Strategy through rigidly defined feifdoms with their own Champions battling for influence?
I also love their list of 'high-value activities' "high-value activities — serious fun, meetings, tasks, research, information assurance and IT/Dev workloads" Does anyone know what they mean by this?
And all of this couched in such thick Business-Speak that 10 different people will come away with 10 different messages.
Mr. Ballmer. For the love of all of the brilliant people you employ, step down. It's time.
Him remaining still as the CEO is not his fault its the boards fault they should have made moves to genteelly replace him a long time ago.
As larger than average person I'm fascinated/frustrated by the way physical presence affects people.
Most troublesome for me have been people who apparently feel intimidated and project it back as something intentional, as I'm trying to intimidate them or have intimidated others into agreement with me.
I am 6'7" tall and weigh 220 pounds. I've also been in IT for about 20 years in a corporate setting. Are you bigger than I am? I ask because I have never had anyone say that I intimidated them nor have I heard of anyone telling me that someone else is intimidated by me. I'm curious as to whether people are intimidated and just aren't telling me.
I'm your height, 60+ pounds heavier and no stranger to the gym. I've been in IT for going on 16 years.
I've had many people admit they were initially intimidated after we've gotten to know each other - women a bit more than men. I've had several problems arise from superficial assumptions/accusations by people who'd never fully interacted with me.
About your situation, there are a couple things I think can help/hurt:
* Build. I can remember being 220. I'm definitely perceived differently now, more "big" than "tall" or "slim" previously.
* I'm pretty quiet. I get the impression that people assume negatives before positives when they can't read a person.
* Jobs. I've done a lot of work in the public sector where things always seem to be contentious. In a place with less infighting and political maneuvering I'd hope for less assumption and undermining as well.
I'm a smaller than average guy (5 foot 4) and people that don't know me are often started when I'm vocal and assertive in meetings. I'm a working professional with opinions just like anyone else, and just because I'm short doesn't mean I don't want them heard.
I suspect it could have evolved out of having a physically intimidating older brother growing up (I grew out of a lot of insecurities when I became taller than he was, but maybe not all).
I think he will never step down. The only solution would be a strong pressure from all the main actionists of microsoft, but it seems they are all sleeping.
So in the past each part of Microsoft seemed to operate both as a independent business (and sometimes competitor with other parts of Microsoft) and part of the whole. This re-aligns the company as a systems company focused on delivering a specific solution.
A number of interesting thoughts ran through my head here. Perhaps the most profound was that Microsoft has basically said "Oh by the way, the PC is dead." and by that tacit admission they fulfill the prophecy of this being the 'post PC' era. Microsoft's reorganization is more about serving customers through a fusion of device + OS + product and less about serving customers as the supplier of "OS" or "Backend business management" or "gaming platform". That makes them a lot more like Apple and really puts Dell and HP in a sticky place. One wonders what the world would look like if Apple embraced people making cloned hardware.
So if I read the tea leaves correctly, Ballmer is attempting to capture Google's Android strategy for Windows with the inclusion of the desktop/laptop component where the monetization comes not from the OS but from the environment.
I don't know if Microsoft can pull it off but it reads like they want to be what Google and Apple would be if they merged.
I give it top marks for aggressiveness, and it seems they are ready to step out of the shackles the monopolist next door, painting Google with that particular scarlet letter in the US and elsewhere.
If I were Michael Dell, my first step after taking the company private would be buying Canonical and installing Shuttleworth as EVP of OS.
All this talk about the "Post PC" era is misguided, with people leaving out the elephant in the room.
It's not PCs that are dead - PCs are fine, you can find one in most homes and most people interact with PCs daily. This isn't going to change for a long time.
Something else is dying - the traditional licensing model for software. Software is becoming a cheap commodity, due to open-source, due to the freemium model on the web, due to piracy, due to the $0.99 or ads-enabled apps that are so popular lately.
By contrast, there's been a lot of innovation in hardware / devices. Skipping over the obvious innovations, like smart-phones with touch-screens, for example Samsung's Chromebook is amazing - a good looking ultra-portable with good battery, that does 90% of what people need and that's so cheap that you can replace it should you break or lose it.
Let's think about what the Chromebook is, because it's fascinating - all the apps you run on it are web apps. The just released Firefox OS does the same thing and I'm sure it's going to be a success. Apple themselves, before releasing their iPhone SDK, were telling devs to build web apps.
So where is Microsoft in this picture? Nowhere. Their empire is built on Windows and Office and without these in the picture they are fucked. And they can't rely on the current PC market for upgrades, because PCs are more than good enough, so people don't feel the need for upgrades, unless they buy based on sex-appeal. Many companies are still on Windows XP and Office 2003.
This isn't a "Post PC" era. This is the "Web Era". Furthermore, all the mobile app stores are just passing fads.
Cheap software is becoming a cheap commodity.
It's relatively easy for any competent software developer to write a diary app with a pretty UI skin, or a basic text editor and formatting engine to drive a lightweight word processor, or a simple puzzle game. I could write a relatively good application in any of those categories in a weekend, and no doubt so could thousands of other people on HN today.
And importantly, that's just fine. There are very many people who will get some value from a fun puzzle game or a simple personal organiser, and who will pay a small amount in return, and so there are many software developers who make a decent income writing just that kind of software.
But what about the next level up? When I had to write a serious document for an organisation that normally used an on-line "office suite", I gave up and switched to more traditional software. It turns out that things like footnotes and cross-references and tables of contents and careful page layout matter if you're producing something that many people are going to spend a lot of time using, and at the time Google Docs could do exactly none of those things while Word could do them all easily. At the rate they were paying me, with the time saved by using the more powerful software, the cost of that software was probably recovered in days, if not hours.
The reality of modern web and mobile software is that a lot of it is cheap, and it should be cheap, because it adds only a little value and it isn't very hard to create it. The trouble is that some software does add a lot more value and is hard to create and shoudn't be cheap, but companies like Microsoft have inadequately defended their ground and so even software that could save a customer $1,000 a week gets comments like "$10? No way!" on app stores.
This isn't a "Post PC" era. This is the "Web Era".
Not until Google Docs does footnotes and cross-references and tables of contents and careful page layout, it isn't. Some people just got the wrong memo.
Looking at it that way, PC vs. web is just a proxy for buy vs. rent. And, like it or not, the "buy" option is slowly being driven from the market.
I don't accept that premise, and moving to Creative Cloud in Adobe's case is a great example of why not.
As it happens, I use Creative Suite for work myself. My company paid a lot of money to buy it. There are plenty of things Adobe could have done that would have made it more valuable to us, and we would gladly have dropped the same money again to buy an upgrade that did a few of those things. But in several years, they haven't managed to do any of them, and so we haven't bought any of the most recent pre-CC versions.
The fact that Adobe's Creative Suite revenue stream dried up in our case has nothing to do with buy vs. rent, it has to do with not adding anything of value to us in several years of development and therefore not being worth buying again. For exactly the same reason, plus the fact that we would never allow our data to effectively be held hostage, we aren't subscribing to Creative Cloud, so Adobe will probably never get any more money from us for that product line.
PC vs. web is only a proxy for buy vs. rent if the purchase really was a one-off. For almost every piece of commercial software I use, that wouldn't necessarily be the case, and in fact the developers could easily add enough value that I'd pay them more money for an upgrade. The fact that they are pushing for the subscription model instead, even while doing funny maths that assumes I would have upgraded regularly to try and justify the cost, just demonstrates to me that they aren't actually confident that they know how to add that value and keep me paying them.
And, like it or not, the "buy" option is slowly being driven from the market.
I don't really accept that premise, either. Companies like Microsoft and Adobe have held near-unassailable leads in large and lucrative software markets for years. Of course they can abuse that position for a while to price gouge those who, rightly or wrongly, feel that they absolutely must have the latest versions of things to be able to work properly. It's even worthwhile for the software companies to offer the first hit for free, but in the end, what they're doing still isn't in the best interests of their customers. Sooner or later the market is going to figure that out, and sooner or later someone with a smarter plan is going to start providing a real alternative.
LibreOffice does footnotes and cross-references just fine and LibreOffice is 0 USD. Here's the thing - MS Office is innovative and still the best at what it does. But it's old and like anything old, it becomes a commodity.
Adobe Photoshop is also innovative and still the best at what it does (by far). The problem that Adobe has though is that many Photoshop licensees are not professionals and can be served just as well by cheaper or even free software. Companies like Adobe also benefited a lot from piracy, as a lot of people ended up using Photoshop, even though not that many people can afford it.
Also, what you're seeing here unfolding with web apps is only the begging. In relative terms, the concept of a web app is still young. Even in early 2000, people had no idea that they can have apps running in their browser and broadband / 3G / 4G is still not a reality in many parts of this world. The combination of cheap and easily accessible on any platform, without any lock-in whatsoever, is extremely powerful. Couple this with devices that are designed to be portable and always connected and you've got a killer that will cannibalize everything else.
> The reality of modern web and mobile software is that a lot of it is cheap, and it should be cheap, because it adds only a little value and it isn't very hard to create it
Things like Google Docs / Google Calendar / Google Maps / Twitter / Wikipedia give me a hell of a lot more value than anything a desktop app could. Are you saying that you could build these in a weekend?
Sure, and it's a set of desktop applications that run locally on your own computer.
Did you realise you're supporting my position here?
The combination of cheap and easily accessible on any platform, without any lock-in whatsoever, is extremely powerful. Couple this with devices that are designed to be portable and always connected and you've got a killer that will cannibalize everything else.
We've seen thick client vs. thin client before, and no doubt we'll see it again. Today, however, we're still a long way from the utopia you describe.
Things like Google Docs / Google Calendar / Google Maps / Twitter / Wikipedia give me a hell of a lot more value than anything a desktop app could. Are you saying that you could build these in a weekend?
Well, you're obviously picking contrived examples, because most web applications aren't in that class. And of course no individual could literally build a replacement for those services in a weekend. However, it is interesting to consider some factors that would stop them:
1. Hardware resources and network bandwidth to serve so many users at once
2. Large volume of data behind the UI
3. Many import/export options, in some cases
Notice that of those, only the third has anything to do with how hard it is to write the software itself, and even then it's not core functionality. Providing compatibility with existing data formats is often extremely expensive in terms of developer effort, which is part of the reason that competing with the likes of Microsoft Office and Adobe Creative Suite is such a high barrier and why incumbents tend to change their file formats every five minutes.
On the other hand, if you were asking whether I could create a Twitter clone to share with friends at first and grow as friends-of-friends joined in, then sure, about a million people here really could write that in a weekend. The core functionality for most of the other services you mentioned could be implemented by a small team in times ranging from a few days to a few weeks, too.
The most interesting thing about this, IMHO, is that it means the core functionality for software with a completely different approach to solving the same problems might also be implemented fairly quickly, and isn't the factor limiting competition and the advancement of the technology. We're being held back by lots of other factors, but most of them are driven by commercial or marketing considerations, not the technology itself.
that is a MBA speak. The reality is that horizontal partitioning is periodically replaced with vertical, and vice versa ... that is MBA action.
I'm not sure, but it could lead to some very interesting manoeuvres if the big PC vendors decided relying on Windows was no longer safe and building one or more freely available alternatives was in their interests.
People joke a lot about the limitations of desktop Linux and talk about how OSS business applications lag their major commercial/closed competitors, but these hardware giants could find a natural and shared interest in collaborating with the community and each other to fix those deficiencies.
At that point, you have some hardware heavyweights with the resources to make business gear -- whether traditional PCs or newer devices -- on a large scale and with the credibility to take on the likes of Apple and Samsung, now also collaborating on a new generation of business software built from the ground up and with all of their interests aligned in making it as good as possible and with little interest in charging a high or any price for it. In short, it could give a new lease of life to the struggling PC big hitters, and would be a very credible threat to the likes of Microsoft, Apple and Samsung. Now throw in the big processor manufacturers, some of whose fortunes are also troubled by the loss of PCs but who also have the potential to make huge deals for new hardware ranges, and you've really got a party.
This has the "it would never happen" feel about it as I write it, but even thinking about it for a while, it does make a lot of sense from a commercial point of view, and HP under Whitman has already started shifting its strategy in a way that might support this kind of move.
Perhaps, but it would be a more natural alignment in the case of hardware companies that wanted the best possible software available to drive adoption of their platforms than in any previous case I can think of. Sun's business model for several of their technologies, including Java, was never entirely clear to me. On the other hand, a consortium of big hardware vendors spending a hundred million dollars to develop the best desktop software in history and then just giving it away to anyone who wants it for free has a pretty obvious business benefit if the result is changing market trends and protecting their multi-billion-dollar revenue streams.
I don't see much upside to becoming another Apple. I always thought of Apple's strategy as being dictated by MS, since the volume and business ends of the market were off-limits, Apple had to take what was left, making a niche for itself at the high end. Apple is doing well now, but their situation doesn't seem any less precarious than MS, and there certainly can't be room for both companies in Apple's market. Google's market, too, doesn't seem to have enough room for a MS.
If I was MS, my priority would be protecting the health of my cash cows. The PC is not literally dead. Just because a van is not a sports car doesn't mean companies that make vans are going out of business.
This reorganization seems to be a response to criticism of Windows 8 and Ballmer's leadership, and this seems to be Ballmer's way of saying he doesn't intend on going anywhere. At least, not without a lot of bureaucratic box-reshuffling.
For instance, in his most recent post he discusses how the lack of coordination between the divisions after the 2005 reorg can be viewed as a feature rather than a bug, but also something that now needs to be changed.
For me the TL:DR after struggling to read it was - full steam ahead to the biggest walled garden on earth. We are still the Borg. Someone correct me if I am wrong.
That is full steam ahead to appleland for me. And it will be closed and walled future. WP8 and W8 demonstrated the MS attitude good enough.
The borg came from the one goal, one vision, one direction etc.
This is not just directed at you, it seems to be a common thing with criticism of Microsoft - so over the top that rational discussion of what they are doing right and wrong gets thrown out the window.
Ok, English is not my first language, and that "to" seems a bit ambiguous to me... But in context that was pretty clearly a move toward a walled garden, not a move done by a walled garden.
All parts of the company will share and contribute to the success of core offerings, like Windows, Windows Phone, Xbox, Surface, Office 365 and our EA offer, Bing, Skype, Dynamics, Azure and our servers. All parts of the company will contribute to activating high-value experiences for our customers.
High value experience is euphemism for gatekeeper from what I have seen.
Between the anti-open Google+/Play/Hangouts universe and the anti-open iOS iGarden, I'm surprised that it has taken Microsoft this long to catch up to their anti-open competitors.
They made errors on every step of the game - allowed carrirs to have saying on the devices, abandoned all lessons learned from PCs and building ecosystems and threw an inferior iOS me too (the UI was better though, the ideology the same)
No offense, but calling it a "me too" iOS competitor is about as nuanced as calling Android a "me too" iOS competitor -- technically, Android is a "me too" product, just more mature, but it don't serve any useful end to point that out.
Android have the "dominant market share" thing going on about it.
MS had very short window to make a dent in the smartphone war but because of "reasons" never really got together to create a product that could be the smartphone win 3.11/98
Unfortunately the ecosystem never really picked up. I'm already looking to switch back to Android because I can't use WP with devices like my Pebble, among other things.
It's not surprising coming from the salesman/CEO who thinks that a loud voice and throwing chairs makes sense. While CEO's with real vision innovate, Ballmer thinks rearranging the furniture is the answer.
Shareholders want reasoning behind such large changes. It's really nothing more than describing where MSoft has been and what its strengths are
We will do this by leveraging our strengths. We have powered devices for many years through Windows PCs and Xbox. We have delivered high-value experiences through Office and other apps. And, we have enabled enterprise value through products like Windows Server and Exchange. The form of delivery shifts to a broader set of devices and services versus packaged software. The frontier of high-value scenarios we enable will march outward, but we have strengths and proven capabilities on which we will draw.
and what it recognizes as it's weaknesses
It is also clear to me and our leadership that we must do an extraordinary job to succeed in this modern world. We have delivered many great products and had much success in market, but we all want more. That means better execution from product conceptualization and innovation right through to marketing and sales. It also means operational excellence in cloud services, datacenter operations, and manufacturing and supply chain that are essential in a devices and services world. To advance our strategy and execute more quickly, more efficiently, and with greater excellence we need to transform how we organize, how we plan and how we work.
It then proposes the solution: the reorg. It gives benefits as to what it sees are possible with such a realignment.
Vagueness is related to the wide-reaching scope of the business, and high-level, long-term goals that they don't want to give metrics for, because they'll be held to them. It's also the description of the vision people see in the future when they think of MSoft (and in turn, how valuable shares will be).
I get that there's a lot of negative feelings towards corporations around the startup scene, but if they just said "Hey guys, we're completely restructuring so our teams can focus more", people (people important to Microsoft, i.e. shareholders) would want to know why the decision was made, how they see it playing out, when it will happen, and what the potential impacts could be in the future.
TL; DR: It's a press release, not a white paper.
This is a huge shift for MS.
I worked at Apple for a long time, and if I could have changed one thing organizationally it would have been to go _from_ the functional decomposition _to_ the product decomposition.
There was nothing unified about it.
On top of that, you'd have one or two competing products (usually via acquisitions, or one product would be positioned more toward consumers than enterprise), a legacy product, etc all with their own teams. The internal competitors were the enemy.
> Is there a reason CEOs cannot use normal English but
> have to dilute the language so much?
[1] Can't find the citation right now... Perhaps someone can provide the link in a reply.
And there's nothing that screams "ownership" like having a VP's reports "dotted-line" report into someone else, and to have that called out in a company-wide email.
Then if you read it, every product MS comes out with will need strong cooperation from 3 SVPs. New Phone? Get the hardware guy, OS guy, and apps guy to coordinate. Recipe for disaster.
That seems pretty first-class to me.
Either way, they will not be focused on making Azure a product I wouldn't be interested in: 1 of 2 focuses or targeting someone I'm not.
Furthermore, looks like they've split sales/marketing from engineering which will probably help them build more features which are irrelevant to me and put as many PMs between the clients and engineers as possible.
(Edit: obviously by "we" I mean "my employer Microsoft", not that I had anything to do with any of these decisions.)
The new name makes a lot more sense to me (and makes for a better acronym too).
Apple's recognized this and decided to pretty much abandon enterprise. Linux has fragmented into different distributions (server, desktop, mobile) each with a different focus.
Microsoft, instead, has doubled down. They all even look the same.
Look at Linux first. Note that it happily goes from cell phones to supercomputers. The reason that works is because "Linux" doesn't actually that much. Really, it means the kernel and (usually) the GNU userland. (Though note that Android proves that you can swap out the entire userland and still get something that people will call Linux.) Supercomputers don't have GUIs. Desktops run X or Wayland or Mir or whatever Ubuntu is doing these days, or sometimes just Chrome. Mobiles tend to run Android, although there's also Maemo and others. Meanwhile, a supercomputer would likely have no UI at all. In all cases, when we say these devices all "run Linux", we're really referring to the driver model, the kernel, and (when applicable) the user space.
The same happens with Windows. Windows Phone 8, Windows 8, Windows Server 2012, and the Xbox One all are Windows. They all run the Windows kernel, they all have the Microsoft CLR, and they all have (a lot of) the same APIs--especially at the driver layer. But while Windows 8, Windows Phone, and Xbox all run DirectX and have GUIs, Windows Server prefers to run headless. Windows Phone 8 and Windows both use WinRT, but Windows Phone 8's UI stack is slightly different from Windows 8 proper, mostly to facilitate power consumption and allow for the wildly different form factors. Xbox pretty clearly has a lot of Win 8 UI internally, but games mostly just code against DirectX. But of course these all count as Windows, because they all are Windows. Just sliced and diced in different directions, exactly like Linux does. And unlike Linux, there's actually a lot more in common that can legitimately be shared.
I don't think unifying all the OS here is really a big deal. It's been proven to work just fine with Linux (and actually, I'd argue, with OS X, but we can save that for another time).
The thing that's the most broken about Microsoft's strategy is it's not just the kernel being thrown everywhere, but the user interface. That's the most incoherent part of their strategy. Does the accounting department need to use the same UI as the Xbox? It's so confused.
OS X and iOS are similar, but not the same thing, although not as different as, say, Ubuntu is to Android. It's possible that the Ubuntu phone project might blur this distinction in time, it seems possible.
What I mean mostly is that just because Windows and it's user interface can run on all these different platforms doesn't mean it's an optimal approach. Then again, Microsoft has never shied away from monoculture. They're the Monsanto of software.
Windows is not Windows is not Windows in exactly the same way Linux is not Linux is not Linux.
The Linux kernel is used in a lot of different devices,
this is true, but it's also a lot leaner than the Windows
one. Although efforts have been made to pare down what
Windows is, it's still got a footprint gigantically bigger
than Linux.
Any Windows kernel folks care to confirm/deny this?
The challenge is that it's difficult to get just the NT kernel and minimal support libraries. There was an internal project called http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MinWin#cite_ref-zheng2007_10-0 Without watching the entire video, Wikipedia mentions something like a 25MB footprint for a usable NT kernel.
Windows installed OS features are a lot more a' la carte these days. It annoys me that there's not a ntsd.exe or telnet.exe on every box by default, but I suppose it's worth it for the greater goal. There's a lot of focus on Windows Server Core, Hyper-V, and Azure. Cloud is bringing everybody back to thinking about OS footprint again.
I think the Windows-sans-(stuff not everyone needs) approach is only going to become more normal.
Which is the same thing with OS development at Microsoft. Microsoft builds one Operating System (Windows) and bundles it into different distributions (Xbox, Windows Mobile, Windows Server, etc).
In the old business model, you could have had kernel hackers throughout the company that didn't talk to each other. The Windows team would build an operating system and then other teams would adapt it - for example, Windows Server was part of Server and Tools Business, not the Windows division. It only makes sense to bring everybody under the same roof.
Edit: fine, I'll add some useful details. What are Microsoft's actual biggest advantages/disadvantages, how should they embrace the market? Advantages: the PC platform is still enormously powerful, and open, and they've still got huge ins with corporate computing. They could own the market on business oriented tablet form-factor computing but they don't have the vision. Disadvantages: stack ranking is poisonous to morale and retaining talent, the company is too monolithic (they used to be monolithic in multiple silos, now they're becoming monolithic in one giant silo, that's not better), and they still struggle with agility. The market? Android is the MS of the mobile generation, is it really so crazy to imagine that MS becoming the MS in mobile as well could be a route to success for them? And that's just what I could type in about 2 minutes.
Exactly, they are too big, and this reorg is going to make that worse, not better. I think they would have been better off actually spinning off their business units into separate companies, each with a clear product category and a clear organizational mission.
What a sentence!
OK for JFK, LBJ, Obama et al
Tip your waiter/waitresses, try the lamb chops.
Why reorg? Who would accept the job of telling Ballmer that, when Nokia goes under, the "devices" part of that story is a fable? On top of that, the press release was apparently written by a student of Vogon poetry.
> Mark Penn... will lead with Tami the newly centralized advertising and media functions
Oh. Well that explains that, then.
That said, walking past the Microsoft store at the Pru last night, the only display drawing a crowd was the Kinect darts game.
Just imagine if he made a reckless but well advertized decision! The stock would rise and I would short that so hard they would name a cake after me.
Okay, so still fucking broken. Moving along.
"Going forward, our strategy will focus on creating a family of devices and services for individuals and businesses that empower people around the globe at home, at work and on the go, for the activities they value most."
The previous was while completely open ended at least on some level measurable. The current is basically saying, we will make stuff to help customers do whatever wherever.
Well, things went along pretty smoothly, but six months later, sales took a downturn and he was really catching a lot of heat. About at his wit's end, he remembered the envelopes. He went to his drawer and took out the first envelope. The message read, "Blame your predecessor."
The new CEO called a press conference and tactfully laid the blame at the feet of the previous CEO. Satisfied with his comments, the press -- and Wall Street - responded positively, sales began to pick up and the problem was soon behind him.
About a year later, the company was again experiencing a slight dip in sales, combined with serious product problems. Having learned from his previous experience, the CEO quickly opened the second envelope. The message read, "Reorganize." This he did, and the company quickly rebounded.
After several consecutive profitable quarters, the company once again fell on difficult times. The CEO went to his office, closed the door and opened the third envelope.
The message said, "Prepare three envelopes."
It really sounds like they're embracing the cloud + hardware model that is becoming standard in the mobile space - you have devices purpose-built for your OS and sold with your company's blessing and you have a suite of 1st-party web-supported cloud services. Google's various webapps and Android and their pseudo-first-party Nexus gizmos, Ubuntu and their new Ubuntu phone OS and their Ubuntu One services, Apple and their iOS devices and their own iCloud services, and MS with Win8/WP8/Win8RT and their various SkyDrive/Live services.
My big problem with this huge move to cloud services is that interoperability has freaking tanked. Every consumer exists in one walled garden or another depending which infrastructure they bought into.
To me, this statement implies a hard push on the WP8/Win8RT devices as well as SkyDrive/Live services... which is going to be a hard fight, since winphone is really late to the party, and the confusing branding of Win8RT (is it Windows 8? What?) has basically resulted in every vendor and manufacturer avoiding it like it's radioactive.
Personally, I'd love a Win8RT HDMI stick device, but I'm weird that way... and Microsoft wants me to buy an XBox One so I'm guessing Win8RT HDMI sticks are off the menu.
Windows Mobile was amazing, the best thing to ever happen to the mobile devices world. But it had grown stale long before Apple joined the market. Windows Phone debuted as a refreshing change in the marketplace and in some ways, ahead of Apple. And then the lack of continued innovation has stalled what little progress it was making. Then they killed Windows Phone (7) just to relaunch Windows Phone (8) as "mostly compatible".
The Zune software was miles ahead of Apple's spreadsheet program. Then they killed it. The Zune Pass was and still is miles ahead of anything else in the music subscription space. But it hasn't just stagnated, it's actively become worse. You used to pay $10/mo and get 10 DRM-free songs per month, making the subscription part completely free. Now that's gone. But still, Google Play Music All Access Pass is the only thing remotely competing with it.
I love Skydrive and you get massive amounts of space and massive amounts of integration, but how many times can they rebrand the same service? I started using Skydrive back when you would log into it using your MSN ID, then your Windows Live ID, then your Microsoft Account.
It's the ADD-style lack of focus that killed Sega, and Microsoft just rides that train for all its worth.
http://web.archive.org/web/19990128084705/http://product.inf...
Obviously, Apple and Microsoft are different companies and looking back 16 years with the benefit of hindsight is a bit unfair.
And yet, even in the announcements, you can see a difference. Apple's is shorter, more direct, bereft of details but not trying to be everything to everyone. Most important is an emphasis on getting back to basics, whereas Microsoft is promising "one strategy, one Microsoft" and then immediately rattling off a laundry list of "core products". When every one of those products is core, it's clear nothing is.
i think that if microsoft opens up some of its own software it would be a good sign .. things they dont monetize on.. like IE and the windows NT kernel (at least).. and with a bonus.. people would start to contribut to those projects..
This is a part of the strategy that has maded google cool.. and for the old timers to become cool too.. they need to learn some moves from the new boys in town.. just saying..
http://www.asymco.com/2013/06/27/preempting-the-praetorian-g... http://www.asymco.com/2013/06/27/the-critical-path-90-the-pr...
where he goes into a lot of detail about how functional organizational structure might be relevant to innovation in a large company.
I kind of hate Microsoft even more after reading it, even though the changes (were there any?) may be good.
"Terry Myerson will lead this group, and it will span all our OS work for console..."
Interesting, because I think XBox One (from One Microsoft) is a bit of a Hail Mary. It's not clear to me that the "next console" is going to be that big a deal. (My secret hope is that Apple has a really juicy Apple TV up its sleeve with iOS dev support, etc., and is just waiting to announce it when it will do the most good / damage.)
What impressed me most about MS (worked with them around '97-2000) was that the company was divided into small divisions that had very precisely defined goals, and were able to operate somewhat autonomously (as long as they didn't conflict with core MS goals).
Moving from a federated empire to a Soviet-style, run-from-the-top dictatorship is not likely to end with much success.
I can't imagine their chief problem was "if only our superiors had different reporting structures, then we could get along with ABC team from 123 group."
In dysfunctional organizations people are sometimes not allowed to talk across org silos. It's horrific.
"Kirill Tatarinov will continue to run Dynamics as is, but his product leaders will dotted line report to Qi Lu, his marketing leader will dotted line report to Tami Reller and his sales leader will dotted line report to the COO group."
> Cloud and Enterprise Engineering Group. Satya Nadella will lead development of our back-end technologies like datacenter, database and our specific technologies for enterprise IT scenarios and development tools...
(Emphasis mine)
Either A) Windows 8 is not selling very well. B) Windows Surface is being ignored C) The Microsoft stores aren't doing too well either D) Windows phone is dying or E) all of the above.
Anyway they can start by adding a left and right padding to their footer.
What do failing, bloated organizations do when they have no other ideas? Reorganize!!
They seem quite lost, and this reorg a sign of desperation. Maybe Billy G should take on Microsoft as part of his new charity arm.
This is not bad :
We're firing a bunch of people, giving more new jobs and focusing on phones and tablets finally.
When you have stack-ranking, you never get harmonious teams and "all-star" sub-organizations are out of the question. When performance reviews are part of the transfer process, people become largely immobile and teams become permanent camps and you get warring departments. Closed allocation, at that scale, is cultural toxic sludge in general.
Simple causes. Simple fixes. Wordy say-nothing emails that inject political complexity, when simple solutions are available, are really not helpful.
I could talk about how Ballmer himself is a significant problem, but then again these "simple fixes" would surely require removing him from an position of direct power in the company.
It was based on a model proposed by Ballmer's hero Jack Welch. What Ballmer forgot is that Welch himself said the "trim the bottom 10%" model didn't work once a company got larger than a certain size.
The only detail I was interested in was the timing; the Wikipedia citation of 2006, which I will stop using, did strike me a bit recent.
I'm not sure that size is the issue. I think that the percentage of deadwood a company has being static is the problem.
A typical 10,000-person company probably has enough deadwood to make a 10% cut safe: a mature company that's accrued enough slackers and incompetents can endure a cut of the obvious nonperformers and few will be upset about it. Even many of the nonperformers will agree, to some extent, that it's time. Besides, the company will have a cut anyway if it underperforms. But if you cut 10% every year, after two or three iterations you are cutting good people, and the cultural effects of that make the process not worth it.
I don't know enough about Valve to know how it works, or even if the culture lives up to the press. So I'm not going to try to comment on that.
In general, though, stack-ranking is destructive even if no one gets fired. In companies that use it, it becomes impossible to transfer without a top-10% political success review (sorry, I mean "performance" review) history. But if you're doing that well politically, then you don't want to transfer because it entails rolling the dice again. The result is that people become pretty much immobile.
Closed allocation actually forces engineering ladders (with their attendant negatives) into existence because unsuccessful/persecuted people can't move and successful people won't move at all unless they can get a permanent credibility bump (promotion). But that leads to an arrangement where managers avoid promoting their best people because they know it might cause them to transfer.
I think Stack Ranking can work in some situations, like mechanical (ie. non-heuristic) work, but for Engineers? I've never understood why they even considered that it would work.
It's not like Jack Welch's worst idea isn't a driver of politics and strategic[1] moves in the real world.
[1] as in, bad for the company but the most rational move for the employee, like attempting to make sure every person added to your team is worse than you.
Jack Welch-style rank-and-yank is cruel and wildly inappropriate for software developers (or any human workers, I'd argue). It encourages political blame-shifting/scapegoating games that distract from the actual work. Just having the practice is also an implicit acknowledgement that your hiring process blows.
Performance curves are just a demented and sadistic way to manage people. They're also the epitome of b-school cargo culting.
And what if they really are all doing great, on a given team? Then no sense in punishing someone just because you have to punish someone.
And if someone is underperforming? Their direct manager's job is to take care of it. If the manager isn't even doing their job of managing people, a grading curve isn't going to fix that.
Also, if it's only enforced at a higher level of hierarchy, then what happens is that it's the junior members of underperforming departments that get the shaft. They probably had the least to do with the team's underperformance, but they also have the least power and therefore the least ability to dodge blame. Shit rolls downhill.
How the reorganization is going to differ from the earlier one?