How not to run a company. A Microsoft story.

You know what is the problem of Microsoft. They, I quote “dont have any taste”. At least thats how Steve Jobs described Microsoft in a nutshell in the 90’s. Vanity Fair has written an article about Microsoft and it´s disability to compete in any emerging tech trend which has appeared in last decade. Although the article is sometimes to much onesided, there is plenty of good points how not to run a company. Here they are:

– do not fixate on historical platform

Windows was the god—everything had to work with Windows,” said Stone. “Ideas about mobile computing with a user experience that was cleaner than with a P.C. were deemed unimportant by a few powerful people in that division, and they managed to kill the effort… Every little thing you want to write has to build off of Windows or other existing products”

– money kill creativity

Worse, the strategy for success at Microsoft was turned on its head. Where once creating innovations was both the thrill of the job and the path to riches through stock options, guaranteed financial success could now be achieved only the way it was at stodgy old General Motors or IBM—through promotions.

– move fast and make the hierarchy as flat as possible!

“There was this institutionalized system, and it was like designing software by committee,” said Prasanna Sankaranarayanan, a former Microsoft engineer. “Things moved too slowly. There were too many meetings.”

– give more power to new blood

The young hotshots from the 1980s, techies who had joined the company in their 20s and 30s, had become middle-aged managers in their 40s and 50s. And, some younger engineers said, a good number of the bosses just didn’t understand the burgeoning class of computer users who had been children. Most senior people were out of touch with the ways the home users were starting to use computers, especially the younger generation,” one software developer said.

– support company collaboration rather then competition

At the center of the cultural problems was a management system called “stack ranking worked like this: every unit was forced to declare a certain percentage of employees as top performers, then good performers, then average, then below average, then poor.It leads to employees focusing on competing with each other rather than competing with other companies.”

PS: Ok, I guess everyone got the points and now it is time to make fun of Apple:

http://youtu.be/2vR4LeL0yzE

source: vanityfair.com