Microsoft’s Alternate Reality Bubble
(Part 2 of “Microsoft’s Three Ruts”)
Last installment, I said that Microsoft (1) has no history of inventing new products that make money, (2) is run by an old guard that believes making me-too copies of other companies’ successes is a winning strategy even though it hasn’t worked in over ten years, and (3) most of the people at Microsoft, old and young alike, think that their mission as a company is to try to defeat the successes of all other computing-related companies (Apple in particular).
I also said that I had strong doubts that Microsoft could turn around these three problems. The reason for those doubts is Microsoft’s dysfunctional internal culture:
4. Microsoft strongly encourages all its employees to have an extremely positive, can-do attitude — about #3 (above). In other words, expressing doubts that a successful product from some other company can or will be replaced by Microsoft is frowned upon. Every employee is expected to enthusiastically agree with the idea that Microsoft is, or soon will be, beating all other successful computing products out of their markets.
5. Microsoft’s “dog-food” policy (i.e. we should be eating our own dog-food) strongly discourages anyone at Microsoft from using non-Microsoft products. The theory behind it, I think, is that our products should be good enough that we want to use them. They should be the best. And if they’re inferior, to the point that it’s actually irritating to use them, then we should be acutely aware of that (because we’re using those products), so we will soon fix the problem.
Having a very can-do attitude about your products and plans, and using your own products so you’ll know if they need fixing, are both good ideas — in theory. But in practice (and in combination), what they appear to have done at Microsoft is to turn its huge Redmond campus into a fictional bubble — an alternate reality where Microsoft’s products all won. A place in which Microsoft employees can cheer their company on to victory after victory, even though those victories aren’t actually occurring off-campus. A place where the whole company can live in one, big, group state of denial, acting as if Apple died in the mid-’90s, and Microsoft beat everyone out of everything.
How would I feel if I worked at a place like that? I think I would just play along with it, keeping in mind that Seattle’s a really nice place in which to live, and my paycheck and bonuses are pretty darned good compared to what I might be earning somewhere else. So I would play along — until I found a better opportunity elsewhere. In an atmosphere like that, nothing’s likely to change any time soon.
At least, not voluntarily. Change can come to Microsoft only in a bad way: damage imposed from the outside. Windows and Office are the monster cash machines that makes it possible for tens of thousands of employees to live most of each day in an alternate-reality, Microsoft-total-victory world. The bubble can’t last if those money machines seriously decline.
Prediction
Here’s my best guess as to what will come of all this:
The Mac will continue to gain market share, and the iPad will continue to erode the market for cheap Windows laptops.
The Windows PC OEMs will continue to stumble around and screw up in their awkward attempts to figure out what they’re going to do about shrinking profits and frightened investors.
At some critical threshold of panic, Microsoft’s board will at long last replace Ballmer. But instead of turning the company around, this will throw Microsoft into the same state of confused higglety-pigglety as its OEMs.
Apple will take over personal computing, and Windows will linger on forever in Apple’s “Boot Camp” feature, similarly to the way COBOL lingers on even today at various companies, despite really having died a long time ago.
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