Certain of our competitors' products and their rapid advancement and refinement of new usage scenarios have been quite noteworthy
could have been:
Our competitors are out-innovating us, and we're losing to them. I hate to lose and you should hate being losers too. So this is what we're going to do.
I recall during one of my first internships (at Siemens, not Microsoft) my first task was to go over test results of electric motors being developed. I drafted an email with my results and fired it off to a number of people.
A short while later I was ushered off by one of the senior project managers. "Why'd you write that email?" "Um...?" "You don't call these things PROBLEMS, you call them ISSUES. Do you understand? You call them problems, people are going to think there are problems!"
And that was the moment I decided I wanted nothing to do with traditional engineering and the automative industry... unfortunately I had another 3.99 months to go on that internship at that point. The rest of the internship didn't go any better, and is still a massive source of antipatterns I still draw from today.
Funny note, those "issues" ended up costing the company millions in a product recall. Maybe they should've been called "problems" instead ;)
The neutering of language into corporate-speak is still one of the biggest red flags I look for when interviewing...
Yes, my exact experiences with that company. Only it lasted a lot more time, at different stints. Sigh.
Once I spent time with people they got more friendly and open. Yet if you do get a good conversation going you can expect the managers at the table to hang out of it. The managers always watch their words. Likewise if you talk to a random person in the cafeteria they will toe the party line.
In contrast one is safe to criticize Microsoft products provided they have been dropped or replaced. No love is shown for Windows Mobile or the Kin.
When you do criticize current practices/products in public there was an unwritten rule that one should always reference the competition. No one calls it out in words like "We can do better!", "This is user hostile!", "We're being to greedy by doing X!". Instead it is "We should focus on X because our competitor is going well on Y". Also "competitor" is always left non-specific, just like it is in your quote.
As such considering Ray Ozzie's former high org chart position I must congratulate him on saying as much as he did.
That's not to say that there aren't koolaid drinkers and that it won't ever be politically unwise to directly criticize your colleagues... But it's a diverse place, and, in my experience, cynicism exists in a big way there.
Interns do seem to be treated differently though. Not many criticisms are voiced around them.
The /bad/ managers never wanted confrontation, were afraid to raise up problems, were autocratic to their reports and nebbishes to their own managers, and never tried to grow their people.
There are managers I regret leaving behind, and managers who I was very happy to see the back of.
Its good to hear not everyone got the same impression as me. On the other hand they may have been observing more private conversations than I am referring to. Still I cannot at all claim more experience than former full timers.
If they are too blunt and direct in suggesting change, their established rivals paint them out as someone who "does not understand or value the organization's history", or "does not get the culture" etc.
The CEO often prefers to sit on the fence, without putting his/her entire weight behind the contrarian. Because s/he does not (or cannot) risk antagonizing the majority of the old guard. In the absence of a CEO's or board's full support, the contrarians start getting stymied in their plans as time goes on. Their words become less sharper, their plans less disruptive and their canvas much less "blue sky". Till comes a time when they prefer to just leave rather than tilt at windmills.
IMHO - Microsoft could have gone too ways. They could have gone full cash-cow, returned even more money to shareholders, and watched the franchise slowly shrink. (The IBM model, who seem to buy more shares back every year) Or they could have gone full-on towards R&D and killing their sacred cow with a better push into the post-PC world. In muddling between the two they did the worse of both worlds: they missed a tech wave, and punished their shareholders.
effective leaders deliver products that customers buy. ineffective ones write memos to other "leaders".
I think many would love to have Office available on all platforms.
Personally I would be thrilled to write C# with first class support on Linux (Mono is not close to having this yet).
the components you cite, sharepoint, sql server, are bought by IT departments that went with windows. once you switch to linux you do not have access to those tools, regardless of their greatness. and yeah, most of those tools are bundled in CALs anyhow, Sharepoint without SQL server?
It was a shame that they could not leverage him more effectively as I really think he had clear vision about where things were going.