Microsoft employees call for Ballmer to go
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| henke54 Mar 27, 2006 7:41 AM EDT |
quote : "The diatribe set off a lot of feeling amongst Microsoft employees with several demanding that Ballmer should head the list of people who should be fired from the company. One remarked: 'Being a 10+ year vet I feel ashamed and sad. This company is a mess on so many levels'." http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/85527/microsoft-employees-call-f... |
| Herschel_Cohen Mar 27, 2006 8:33 AM EDT |
henke54 - read this and others last night, however, there are voices saying this was a good move to avoid bringing out a faulty package. I think that is a valid point. The problem is: how faulty was it that it was recognized releasing it would have been a bigger disaster than delaying it beyond the prime sales season. Moreover, there were references to financial analysts predicting further delays beyond January. The latter is consistent with some other questioners asking if it was so bad a delay was required, how is it going to be fixed in a mere two months more time? I guess it probably will not be if they stick to this revised date. These views among the rank and file workers at MS can be highly destructive. Combine the negative opinions within MS and those leaving due to politicization of the evaluations, may result in two currents. The first is the flow of the best talent away from MS, both leaving and those never applying. Second the elevation of the louder voices of certainty, without concomitant abilities that cultivate timid supporters. That combination is a death sentence to the creative, because to do something really new results in more failures than successes. MS work force and management will become risk adverse. What's left: innovative marketing - well they might lose their touch there too. So in the end they will resort to outright thuggery and drive by shootings to get their way. Might I suggest you watch for muzzle flashes when visiting your local Star Bucks where coder types congregate. Now that's nothing but Innovative, the profit margins would be tremendous, think of all the business they could leverage themselves into: drugs, loan sharking, gun running ... |
| SFN Mar 27, 2006 8:37 AM EDT |
I'm waiting for the press candy from MS that claims that these anonymous MS employees are not MS employees at all but Linux Zealots(TM). |
| rittmey Mar 27, 2006 9:12 AM EDT |
I think Herschel_Cohen ir right in that MS is really loosing ground and that its management is seemingly unable to even understand their problem. Once their marketing has been the very best in the world. They had to be, the products themselves haven't been innovative enough. But this has changed dramatically. In Germany they advertize for the new Visual Studio with two pictures. The upper showing a frustrated employee doing overtime. The lower showing the same employee being utterly relaxed. Problem is: Both screenshots show VisualStudio. Maybe the one in the lower picture is VisualStudio2005 and the one in the upper VisualStudio.NET 2003 or whateverthey might be named (one doesn't get even this tiny bit of information in the ad). But the message is still strange. Have we to assume, that VisualStudio has been a disaster in its previous releases? Might be true ;-) But why don't they show Eclipse, Borland's IDE or whatever else there is in the market? That's so stupid. Another point about asttracting talent: In past years (including 2005) Microsoft even got voted as "best employer" (a competition where only the employees themselve decide upon the fate of the company) in Germany and a surprisingly large number of computer science students hold Microsoft in high esteem as a potential employer. Reports about flowing chairs (no matter if true - but, well, it could be true) employee frustrations and so on, will change that. Not being able to attract or keep the most talented people combined with the fact that there products get more and more complex... Sound like a lot of trouble to me. And one last thing: Microsoft never had a good track record on quality. So if they delay their core product because of quality problems - well this must be really bad. Could as well be that they changed their attitude and wanted to deliver a better product right from the beginning. But does anybody believe this? So, are their problems that bad? |
| Sander_Marechal Mar 27, 2006 2:42 PM EDT |
Have you read the blog comments themselves? There is one that I find particulary interesting. The reason that the end-user Vista has been delayed but not the business Vista is the fact that many Software Assurance contracts end in december 2006. If they don't have a business Vista before 2007, MS will be sued to death by all the companies that were "coerced" into buying SA's from Microsoft under the veil that Vista would be out soon. It makes perfect sense too. No sane business owner is going to upgrade to Vista when it just launches, especially if the end-user version is still considered "not suitable for consumption". And MS knows it perfectly well (hence the $500 million ad campaign -- if businesses were interested in Vista, they could do with 10% of that). The only reason MS has to bring out Business Vista in end 2006 is to prevent class action lawsuits against them (with probabely the US DoJ getting interested again, because they cannot ingore it anymore at that point). As for the silver lining: Vista won't be done in 2006 but MS will *have* to bring it out nontheless to avoid the legal trouble. Business Vista 2006 will be so crap and recieve such bad response that it will damage MS permanently. GNU/Linux should be ready to step in at that point. Luckily with Suse Enterprise 10.x, Ubuntu Dapper for Enterprises, a new Red Hat and a couple more enterprise oriented distro's, we seem to be right on track to profit greatly from the vista debackle. Perhaps someone better in the know should do an article about this (The expiring SA's and the 2006 release). tadelste? |
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