Scoble’s solutions won’t shut down mini-MSFT
Scoble, How Microsoft can shut down Mini-Microsoft. Ugh. I totally disagree with everything here and I should be totally writing a spec instead of responding to his rant.
Terabyte storage for everyone. I almost have a terabyte at home. It’s okay, though I’ll probably need some more soon. Putting it in the cloud would be nice, but my pipe wouldn’t support streaming HDTV from the cloud. That aside, how does giving this to everyone change actually change anything? Scoble doesn’t offer any clear end user benefits that a terabyte would bring to justify the cost. Why would my mother wants this? And how do we profit from it?
Dual monitors plus Vista for everyone at MSFT. Almost everyone in my group has at least two monitors (or one really big one). I can’t think of a single dev who has just one. Many have three. Maybe the evangelism group has a smaller hardware budget then the product teams :). As for Vista, lots of us have Vista running on one or two machines in our office/home already.
Public compensation change logs. I disagree that compensation should be public. Let’s publish the pay range associated with a ladder level to clearly spell out the incentive of moving up the ladder but going all public with all compensation information will cause much more harm than good. Do you want your neighbors, friends, local businesses to know how much you are paid?
Speed bumps. As a program manager it’s my job to shield my developers, testers, designers, etc. from as much red tape as possible. Yes, we could be more nimble, but when you’re shipping software to hundreds of millions of people, the red tape is usually there for a damn good reason.
Marketers need to explain themselves. More conversations are good. However, Microsoft’s marketing problems do not stem from a lack of conversations between marketers and their end users. Rather, it’s because Microsoft is a technology company first and foremost. Everything else is a distant second. For us to embrace marketing and integrate it so it’s a part of our sole requires a huge cultural and organizational change within the company.
Conclusion: Do I think Microsoft has some structural issues which might prevent our stock from swinging back to being a growth stock? Yes. Do I think Scoble comes close to addressing those issues? No. He doesn’t even lay out the problems/issues, but somehow has the solutions. So what are the problems? What are the solutions? As much as I’m all for blogging, discussions of that nature should be kept within the confines of the hallways here in Redmond, and shouldn’t be debated on our blogs.
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