No, I am not having an open-source developer's ultimate wish fulfilment fantasy. Microsoft is still, as far as I am aware, listed on assorted stock exchanges around the world. In that simple legal and financial sense of course Microsoft exists. I am trying to make a subtler, more practical point.
In saying that Microsoft doesn't exist I am trying to tease out issues relating to a reality that explains many of my frustrations with Microsoft (if it existed!) and the frustrations of others.
Rather than being a monolithic corporation Microsoft is more of a consortium of a few dozen small businesses. Each small business has its own business goals, its own projects, its own concerns.
I suspect, but don't know, that employee appraisal is carried out on the assigned, often short term, goals. And those assigned goals need to be carried out on a defined timetable.
We need to remember, too, that a typical Microsoft employee isn't sitting around all day having cups of coffee. OK, some may be sitting around all day having cups of coffee but, at the same time, they need to be doing something useful and productive. Otherwise personal and team goals are missed.
This culture, which is of course not unique to Microsoft, explains some of the customer experience with Microsoft.
For example, the impression of a Microsoft which doesn't listen is reinforced by simple events as sending someone an email to which the customer gets no response. The reality, of course, is that the Microsoft employee (either by training or hard experience) has learned that email must be replied to promptly if it is related to team goals or ignored if it isn't. From the employee's viewpoint ignoring low priority email is "efficient". From the customer's viewpoint the absence of a reply may be seen as arrogant, not listening, not caring or some similar interpretation.
But the non-existence of "Microsoft" manifests in other, larger scale, ways too.
The team-orientated, short term goal-orientated culture in Microsoft also contributed to another problem. It is no secret that many Visual Basic developers were incensed by several technical decisions about Visual Basic .NET. Without going into technical detail the VB developers were incensed because lots of their code was broken when VB.NET was introduced. Somewhere, back along the line, or so I understand, a promise was made by "Microsoft" that code wouldn't be broken in that way. But, by the time VB.NET came on the scene that promise wasn't kept. The result, as you can easily discover by talking to people at conferences or on aeroplanes, is that a whole raft of VB developers feel betrayed by ... you guessed it ... "Microsoft".
And in that situation too we need to remember that, in a very practical sense, "Microsoft" doesn't exist. The person who made the promise was, in all likelihood, long gone and the new short-term goal-orientated employee had, I guess, little or no awareness of the history and of the promise.
The lack of institutional memory is, of course, not unique to Microsoft. Any commitment from a corporation is only bankable when the person making the commitment can make it in writing in a document signed by an authorised signatory of the company. It is only when you have that kind of commitment that you are safe in assuming that Microsoft exists.
Posted by Andrew Watt at March 13, 2004 09:11 AM