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Comment by qq66 | Hacker News Reader

Well, one more blog post about the "ONE THING THAT KILLED MICROSOFT."

Nothing killed Microsoft. It just exhibited mean regression, as everything eventually does. It found itself on the very top of a mountain in an industry where you have to keep climbing to stay still.

The same thing happened to Apple -- it had an unprecendented string of hits with iPod/iPhone/iPad and it took competitors a few years to catch up.

Sometimes, a basketball player will make ten straight baskets. He'll seem invincible, then he'll make another and the crowd will go wild. But if he's a 60% shooter, at some point he'll miss a basket, and another, and another, and descend back into reality.

That's just how the world is.

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Ex Microsoftie here.

There are a few things I'd fix with MS, but I would definitely start with the forced curve system. It's basically evil.

Sort of balled-up in this is the sense of fear that forces people to make bad decisions just to get promoted (my favorite example of this: The "Metroization" of the Visual Studio 2012 interface, with nearly unusable color schemes and all-caps menus. I have to assume that somebody got promoted because making VS 2012 look like the flavor of the day looked good on a review).

I was in Xbox, which had a /lot/ of very, very good people in the same review band that I was in. It's hard to shine when you're sitting next to those folks; it's also hard to imagine not working with them, because one of the reasons I go to work is to study at the feet of masters.

So I was looking at an "okay" review, maybe even "sub-okay", while doing work that would probably have brought the company a few hundred million dollars over the next ten years. And I couldn't stand it. And that's one of the reasons I left.

Seriously, fuck the Microsoft review system. It's broken. Most everyone with a brain /knows/ that it costs MS really good people. But Ballmer and Brummel (the head of HR) seem to love it; maybe it makes it easy for them to remove threats? I honestly don't know why they think it's good.

I think it just plugs into the Ayn Randian / objectivist mindset. "Some people are hard workers, and others are parasites, let's identify the parasites and axe them and we will have a utopia."

Yes, nobody thinks of it in such an outright simplistic way, but I do think this is the basic appeal.

It's a nice theory. But it doesn't work.

Looks like the objectivists downvoted you. Such is the nature of Hacker News!

I think the stack ranking thing comes from quotas for sales people. The thing about salesman is that you can more or less rate their performance objectively by how much they sell. Trying to bring this over to knowledge workers is a recipe for disaster though.

Ayn Rand considered collectivist intellectuals and politicians to be the parasites.

She particularly lamented big businesses that harness government to gain advantages over the "regular guy," who she actually stood up for.

Regarding people who work productively, all she did was heap praise on them---whether they were at the top of the company, or the bottom.

For Rand, being moral was never about how much you actually accomplish compared to other people.

So, the parent comment is an uninformed and (possibly unintentional) smear.

There was a very strong backlash against Rand from the intellectual left the second she was published (in the 40s), and the reverberations from that are still very prevalent in the culture, but they are secondhanded and mistaken.

I read the Fountainhead, and it was hard to square the views expressed in that book with her extreme enthusiasm for capitalism and business that she expressed in other writings (I didn't read the other books). In the Fountainhead, capitalism comes off as looking rather corrupt and dishonest, a system that was exploited by Peter Keatings at the expense of Howard Roarks. I couldn't really discern a clear and consistent philosophy from that book, so I interpret it as basically a romance, set in an ideal fantasy world, between a heroic uber-mensch, Howard Roark, and a beautiful woman whose high standards admit only uber-mensches, Dominique Francon. The Dominique character I interpret as an idealized Ayn Rand.

Romance? Doesn't Roark rape Francon at one point?

Yes. And she still likes him. It's not an unknown fantasy.

If I remember correctly, Dominique intentionally hit Roark in the face with a huge stick while she was riding a horse through the woods. That was before the rape scene.

I think she had to "bring him down" because she loved him, and she always destroyed that which she loved (e.g. a statue), because she didn't believe that such things belong in a corrupt world.

The point of all this was not to condone such a sequence of actions, but to tell a psychological story about two people.

Rand rejected the Nietzchian ubermensch, favoring free and voluntary association. Fountainhead specifically references this with the downfall of Gail Wynand. The characters are idealized though, yeah.

> In the Fountainhead, capitalism comes off as looking rather corrupt and dishonest

There is a lot of corruption and dishonesty in the Fountainhead. Ayn Rand was trying to show the difference between firsthanded and secondhanded people (i.e., people who try to let others think for them or dictate their values). That can happen in any society, whether it's a capitalist one or not.

Ayn Rand does not simply equate "capitalism" with "business." By "capitalism" she means "pure capitalism" (as opposed to a mixed economy or something else), which is a system where all people are completely free from having force used against them unless they first initiate it. (In other words, a system purely based on trade, never on coersion.) This whole issue was not really a topic in The Fountainhead.

> exploited by Peter Keatings at the expense of Howard Roarks

Was it? Peater Keating's life was completely miserable.

> I couldn't really discern a clear and consistent philosophy from that book

The point is that Howard Roark lives for his own happiness and his own values and actually achieves them, while all the other characters live in some secondhanded way and are miserable.

> a heroic uber-mensch, Howard Roark

Gail Wynand, the newspaper baron, was the Nietzschean uber-mensch in the book. He achieves complete domination over New York (he controls what people read enough to control public sentiment, has all the politicians in his pocket, and is wealthy enough to buy anything he wants). Yet he ultimately hates himself and is miserable. Because dominating other people is not a means to happiness; it is empty and ultimately miserable. Gail Wynand did not achieve _his own_ values. That was the point of that character, and it was also Ayn Rand's response to Neitzche, who she rejected.

> The Dominique character I interpret as an idealized Ayn Rand.

There is a character that can be interpreted that way, but it's Dagny from Atlas Shrugged. Dominique was psychologically perverted because she didn't believe that values were possible in a world full of second-handers; that's why she goes around smashing artwork in the beginning. This is definitely not an idealized version of Ayn Rand.

I think Ayn Rand described Dominique as "myself on a bad day".

> The point is that Howard Roark lives for his own happiness and his own values and actually achieves them

Roark doesn't provide a useful model for how to achieve this, because he is sui generis -- a genius. IIRC, there were characters that were first-hand that had ordinary jobs, but the book didn't dwell on them. It may be because first/second-hand make a big difference for an artist, but not so much difference for a grocery clerk.

> Because dominating other people is not a means to happiness

It's not a means to happiness, but it's clearly a means to capital accumulation, according to the book.

> Dominique was psychologically perverted because she didn't believe that values were possible in a world full of second-handers

But she came around by the end, and lived happily ever after with the hero, didn't she? I read the end quickly. It got strange.

I haven't read Nietzsche, but Roark is a kind of perfection, given that he is artistically-gifted, has total confidence in himself, and loves his work. He has strong values that he never wavers from. He has trouble achieving success in the market, though. I guess you could say that that's because the market is dominated by second-handers, who don't value people like Roark. If ideal capitalism requires every participant to be a Roark, then it's not any more achievable than ideal Marxism.

There is nothing inherently poisonous about doing company-wide ranking (though it is infeasible to do precisely since objective measures of "goodness" are non-existent and you can't do subjective ranking of everyone in all but the smallest environments; whether or not good-enough approximations exist is debatable).

However, doing it on a per-team basis is stupid. It guarantees that some teams will have bottom-performers, since a team without bottom-performers will fire or scare away the lowest in the team. Furthermore you incentivize sabotaging your teammates and--even if nobody does it--that makes everyone suspicious of their teammates.

If there were a magical wand I could wave to nearly perfectly rank all the employees at a company I were running, I would do it and base compensation off of it. Doing so on a per-team basis is stupid.

You still run into problems if you do an org wise stack rank and manager popularity and pull is going to impact which groups are magically determined to have only top performers.

A better approach really I think is to just do 360s and if there are clear problems with key employees that are holding back other employees let them go. If you have everyone working on complex code and are pushing for excellence over time it will become clear who is making the grade and who isn't.

Even if some of the employees that work well on the team could be replaced by other slightly more efficient or intelligent employees the benefit of doing so is greatly offset by ramp up and recruiting time that takes away from team productivity.

But to do that you need to be able to trust managers to make competent hiring and firing decisions. I have watched firing decisions happen at Microsoft, as well as been hired. I can tell you that managers are definitely not trusted to make these decisions or at least weren't when I was there.

So once you establish that you don't trust managers, you pick managers who excel at politics rather than anything else and the problem continues.

Well I think that is a major underlying reason for why they used the forced curve. It's a problem. I can't say I have an answer for avoiding it other than flattening the business hierarchy and taking the first step of trusting managers to make those decisions.

If you aren't trusting your managers to make these decisions, why do you have managers in the first place?

Those are two things that Microsoft needs to do, namely use IT to replace depth in business hierarchy, and to empower team managers to make these decisions.

Managers do the dirty glue-work that allows their teams to get things done. Managers interface with other business units, again, to allow their teams to get things done. Managers pull together a clear picture of what everyone else is doing so that they can see when something isn't being done--so that they can communicate that back to the team, so it can, once again, get stuff done. See most of the stuff Rands has written on the topic of management (http://www.randsinrepose.com/). Basically, a manager is a glorified secretary who works for everyone in the team at once. The equivalent in sports is the coach.

Management is, however, not the command-and-control backbone of your company. That's leadership, and that's an orthogonal role. Management is about oiling teams to run better; while leadership is about taking responsibility for, and ownership of a team's output.

Leaders, of course, want their teams to be managed, because it makes them work better--and if nobody else will do it, they can do it themselves. But, importantly, the leader role works better when held by a member of the team--someone doing the work, down in the trenches--while the manager role works better on someone who doesn't have any other responsibilities (since it's a full-time job in and of itself.) Leaders who are also managers become out-of-touch in their leadership, because the job of management deprives them of access to the distributed knowledge they need to make leadership decisions (the kind they'd just pick up naturally by doing the job alongside the team.)

Ideally, leaders are just members of teams held in high regard by their peers, who just end up taking ownership of the team's project by default. In contrast, ideally managers are free-floating socialites, working with several teams and ensuring that everyone has everything they need (including introductions to people outside their team they might not know they need!)

You'll notice that there's nowhere in this list of requirements for a "boss" who tells you to "get to work." This is because, if your team lead actually has your respect--and if that lead actually cares about the project--then you don't want to disappoint them by giving them any less than your best. And if either of those two things aren't true, then you probably need to rebuild the team, or scrap the project.

This is all true but here is the other side.

Knowledge is local. We can prove that (see the CAP theorem). Therefore decisions are best made at a local level. Someone needs to take ownership of decisions like hiring and firing and that needs to be someone close to the work. Since the leader is not the one with that power, that leaves the manager, and if you can't trust the manager with that power, then you can't trust the manager with anything.

The basic problem is that with responsibility comes power and vice versa. You can't be responsible for something without the powers necessary to live up to that responsibility. Likewise power without responsibility doesn't work out so well either. The question, as always, is what are the responsibilities and what are the powers that come with them.

My sense from where I was (front lines of Product Support Services in 2000-2003), that the team managers were bit players. They could not fire people. All they could do is try to interface one team to another, but they didn't have the authority to get anything done. I found that for anything out of the ordinary, the last person I wanted to bring in was the team manager because they would claim responsibility for it, but had insufficient power to do anything about problems.

So my point is this: if you are going to give managers responsibility for the production of the team, they need to have the powers to do things like hiring and firing (within a budget of course). if you can't trust them for these things, you are giving them responsibility without power.

It doesn't happen on a per-team basis, at least the curve isn't strictly enforced at that level. That really would be insane. As you go up and up the org chart to bigger and bigger collection sizes, the curve is more strictly enforced.

(At least according to the 2 stack ranking reviews I took part in before I left.)

People at the tip top of success like Ballmer tend to be ardent defenders of competition and pure meritocracy, because viewing the world this way frames their own success as heroic. Perhaps a zero-sum mentality also helps to provide the motivation to claw your way relentlessly to the top of the pile in the first place.

It's especially amusing considering that actual "merit" is usually the last thing I think of when I see people at the "tip top of success" like Ballmer. Very few of these people did much more to merit their success than anybody else in the industry they're in, in terms of actually doing quality work. Most of the "above and beyond" effort they put in is related either to simply being part of the relevant 'old boys club'/coming from wealth already or else engaging in the kind of backstabbing and negative competition that MSFT's stack ranking encourages.

[Citation needed.]

Well, formerly from the ground level of Product Support Services, I will point out one key thing.

The review system is one of the surest ways to ensure that the hard workers stay on the work floor and are never promoted. The people who find the problems, and fight to get them fixed, are the people who make their bosses eventually look bad just a little, and they get barely ok reviews. Those who work to rule get good reviews and advance.

What this effectively means is that middle management ends up killing the organization.

The review system is really insane. I remember working in the SBT division on the AAPT group as an SDET and constantly being taken back by how archaic most of the practices were there. Which I can only imagine were in place because everyone was afraid to rock the boat too much or take a chance on something and come up short for their annual performance review.

On a similar vein there is just a mountain of half ass'd internal tools that only exist because someone had to mark off a checklist item on their review commitments but never bothered to maintain. Which would be fine except whenever you have to tackle a project if there's an internal solution it will always be favored over the open source or license-able alternatives.

I'd constantly get flak for asking questions of senior management like why don't we have unit test coverage, why doesn't our system allow for any sort of dependency injection, why don't we have continuous integration, why are we using this shitty internal browser test bed instead of selenium and selenium grid, etc. I spent a lot of time working on pushing modern standards around testing test code, designing reusable testing frameworks, leveraging continuous delivery etc. and to be honest it hurt my career trajectory quite a bit over what just following marching orders and writing crap code and commitment items would have done.

You should consider yourself lucky for being in the entertainment division however. That group seems a lot more progressive than most of the other divisions. The developer quality seems to be better as well. I was really horrified at the low level of competency of about 60% of my coworkers.

I also worked with a Big 4 accounting firm and they used this method exclusively.

It was nothing but politics...I managed for a year but left when I felt mentally unchallenged...so I left.

I spent several years at MS, 3 as an FTE, and Microsoft is definitely in decline, partly due to stack ranking, partly due to general cultural shifts from being a big, lumbering company.

One of the things you have to realize is that a lot of the dynamics of the company over the last decade have caused a mind boggling amount of talent to simply evaporate out of the company. Many of the "fuck you I'm fully vested" folks who were around in the earlier days of MS either checked out or peaced out whenever they hit their personal bullshit thresholds. More recent hires have generally found that other companies are often more exciting, more rewarding, and more lucrative to work at. MS today tends to punish caring about things (not always, but more often than not). If you try to make a difference and put forth the effort to make merely sensible changes then you'll spend years struggling against the system and if you're lucky you'll only have moderate success to show for it.

And the stack ranking system tends to reward people who are good at gaming the system rather than those who are good at actually delivering anything of substantive value to end users.

Naturally, all of this tends to be very discouraging to engineers, especially those with a bit of maturity and experience who see that with their talent and skills they could go elsewhere and not get shit on all the time, work for a company they wouldn't be embarrassed about, and actually get stock options that are worth something. And, since techies tend to value working alongside other techies that they admire and look up to this sort of process tends to be a positive feedback loop.

It's simply unimaginable that this loss of talent hasn't had a huge impact on the company.

That and the levels system ensures that a lot of people who do care and have the talent have no way to contribute.

Stack ranking causes employees to compete with each other rather than the company's competitors. It's all downhill from there.

It also encourages people to game the system through various ways. Such as ordinary office politics, of course. Also working on more visible and easily completed projects than tackling tough, more diffuse projects. And especially in spending time on new projects instead of fixing existing stuff. All of this has seriously hurt productivity within the company and the ability of big parts of the company to execute on projects that actually provide serious end-user benefits. The way to get ahead seems to be to work on the easiest and flashiest projects regardless of customer impact.

Microsoft are giving stock options instead of actual stock? That can't be true. Are they looking for stupid employees or what?

What is the problem with stock options?

Options are great for a company where there is a lot of growth (ie. a startup). Options are horrible for a company which has no growth (ie. a fortune 500).

Options give you the ability to buy a share at the last strike price set by the board (FMV for a share). If FMV for your startup share is $0.01 and you exercise it for $20, you're walking away with $19.99 in your pocket having spent $0.01. Multiply that by 50,000 and you're almost a millionaire.

If you get an option for a share of MSFT at $35, unless the stock price goes up, you're not getting a dime. IF it went up by $20 a share, you'd be doing just as well. That's unlikely, however, given how infrequently the stock moves. If they gave you 5,000 shares instead, you'd be sitting on a (more or less) guaranteed $175,000 _even if the stock price didn't move_ instead of absolutely nothing.

The number of shares in an option grant is not necessarily the number of shares in a stock grant. You're assuming the choice is "5,000 options [for a single share]" or "5,000 shares." That's ridiculous. Clearly the shares are worth strictly more. But that's (typically) not the comparison.

Thank you for the explanation . I assumed options always have a symbolic price.

The current practice which I have observed is for stock grants which vest over a multi-year schedule.

Stock options used to be the go to method for giving bonuses to employees because they're cheap and potentially very valuable. However, they don't work very well if the stock is stagnant, so in that case the fall back is usually to just give stock grants which are really no different than getting cash.

With options employees have an incentive to retain equity in the company, which has a lot of good side benefits, not least of which is that it gives employees more of a stake in the company's future. It's also a way to reward employees financially by making them rich if they stick around long enough to collect enough options, have them vest, and have them increase in value significantly over time. A lot of techies have become millionaires through stock options.

Since MSFT's stock has been stagnant since the late '90s stock options as a reward aren't an option, which removes all of those benefits mentioned above and creates a further encouragement for ambitious employees to seek other companies where they have a reason to hold stock in their employer and where they are significantly financially rewarded for sticking around and doing good work.

I'm not sure when you were at MSFT, but my time there was in the mid-90s.

"It's simply unimaginable that this loss of talent hasn't had a huge impact on the company."

I think it would have done if the rank-and-yank/up-or-out happened when we were a 6,000-ish person company. They had just opened RedWest while I was there and were working on the new buildings across from the main campus. I think they were talking about the Issaquah campus right around the time I left as well.

It was clear that the company was growing and things were changing. There was even talk about not granting stock to new hires anymore, which has obviously been reversed. However, this was heresy at the time. (Mind you, most of us were thinking we were past the guaranteed "millionaire" stage and thinking that a stock grant would cash out for a down payment on a nice house.)

Now it's most definitely a "big" company, and you don't need that many people who would earn 1s in their reviews and get promoted every year. A company like that needs a lot of consistent contributors. If you let some good people fall through the cracks, even if it's 10%, the company can continue for years.

> If you let some good people fall through the cracks, even if it's 10%, the company can continue for years.

Continue, sure. Microsoft isn't going to go away for many years, no matter how much they fuck up. They have too many established customers that will find it hard to switch away from them and they have too much cash on hand.

Nevertheless, the degree to which Microsoft will be relevant to the industry at large and their revenue levels in the time frame of a decade to two decades from now are currently open questions. And not by a small amount either, by orders of magnitude. And the difference between being able to execute on projects that will keep the company relevant and highly profitable and not being able to do so will largely come down to the collective capabilities, passions, experience, and talent of the folks who are still at the company. And that pool of skills and capabilities has been substantially decapitated bit by bit over the past several years.

Its all about gaming the system if you have these systems I had a college who was going for a promotion to senior software engineer in British telecom.

Every 18 months or so there was a round of promotions there would be maybe 18 - 25 roles available for the whole of the Systems engineering division (around 50k FTE)

But as my boss wryly remarked "he has not done any real work for 6 months)

I also saw a college going for pm (first proper management role) expend a million pounds and 15 man years of developer resource pointlessly redeveloping a system in oracle as managing a >1 million pound project was a tick box for promotion)

It's simply unimaginable that this loss of talent hasn't had a huge impact on the company.

It has. Absolutely. Microsoft used to achieve domination in every area they entered. Console DOS, graphical Windows, word processing, spreadsheet, entry-level desktop programming with Basic then VB and VBA, internet browser, corporate email with Exchange. Nearly every product blew up into owning its market.

In the 2000s, that dominance faded to merely being a strong competitor. Server OS, database, video games with Xbox, development with .NET, and all the enterprisey stuff like Active Directory and SharePoint. They all became viable and performing product lines, but hardly leaders, with market shares just about on par with the competition.

And in the 2010s, every me-too product by Microsoft is a fringe marginal player. Bing, Zune, Surface, Azure, Windows Phone... using any of those pretty much gets you laughed at. What happened at Microsoft that they can't take over such industries at will any more? The massive loss of talent and adherence to bureaucracy over excellence has to be part of it.

As I have put it, the problem with Microsoft is that they have this huge HR bureaucracy which seems intent primarily on ensuring that people do not advance their careers too fast. The review process is one part of it, but also consider that when I worked at Product Support Services, I worked with people who should have been coding Microsoft software but weren't due to the tyranny of the levels system. Those who were A- eventually were hired to do this. Those who were FTE's either left to pursue technical work or ended up left to rot as things were moved overseas. I knew very talented people who never got a chance because to get a chance they would have had to quit first.

I think the fundamental problem has always been bureaucracy and a mentality of loyalty to one's department over loyalty to the users. I could tell you stories about rules I broke in order to take care of users in line with what I saw as the interests of the company as a whole.

I would be interested in hearing those stories!

Ok, so here was one. There was a point where the Microsoft Office XP (or was it 2003?) advertised different qualifying products than it actually required. I felt that if we advertised it on the box, we needed to honor that. Our managers said, no, offer a refund. So I went ahead and I generated bypass keys allowing people to install the software without a qualifying product. I did so openly. My bosses were not happy. They said they were trying to solve the problem and we needed to do things their way.

So finally after a few weeks of this frustration I broke the chain of command and talked with the general manager of my department instead. He agreed that this was totally unacceptable and got the manufacturing stopped, packaging re-done, and the like. My bosses were horrified that I would break the chain of command like this and I got reprimanded by them.

Of course the word came down from the top not to generate bypass keys anymore but to offer the customers a free full version we would send to them at our cost. I looked at this, and offered it to the customers, but offered as an alternative a bypass key so they could just install the software they purchased, saving our company time and money.

Honestly, I was surprised we weren't sued over the problem, but I was going to be darned sure it was not over someone calling in to my line.

There were plenty of other things I did:

For example, I actually delivered Linux tech support a few times (always very careful to set expectations that this could not be expected in the future).

Needless to say, since my loyalties were to the company and the customers over my bosses, these never came out as positives in review.

Comparing Apple's smartphone business to Microsoft does not appreciate the position that Microsoft was in during the 1990's. They essentially owned personal computing. They could put you out of business with a single announcement. Apple (or Google) does not hold that power. Microsoft's diminishing consumer market leadership has more to do with a changing world, and their inability to react, then competitors catching up.

"There were many reasons for the decline of Microsoft under Steve Ballmer"

Yes, when I read the opening sentence of the OA, my first thought was 'perhaps the thing that needs explaining is Microsoft's amazing success in the 1990s'. The rest is the usual random walk of any publicly quoted megacorp, attempting to function under huge weight of the structure.

60% may be his predicted mean, that his scores - taken as measurements - will tend to regress towards over time. However, that does not mean that there isn't an answer for why that happens; why he's a 60% shooter rather than a 70% one. Even if it's just an unsatisfying answer, like he's genetically flawed and was getting tired or something like that.

Well, if he's a 60% shooter, then he has a 60% chance of making each shot. If he makes 10 in a row, then he's still 60% likely to make each of the next 3.

Your argument seems to be that everything is doomed to fail, but there's no reason why that should be true within a single generation of people.

What I'm saying is that the ten consecutive baskets make the spectators in the bleachers temporarily forget that they are watching a 60% shooter. Each consecutive basket takes them further and further into the delusion that what they are seeing is not random. And when the eleventh shot misses the basket, the jarring reintroduction of reality sends them looking for a reason "Why?" when the only real answer is "because."

The more baskets he gets the more likely it is that it's not random. The chance of him shooting a single basket, if he's predicted to get them 60% of the time and you have evidence justifying that confidence level, is .6

The chance of him shooting two such baskets in a row is 0.36

The chance of him shooting 13 such baskets in a row is 0.0013

It seems unfair to suggest that crowd are behaving irrationally when dealing with such a distribution. In probability you compare against other probabilities to determine what's most rational to believe. So - what's more likely:

A cumulative probability that will occur very rarely?

That he's cheating?

The more shots he makes the more likely that explanation becomes by comparison.... If people cheat more commonly than the odds of that distribution of shots would happen by chance....

They are behaving irrationally:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clustering_illusion

If they don't know they're watching someone with an accuracy of 60% over hundreds of shots and instead have to judge on nothing but 10 consecutive hits, it's actually perfectly rational to overestimate his ability, though it should of course have a low confidence and be constrained to the known possible range.

I'm not sure that they are:

Yes the most likely time for him to score, all else being equal, is just after he's scored. This is really just looking at the cumulative probability of something not happening - the chance of not scoring on consecutive attempts goes down just as the chance of scoring on consecutive events goes down - (with the remainder constituting the other potential arrangements of observations.) And so observations for given events have a certain tendency, for a certain level of probability, to occur in clusters - which influences how much confidence you can place in something given the data.

However, that does not make it likely that that'll keep happening for large runs, it's more likely that a yes will fall after a yes than that it'll happen elsewhere, but more likely is not the same as very likely. And the more observations you make the less likely it is that you're just looking at a cluster that'll occur naturally in a given number of cases.

By way of a, perhaps simpler, example: if you flip a coin and it comes up heads six times out of ten, that might just be a fluke. If you flick a coin and it comes up heads six thousand times out of ten thousand, then you can be fairly confident that it's crooked.

A 60% shooter isn't just a random number generator though, he's a human being with his own psychology. His accuracy for a given five minute stretch might vary based on confidence, fatigue, concentration level, and all of those factors on the opposition. If a player routinely shoots poorly when he's tired, substituting him off for a rest will raise his overall accuracy from 60% to maybe 70%.

In my opinion, maximizing a new business model is what made it HUGELY successful, and not finding a new business model is what is keeping it flat.

I believe that it will have a very hard time transitioning to the "device and services" model with it's current corporate culture, as I understand it, which includes stack ranking.

Regarding business models: MSFT had a variety of web services before Google; it had mobile before apple. It popularized the term "smartphone".

Sure Google search was better, but the fundamental thing that made google fly as a business was adwords, a different business model than banner ads and paid placement on top.

Apple did have a better device than anyone expected, but it made that device price competitive with a huge subsidy from AT&T.

XBox choked out Sony Playstation's profit margin by imitating it's business model (lose money on hardware, make it back selling quality games via licenses per cd/hdrom/dvd), and then innovating with XBox Live, which included a new software services you can charge for business model, just not one that scales to dozens of billions a year like Office.

If my experiences at Microsoft late 90s, half of the 2000's are still valid, then the currently proposed buisness model will fail.

In good software architecture the design choices you make need to match the forces you have affecting your architecture.

The business model: "a devices and services company." will require seamless co-operation across a whole company. I didn't see that in my time there. Exchange and SQL Server, two nearly billion dollar businesses, spent non trivial time trying to ally with other teams and kill each other "and take the mandate" rather than try to deliver great software. I had friends who worked in Exchange and SQL, and the ones in SQL were actively trying to make SQL Server do what Exchange does. I don't know if both businesses are merged now or not, but that was one of MANY places I heard about "killing and eating another team", before it happened to two teams I was part of, twice in a 6 year career.

When a team is "killed and eaten" by another team, the eating team gets to distribute the dead team's 4.0's, and have more 4.0's for their team.

Also, at MSFT at the time, there was a tremendous amount of lack of respect for other teams. "Those VB programmers at MSN don't know how to write scalable software." "Those jokers in...X...aren't really technical". I was in a visual studio building in a meeting, and a windows server group had the chutzpah to convince us that they had reserved our room and kick us out of our own meeting. As we left, one of the people in the meeting to heckle us with a derogatory comment of "We're the people who make all the money around here, we're more important."

Stack ranking, plus the only Type A's filter, plus the seperate businesses with seperate P&L, and VPs that are stack ranked versus each other will not lead to seamless integration between diverse services and a great user experience.

The way you pay, the way you measure, the persistent theme of "us versus them", and the filter for people that came in the door all contribute to a poisonous work environment for maybe 60% of the people.

It wasn't poisonous everywhere, 2/3rds of my time there I wouldn't have traded for the world, but it was incredibly refreshing when I left to work for a place where the enemy was outside the building versus inside.

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