“So I read a recent message to Microsoft employees from CEO Satya Nadella, in which he attempts, once again, to explain his plans to reform the company. I won’t quote any of the estimated 3,100-odd words here, because they frankly do not make any sense,” Gene Steinberg writes for The Tech Night Owl. “Using fancy buzzwords the only message Nadella manages to convey, more or less, is that it’s mostly about productivity.”
“Indeed, I see that other members of the tech media are already taking Microsoft to task for failing to present a cogent vision for the future,” Steinberg writes. “While Nadella was being praised as the right person to take over Microsoft, a real nerd in the spirit of Bill Gates, it’s clear he’s so hung up on technicalities that he doesn’t grasp the needs of Microsoft’s customers, and why the company’s products fail to elicit an emotional connection with most users.”
“Now I do not expect Microsoft to fire Nadella because he cannot enunciate a workable plan to improve the company’s prospects. At the very least, he’ll be given a few quarters to demonstrate that things are changing, perhaps until after Windows 9 ships,” Steinberg writes. “I also wonder about Microsoft employees, wondering what direction the company might take with new leadership, and reading a bunch of drivel that has little relationship to the real world and the problems the company confronts. Are they disappointed, or just suck it up since they still have jobs?”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: The super-slo-mo train wreck that is Microsoft continues! As unbottled joy threatens to entirely overwhelm our senses, we cannot look away. Oh, happy days, indeed!
It’s tough, if not impossible, to deliver the type of change Microsoft needs when you’re a lifer.
Related articles:
Beleaguered Microsoft CEO lays groundwork for mass layoffs, yet another rearrangement of the deck chairs – July 11, 2014
Microsoft CEO Nadella to use his first press conference to talk a lot about Apple – March 27, 2014
Microsoft CEO Nadella begins rearranging the deck chairs – March 3, 2014
Satya Nadella? Seriously, Microsoft? – January 31, 2014
I posted this in a previous article…but it really applies here!
What is truly sad is that many of the MS staff will be pink slipped before they can read and understand Nadella’s 3,100 word Manifesto.
With only 5% of the words, Tim Cook, in his doctrine, was able to succinctly and accurately express Apple’s corporate vision.
While Nadella labored on about MS’s existing hardware, software, and services; Tim mentioned nothing of that…only WHY Apple exists and why they do what they do.
Nadella uses great “corporate speak” which tells me he does not have a clue what to do! He totally confuses tactics with strategy. And setting a corporate strategy is his job. Again the Titanic is without a captain.
Don’t forget the massive amounts of liquids from the MS water cooler he’s consumed over the years.
If you can’t dazzle ’em with brilliance, baffle ’em with B. S.
Steinberg says he won’t hold it against Nadella that he can’t enunciate his vision to Microsoft’s employees.
I will. How can a CEO put into effect his vision of how a company should run if he can’t explain it to the company’s employees?
Answer: He can’t. And that’s because he wanted the job (who wouldn’t?), but he really has no idea how to be a CEO. He’s a nerd in the truest sense: He needs to control everything. The problem is a CEO can’t afford to micromanage. A CEO of a large organization has to set goals, policy, make hard decisions on what products to pursue and which to abandon, and manage from a bird’s eye view, so to speak. The VPs, department heads, etc. take on the details of the work.
Nadella is doomed to fail because he doesn’t have a CEO’s mindset. He’s a worker bee, and probably an excellent one. But he’s no queen bee.
My opinion continues to be that Nadella had to announce a hatchet job to the company. But he was so reluctant to take the cleaver that he had to bury it beneath verbal subterfuge in order to divert the MS employee masses from labeling him a psycho-killer. That, of course, made the situation even worse, since this sort of coded death threat is exactly what sets people’s paranoia up to setting #11.
At least with Ballmer Microsoft employees knew where the stood.
Based on the smell. Either upwind or downwind.
> … why the company’s products fail to elicit an emotional connection with most users.
Microsoft does not need an “emotional” connection to its customers. Its key customers (Windows users) just want a freakin’ NEW version of Windows that is designed for computers (desktops and laptops) that do not have a freakin’ touchscreen. How hard is this to understand? Go back to the Window 7 interface, update its underlying tech by transplanting from Windows 8, and call it Windows 9.
Rename the touch-based version of Windows something else (as a separate product), like how about “Surface”…? Calling it “Windows” doesn’t even make sense anymore. Then, your tablets will (still) be “Surface tablets” and your (Nokia) phones can be called “Surface phones” (which is infinitely better than “Windows Phone phone”). PCs with touch screens will be “Surface PCs.” Almost catchy…
Grow the “Surface OS” business steadily, without alienating your core Windows customers who pay the bills and keep the lights on (and pay employees). If you don’t respect your existing customers, they will realize that there IS another established platform that DOES respect laptop and desktop users. “Welcome HOME to Macintosh.”
They could name the new version Tindows, for tainted windows.
How about Dimdows?
Bimboes??
Steaming pile?
‘Surface Operating System’ or S.O.S for short.
He will be given a few quarters to demonstrate that things are changing?
He will be overpaid.
Apple understands that software becomes obsolete over time so it doesn’t have to support applications that haven’t been updated in 10+ years.
It just shows you how long a tech plane running on Windows/Office fumes alone can get. But inexorably will eventually crash land with many employee casualties onboard because of directionless Captains.
Office is the toughest MS thing to wean businesses off of.
No kidding!
And Adobe things, too!
… happily MS and Adobe free 🙂
I could replace Microsloth before I could replace Adobe. There is nothing out there as good as InDesign. Quark is a joke. And the seamlessness of all their apps working together is what sells it as a must have suite of products. We tried Quark for awhile back in the late ’90’s but the unity of the Creative Suite blows away any defection to Quark. Office I can easily do without, but our editors and clients think they need it. Tried Open Office and it replaces MSWord nicely, but can’t open and keep the function of Excel documents well enough, specifically those with Macros. Hope OO developers keep pounding away on a solution for that.
If you even read a few paragraphs from that 3000 word slog, you will find more Dilbert-Speak than you ever dreamed possible. He could have saved himself a lot of work by simply slapping the MS logo on this video which the pinnacle of corporate buzzwordspeak:
Brilliant video! lol
Fantastic!
Dilbert-esque as it gets. Wally.
Is it too late to sell the company and give the money back to the shareholders?
Remember those slappety-clackety commercials where young hipster types were jumping and dancing in perfect synchronization on boardroom tables for Surface? Yeah, I knew it was over then, too.
Those were funny. It was like the agency said, “people dancing with iPods worked, so lets show them dancing with tablet computers!”
The only problem was that people actually dance with their portable music devices so it makes sense. Nobody dances with their computers, it looks like a farce. Could you imagine Apple ever running ads where people dance around with their Macbooks?
I’ve said it before and elsewhere: All that comes out of Satya Nadella is corporate buzzword word-salad. He talks like the boss in a Dilbert comic strip. Keep on leveraging synergistic dynamic customer-focused cloud solution paradigms, my friend.
Ambagious sesquipedalian circumlocutory.
Without putting too fine a point on it.
Microsoft has been dead for over a decade. It’s just such a huge bloated corpse, it takes a long time to rot.
No single person leads at MS.
They form committees, they take votes.
Each department assigned to creating a part of a project is walled off from every other department creating a different part.
They then get together and try to cram it all together.
Is it any wonder all the new CEO, a MS insider, can do is spout business buzzwords?
“Are they disappointed, or just suck it up since they still have jobs?”
Answer, the latter.
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What saddens me is that MS employees have brought some amazing technology to their seniors only for it to fall on deaf ears… One day (Before its over hopefully) if one man becomes the inspiration and central point for decisions and process. Maybe some of that cool stuff that the MS team come out with may see the light of day. Heres hoping….
I don’t know why anyone is surprised at Microsoft’s floundering. Back when Microsoft was on top of the world, the tech media confused their ability to make gobs of cash with the ability to innovate. Microsoft was never an innovator. They bought what became MS-DOS, and when IBM foolishly licensed it instead of purchasing the OS, Microsoft was able to build upon the resulting OS monopoly, layer by layer, until they became the dominant behemoth they were at the turn of the century.
But now it’s a new game. Dominance in desktop PCs means jack sh*t in a world of smartphones and tablets. There’s no way for Microsoft to leverage existing dominance into success in the mobile world. Although they keep trying because that’s literally all they know how to do.
Seriously, anyone who scratched the surface of Microsoft’s 90’s and 00’s financial success should have known this day would come.
——RM