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28.03.06

Internal voices

Microsoft’s recent delay for releasing Vista has triggered several serious announcements from employees inside Microsoft via blogs. It covers a fair portion of different organisational functions. This one is about marketing:
’I was upset at missing the back-to-school market. Now we’re missing the holiday sales market. All of those laptops and PCs are going to have XP on it. What percentage will upgrade to Vista? Well, I guess that’s the little dream that I need to give up on. Vista’s deployment is going to come from people buying CPUs with the OS pre-installed, not dancing down the CompUSA aisle as they clutch that boxed version of Vista to their loving chest. So not only did we miss last year’s opportunity, we’re missing this year’s opportunity, too. With the convergence of high-tech media, this holiday season would have been an explosive nodal point to get Vista out for a compounded effect.’

This one is about organisational culture: ’Bill, get rid of the Windows mafia, or be ready to lose your good employees. This is just unacceptable. It can’t be happening. It can’t be real. This is not Microsoft. I need to see people getting fired. I have to see people being kicked out of the door. I don’t know where the motivation is going to come from, if some justice is not applied. THEY HAVE TO LEAVE.’

This one about reward and review systems: ’“I just submitted my resignation from Microsoft today, not because of this mess. It just happened that I found a great opportunity outside of MSFT and got tired of [the] salary compression and review system. So now I am speaking as just a shareholder: please change the management in [the] Windows division.’

And finally, there is apparently a post from a technician: ’If you had spent the last five years of your life grinding away to get this thing out the door, you would have realized the only thing worse than slipping the date would have been to lay a turd in August. Those of us in the trenches … see exactly what bugs are between us and shipping.’

Still, the shares rose. For how long?

All posts can be found at RedHerring or at Mini-Microsoft

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