Microsoft's 2008 - What's Going Well?

Here we are, wrapping up 2007 and launching into 2008. I continue to believe that we're in a good transition time at Microsoft and that 2008 will help cinch that transition as some of the bigger products wrap up major development (Office 14, Windows 7). Trying to keep a positive vibe, I just want to share some of the things going on in and around Microsoft that I see as goodness. I'd like to know what you honestly think is going well, too.
Indulge in some praise, too, if you will. We can get around to the constructive criticism after we're settled into the new year. Drop by MSFT Extreme Makeover for a dose right now if you need a hit.
Competition: Praise the Lord for competition. Without some light to shine the way, we really tend to get lost in our own initiatives. Think of pre-reset Longhorn. Think of post-IE6 (Blake Ross, I've got a hug with your name on it). So I'm thankful for Google, Facebook, Apple, and Adobe. And Amazon. And Nintendo. And all those startups who show that good ideas don't take an army to deliver. And that design matters. And that everyday citizens have cash they'd like to spend, too, for quality products. If it wasn't for our competitors doing so well in their respective areas I'm willing to bet that we'd still being ignoring good design and consumer facing features. As of now, those internal champions have leverage.
Something I haven't seen before, especially around Apple, is a level of humbleness and respect when considering, say, what Apple is doing - and doing well - and how we can endeavor to do better ourselves. I haven't or heard much trash-talking around Apple, but rather aspirational discussion. That's great and makes me believe that we'll be able to deliver something that actually delights our users... and hopefully therefore our shareholders.
I've been bummed lately when our competitors screw up. Really. No schadenfreude here, as much as they do indulge in it in our direction. Yeah, I'm bummed when Apple's latest OS comes equipped with a Blue Screen of death and other failures. When Facebook starts upskirting all of their users' purchases. When Google potentially jumps the shark. I'm bummed because their great accomplishments serve as a big walloping stick to break through blockers at Microsoft (because there are still people convinced that the most secure, robust, solid features are those that you don't ship - not exactly a formula for success 100% of the time).
Their failures serve as excuses to keep on doing what we're doing, or less.
Surprise! Holy smokes, stop your grinnin' and drop your linen! I love my new Zune player. That's right, I'm having a blast listening to my tunes and podcasts on my little black 8GB Zune. I promised to buy a Zune when a solid-state Zune with wireless syncing came out. Now, I'm sure you iPod fans just had to spit out three mouthfuls of foamy indignation. Uncross your eyes and let me comfort you in saying that yes, the iPod is still better. When I picked up the very first iPod nano I was amazed at how it just worked. It was delightful. Not delightful is the decision I made years ago to rip all my music in WMA. Now I know all that is just one big transcoding script job away from being something else, but I'm sticking with WMA. And the Zune is my first WMA player (going through about five different players, all the way back to an Intel 64MB player I first owned) that just works right.
And I really enjoy the Zune desktop software. And I intend to rip off some of their UI designs. Imagine that! A Microsoft team ripping design ideas off of another Microsoft team. "Hello, Hell? How's the snow?"
Solid VS2008? When VS2005 came out, there was a series of negative reactions I noted, mainly around its IDE. Dealing with the VS teams quite often, I certainly know they did a major reset in the way they develop software post VS2005. Is it paying off? If so, will other teams adopt this level of engineering excellence to address issues they have in shipping solid features?
DRM die-off? Raise your hand if you love DRM. I don't dork with anything that has DRM because it's so incredibly rare that I've gotten that crap to work without a lot of manual intervention. How am I supporting the non-DRM initiatives? By spending cash buying MP3 albums as much as I can stand. Radiohead. Amazon. And even the Zune Marketplace MP3s (surprise, part II). Do you hate DRM? Show the DRM-free music the love, then. As expressed in cold, hard cash. Or dippy Live points. Put down the Rock Band guitar and go buy some classic tunes in MP3. This kind of success will help Microsoft detangle itself even more from the DRM monster (which, by inadvertently killing Plays-for-Sure, we're well on the way).
Translucency: I know there are a lot of customers, partners, and competitors who enjoy knowing everything going on with every little new Microsoft feature along the way. When it comes to translucency vs. transparency, I support putting the kimono back on and tightening it up, perhaps doing so in an enticing burlesque-style way, revealing only what we want to reveal. A little toe here, perhaps an ankle there...
Part of my support is obviously Jobs/Apple envy of being able to surprise people with a feature just being released. The other is avoiding embarrassingly-public screw-ups like WinFS or other big features we're going to deliver and then end-up cutting. I think we've stopped being the Britney of the software-news world, now we're aspiring to be the Angelina Jolie.
Obviously, we'll still be doing betas for Windows and Office so that by the time they are released everyone will be yawning about the by-then well-known features, but I hope we can pull-out a few surprises and underpromise and overdeliver. So: way to go IE8 team! And I'm looking forward to seeing the reactions at Mix08.
Not the Bad Guy? It's taken a long time, but I don't believe we are perceived as the Evil Empire anymore. Part of that went out when people decided, at least contextually, to bust apart our empire. Okay, fine, we're playing catch-up now (wink wink). Now the evil part starts fading based on the relative failings of other firms. This is a grand opportunity for Microsoft to follow a vision like the one that Mr. ... Mr. ... Mr. Ozzie shared with us (wow, my mind blanked trying to remember his name there for a second... not sure what that means) at the 2007 Company Meeting and be the good guy on the side of the citizen and their private information, making it protected and easily transportable so that you are assured that you own and have access to what's yours, even it if passes through our clouds.
(Administrivia: sorry for falling off the map, but it just plain hasn't been computerized happiness for me over the past month given a wonky Neomailbox email service [probably anything you sent to me directly from the middle of November for a few weeks got bit-bucketed] and a series of cascading hardware failures on the home network. This is the first time in a while I've gotten the "Mini" account going again vs. the minimal life-support it has been on. It's still rough going as I try to duct-tape things back together and bond with Notepad for a while. I guess I'm working through some karma here.)
Mini-Microsoft Microsoft
Posted by Who da'Punk at Thursday, December 27, 2007 102 comments Links to this post
Saturday, November 10, 2007

Low Hanging Late Harvest Fruit
Boot! Yoink! Yank! What does it take to be disappeared from Microsoft? We can only guess one day Stuart Scott was walking outside of his building when a black Escalade with VI0L8R plates pulled up, Ken DiPetrio swung open a door and said, "Get in." Along with, "Martin, scoot the hell over and make some room." It takes something pretty egregious - more than shipping Vista two years late - to get scooped up in the VI0L8R.
Some one was kind enough to drop a hint here back in October that Mr. Scott had some interesting antics going on. I have no idea what the reality is, though several comments are like the following:
No, Stuart was fired for the affair and the hostile work environment he created for women in his org. Great to see that HR finally did something about it, and that the reason publicized was company policy violation ...and not "spending more time with his family".
As we speculate about affairs and relationships at work, it's interesting to reflect that Microsoft has a unique history for singles at work given how BillG and Melinda met. Obviously not apropos to the married philandering type. But it makes for a fun lunch-table subject and probably a bit of an HR headache.
Now, just short of the VI0L8R seems to be the BUMZRSH treatment that Mr. Selberg mentioned recently of a Microsoftie friend immediately shown the door upon deciding to join Google. I agree with Mr. Selberg that you should always leave with your bridges well in place and with grace, and that this is a two-way street. But you know, I was thinking after reading this post: who do I know personally that's recently left Microsoft to join Google? No one. Weird.
Then again, maybe not. From the Newsweek Google story by Mr. Steven Levy:
Earlier attempts to hire veterans from firms like Microsoft had awful results. "Google is so different that it was almost impossible to reprogram them into this culture," says CEO Eric Schmidt. The difficulties led Google VP Mayer (employee No. 20) to wonder whether experience was way overrated.
Finally, one last departure: Jon Pincus. A lot of Microsofties interested in changing Microsoft's internal and external-facing culture rallied around Mr. Pincus, who has had quite the distinguished Microsoft career. He gets given crap sometimes for being different or a self-promoter, but I just have to wonder what kind of leader or change-agent isn't. Anyway, it's a bit sad for me to reflect on Mr. Pincus going quickly from being up on the big-screen several times at our 2007 Company Meeting to being shown that there was no home for him - and his refreshingly different spirit - at Microsoft. It shows that our increasingly bland golf-club leadership is satisfied with the status quo and that the Good Ship SPSA need not be rocked.
Mr. Pincus leaving at a time of dubious a dismissal and bad diversity attrition is a rotten seeping from Denmark, indeed.
If I had my druthers, I'd at least offer Mr. Pincus a position to be the Microsoft representative of goodwill to the Silicon Valley and Seattle local tech community and serving as the connection between The Outside and the generally protected Microsoftie product team members. I especially thought of this after reading Microsoft wants to add Silicon Valley as a friend. Snippet from the end:
Angel investor Tom McInerney, co-founder of the video site Guba.com, agreed: "Microsoft has been humbled a little bit. They've been forced to play nice. A cultural change has taken place with Microsoft. There is an acknowledgment that they are not the king of the hill anymore. And there is the looming concern that Google is the new Microsoft."
Has the big-huge aircraft carrier finally started the turn?
An Appropriate Home: reading Mr. Bishop from the Seattle-P.I. this week, I find irony in the reports that the Entertainment and Devices division - home of the billion and billion dollar loss leader Xbox group - is going to have its new home right on-top of the huge West Campus parking garage pit. Instead of something boring like P1 and P2, perhaps the parking garage levels (all painted in increasingly dark levels of red) can be named -1Billion, -2Billion, -3Billion, -4Billion, and -5Billion.
In all seriousness, now that Sony has capsized on the PS3 I expect that the next generation of Xbox will be designed to be profitable from day one.
Sunday update: Mr. Benjamin Romano in the Sunday edition of the Seattle Times has a larger article about the new buildings at Microsoft and the Microsoft expansion: Microsoft campus expands, transforms, inside and out. And there's a fun little interactive campus expansion map. An additional article on open workspaces: Microsoft strategy throws open the doors.
Not So Limited Kim - Not So!: I have great respect for Adam Barr, and we disagree over the whole Limited II (now 10% Situation II) career designation. He dropped by the last post with a couple of comments to reiterate that it's not a bad thing:
I continue to disagree with the consensus here on the alleged "Kim" situation. Mini, this is the one area where I feel you are actively promoting something which is factually wrong.
This is what I see:
1) Microsoft decided to bucket people for stock grants, and decided there would be a bottom 10% bucket.
2) The name chosen for this bottom 10% bucket, "Limited", was poorly chosen due to the connotations of the word--so it was changed to "10%".
3) The description of the bottom 10% bucket implied that Microsoft didn't see those people as having much value--this was incorrect, so Microsoft created a second definition to correct that (for some people in the 10% bucket, the original definition WAS accurate, so it is still available).
And more specifically, the change in #3 was done to AVOID people getting a more negative message than was intended...so I don't see why people are interpreting it as trying to force a more negative message and push the entire bottom 10% out of the company.
As always, I invite any Microsofties who want to discuss this more to contact me via internal email. Thanks.
I hope that people who don't believe it's a good thing (perhaps who have had their career Kimmed and maybe even left Microsoft because of it) will accept Mr. Barr's offer to follow-up 1-on-1 about the issue. And while I'd love to host a guest post on it here (really) I think this topic would also serve as a great cathartic use of InsideMS, should someone like Mr. Barr be ready to slap on the asbestos suit and give a post on the subject a shot. They'll need to be ready to explain why the following story is okay and in-line with expected results of the designation:
After being promoted a year ago, I was blindsided during this annual review period with the Kim label. I know exactly why it happened. It happened because I was caught on the wrong side of a spiteful, incompetent manager. That, after a 13-year career at this company, during which I'd received awards for my work, many 4.0 reviews, and steady promotions. Every other person who'd submitted feedback on my performance during the last annual review period had submitted positive feedback.
So does being slapped with that label make me a loser? I'll go ahead and answer that for you: No. Is it "good attrition" now that the team is losing me because of that review? I'll go ahead and answer that too: Um, no. With me, seniority and a great deal of valuable in-house knowledge are walking out the door.
So I'm lobbying and providing feedback wherever I can to encourage others to lobby for getting rid of the asinine 10%/Limited "Situation 2" label. If that label is being applied to others in the same way that it is being applied to me, the company will not have "good attrition" or "losers" going out the door. They will have long-time, great performers walking out the door. And for every one one of us who walks out the door, the company will need 3 or 4 lesser-paid junior people to do our work. It will take months, or perhaps even years, to bring the new kids up to speed, and they won't have the history or background knowledge that we do.
And every Kimstar who walks out the door will do so with resentment for this treatment after years of great service to the company. Since these people aren't "losers," they'll be hired by our competitors or initiate their own competing start-ups. You can be sure they won't be providing great publicity for their alma mater.
So before you label people "losers" because they received a "loser label," stop, step away from the keyboard, drop the chalupa, and think.
You just haven't been Kimmed yet.