How Microsoft became what it used to despise

Microsoft has a long and rich history of leadership in the field of information technology, which for decades has been accompanied by numerous innovations. However, in recent years, the Redmond giant has lagged far behind its direct competitors: its position in the mobile technology market has been lost, because even the iPhone gives more profit than all of Microsoft, and Windows Surface is still not released, the response to the attack from Apple three years ago tablet pc ipad. Kurt Eichenwald spoke about the reasons for this “lost Microsoft decade” to Vanity Fair magazine.

Eichenwald's story helps to understand that the main problem of innovation in Microsoft is the so-called stack ranking (stack ranking), forcing each work unit to allocate a certain share of the best, good, average and bad workers.
')
“Any of the current or previous Microsoft employees with whom I spoke, anyone called stack rankings the main destructive process inside Microsoft, because it displaced an unknown number of employees,” writes Eichenwald. In a team of 10 people, each of whom knows that seven of them will receive average marks, two will be good, and the work of one will be considered bad, it is not competition with other companies that is born, but only internal rivalry.

Brian Cody, a former Microsoft engineer with whom Eichenwald spoke, says that more effort was placed on visibility for managers than on improving skills. Having worked for 16 years as a marketing manager at Microsoft, Ed McCahill calls the bureaucracy in the company the main reason for the failure of Microsoft in the mobile market.

Eichenwald mentions that Microsoft had a prototype of an e-book back in 1998, but when the technology group showed it to Bill Gates, he immediately criticized the idea as inappropriate for the company. “He didn’t like the user interface because he didn’t look like Windows,” recalls one of the project’s programmers. In fact, the death of the e-reader initiative was caused by a strong desire to see opportunities for profit and a new input interface - a touch screen. Several influential people in the group considered as insignificant trifles any platforms other than personal computers, as well as non-keyboard entry or stylus input under which the “sacred cows” of Microsoft — Office and Windows — were oriented.

When one of the young developers of MSN Messenger noticed how students put statuses in the AOL messaging program from AOL, he suggested adding this to the Microsoft product. “These were trends that preceded the advent of Facebook, people needed a place to store their thoughts, a constant stream of consciousness,” he told Eichenwald. When the developer pointed out to his boss the fact that the main goal of AIM is not chat, but the opportunity to check what friends are doing at any moment, he, the person in years, denied it: he could not understand why young people need it. And precisely because of his misunderstanding nothing like this was created.

“Microsoft used to like to point fingers at IBM and laugh. Now they themselves have become what they used to laugh at, ”said Bill Hill, the company's former manager.