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Blogging will be against Microsoft company policy before Christmas.

I've always seen Microsoft as a balloon slowly filling with more and more air. There comes a point at which the balloon can hold no more air and explodes.

It seems that more accountability is being placed on the executives now-a-days. And rightfully so!
I'm sure Microsoft has a lot of talented people working that the executives are just to ignorant to manage properly or even have the vision to manage.
If Billy thinks that releasing XP-64 is going to cushion the blow that Tiger is about to deal, he's as foolish as his underlings...

"For Microsoft employees that still dream of innovating: http://www.apple.com/jobs/ "

LOL

MW: "better"

Well.. what do you guys think.. Ballmer is loud and brash, but is this a result of Bill Gates stepping down..

I mean.. do you think the company has lost direction because of that..?

SJ said he thought so... Ballmer's a salesman, he doesn't talk product, he talks product as if it were a commodity, he talks sales numbers...

"trying to 'find somewhere at Microsoft that isn't overwhelmed by the current malaise"

Try the Mac Biz Unit

I hadn't considered the effect on Microsoft employee morale the relentless improvements on OSX Apple is making. It's gotta be really hard going to work day after day knowing you can't keep up with the "little guys" no matter how hard you try or how good you are as an individual. I don't want to condescend, but Microsoft can't get a better OS until they they break from their legacy. Their legacy seems too tied into their business model. Tough break that. Guess Bill didn't look far enough down "The Road Ahead" >snicker<

I hope that Steve Ballmer is the CEO of Microsoft until the day the company goes out of business.

maybe microsoft should hire that guy who used to sell sugar water. i hear he is available.

I meant:

I hadn't considered the effect on Microsoft employee morale the relentless improvements on OSX Apple is making would have.

English is my first language –sigh

ABQ Peter: heh

trying to get my nic spell corrected. sorry

The ship is sinking! Abandon ship!

Microsoft is definitely not a growth company or innovator. I am sure there are lots of really smart people at Microsoft spinning their wheels wondering why they have not jumped ship to something better.

I would be interested in the people leaving Longhorn development dept.----wonder how many there are that are leaving, what is the fallout rate?

Steve Ballmer should go. Until he leaves Microsoft will continue to wither...staying alive only because it has such an entrenched monopoly with its OS.

"Microsoft leadership lacks vision. Bill Gates is where he is because he is a tenacious and fierce competitor. Neither he nor any of his henchmen have the imagination or social instincts to catch or generate the next big wave. We missed the incredibly high margin business that Google and Yahoo created around search. We missed the music business Apple created around ITunes and IPod. We missed the [freaking] Internet!"

http://minimsft.blogspot.com/

http://minimsft.blogspot.com/

3) Creativity is not a part of its corporate culture, and it never has been. Microsoft made its money doing a better job of executing other people's good ideas. I can't think of anything revolutionary that Microsoft has produced. The next big thing and every other big thing after that will not come out of Redmond.

4) Microsoft leadership lacks vision. Bill Gates is where he is because he is a tenacious and fierce competitor. Neither he nor any of his henchmen have the imagination or social instincts to catch or generate the next big wave. We missed the incredibly high margin business that Google and Yahoo created around search. We missed the music business Apple created around ITunes and IPod. We missed the [freaking] Internet!

Greatness is all about potential, and you need the right environment to bring it out. Most of the "mediocrity" you see at Microsoft these days is the result of systemic paralysis.

Can you imagine? I can. I worked for WorldCom briefly when they bought us, but I lept like a rat from a sinking ship after selling my stock. Two years later WorldCom was bankrupt.

MS is in now way WorldCom or Enron, but giant mega corps will collapse under their own weight just like the Roman empire, just like the good ol USA is doing now, sadly.

There's still hope. MS could turn it around if they spun off some divisions. Maybe the US govt needs to do the same.

Good timing Pogo!

Well, to be fair, there are employees who make similar complaints about almost every large corporation, even Apple:

http://viewfromthemountain.typepad.com/applepeels/

Microsoft is a dinosaur in a world that is changing rapidly. They can't respond to technical challenges, have a bloated marketshare that they can't manage, and a technology that has seen it's better days behind.

It's not just Ballmer, but it's the whole PC commodity mindshare that is trying to deliver it's OLD technologies as an appliance to an intelligent market that knows that the appliance is still being tested.

ENTER.... TIGER, LINUX, and UNIX......

Imagine getting up every day, going into the office, and working your arse off just to make Bill and Monkeyboy even more money.

The fact the bloggers only leaving and not jumping off high buildings is a blessing.

Missing word up their "are".

Feel free to insert it wherever you think it should go

There, not their.

Damn, it's getting late.

i just happened to think: malaise. i wonder if monkeys are afraid of killer rabbits (you have to be a minimum age to get this).

thats one of the more interesting MS articles in a long time. And will hopefully make several rounds around the net. A major shakeup in Redmond would be an interesting development

beleaugured.

or, beleagured. you pick.

Rubes!

Hey Naara Haara,

Sit and spin mofo!

HAA HAA HAA HAA HAA


I don't get it.....

Jeff said: "Well, to be fair, there are employees who make similar complaints about almost every large corporation, even Apple:

http://viewfromthemountain.typepad.com/applepeels/"

Jeff, that article is different in one fundamental way from the blog that MDN linked to. The low moral of the people inside MS is what is apparent here, as opposed to someone in Apple who has different views on Apple's government pricing policy (and rightly so it would seem). The complaints in ApplePeel are hardly similar to those at blogspot.

EXCELLENT!

I will personally give a bottle of champagne to every mac owner if they get rid of Gates and Ballmer!

Wingsy,

The complaint about Apple's government pricing policy is just the latest post. In another post, he called Apple an "abusive" employer:

http://viewfromthemountain.typepad.com/applepeels/2005/03/the_abusive_com.html

Our grandkids are going to study in history books about the fall of Micro$oft. Tiger will be referenced when they talk about the beginning of the end.

dogcow says MOOF, not Moo.

Jeff and Wingsy, the Apple peels guy is an ex Apple employee. A disgruntled one that worked as a salesman. How that guy worked for Apple for twenty years is beyond me. His writing is poor and his personal website is super "lame". I wouldn't base any judgements on this guy's silly opinions. Also, it seems that most of his sales work has been in the federal sector. So Apple didn't emphasize sales to the gubmint, he was let go and now he's pissed. Whaaa! Business decisions sometimes affect people. Like layoffs. Let's get real now.

Yah, Jeff --

That guy on "viewfromthemountain" has a serious axe to grind. For so much of what he writes he has to really contort himself into all sorts of positions just to even try to make his point.

Plus, it's ONE guy. At Microsoft, those employees are contracting a virus (pardon the pun) that is slowly insinuating itself into many, many different divisions and individual personnel. Don't confuse the rantings of a vengeful ex-Apple employee and current dipshit who can't even properly edit his own blog, with the glorious beginnings of the sociological plague that's infesting Microsoft.

I say, "All hail the MS plague -- to the tune of 20% lost marketshare to Apple!"

I sincerely hope that Gates and Ballmer stay on. Aren't captains supposed to go down with their sinking ships? Being a multi-billionaire means never having to say you're sorry.

I dumped M'soft during Windows 3.1. I then put up with years of shite from my windows mates and at work. Apple's rediscovered innovation and the rest is history. M'soft was never an innovator.

Is M'soft dying, it's just too early to tell. Remember, they said Apple was dying and during the early to mid ninetiesit it was in decline. By 1997 Apple was on the ropes. Look at the company eight years on, you'd never recognise them.

Don't right off the Redmond recalcitrants; they're still worth a bomb and they still control a large share of the personal computer market (via their dipstick OS).

Having made that point we can always hope they ARE on the way out. Still it still feels good to pee on M'soft users …and watch them take it. We had to take it from them and now it's their turn.

It's funny, to the point of shaking my head in disbelief, at the lengths of how some will go to defend Longhorn in some of the blogs and responses. I think there were some who asked, and rightly so, how can they compare OS X (which is shipping) with Longhorn (which is not shipping).

We'll see what Longhorn has to offer when it finally ships. Until then, MS needs to refrain from comparing it to Tiger. Otherwise, it just looks desperate and pathetic.

I haven't heard from our friend Enderele lately. So has he been staying home lately?

MDN Magic Word: feed
As in "Keep feeding the BS, your users will see right through it, MS."

From a Microsoft employee on
http://minimsft.blogspot.com/2005/03/better-off-without-ballmer.html

"I'm so pissed that I can barely convey it. I'm a longterm employee and I'm forced to sell an expiring set of options this year from 1998. What are they worth? Well, I haven't looked at the price today but it was less than $1 a share last week based on our 1998 strike price.

F**k that. I should go work for Google, Apple or anyone else who can grow their stock and actually ship something."

Bert's post is instructive. A lot of the malaise in Redmond can be linked directly to their stagnant stock price, I think. MS is essentially too big to be a growth company now (just like walmart). But like Walmart, don't assume because growth is stalled they are on the way out or someting. (If only...)

For example, if MS Office was a separate company, it would be bigger than Oracle.

So is MS going to lose it's market dominance? Not easily, because so many people and enterprises are unwilling to leave MS until they see someone else doing it. So they all sit there, hating their OS, but unwilling to leave the abusive relationship.

MS may be stagnant, sluggish and confused-looking, but The Empire is far from weak. They could bombard every mac user with a huge sack of money, crush him or her to death after several misses, and still have money left over to convince the government they were simply encouraging competitive market behavior.

And Longhorn could be an actual steaming longhorn turd in a box, and most of their user base would still spend hours trying to cram it into their PC's CD slot anyhow.

And hey, I'm a mac lover. That's just how I see things.