8 ms·

My favorite bit about this is how none of the execs want to take ownership of the change, but instead trying to put someone else in the hot seat and/or start a

My favorite bit about this is how none of the execs want to take ownership of the change, but instead trying to put someone else in the hot seat and/or start a Committee. This feels like an email that should have been blasted to the entire company. Top-down, empower employees to think of a more unified experience. Then again, all of the external jokes about Microsoft indicate that every department is fighting for their lives against the others, so that kind of kumbaya togetherness was never going to happen.

dmitriy_ko 9d ago
Microsoft is a company where you get promoted for playing politics, not taking ownership, improving things, fixing bugs.
motoboi 9d ago
Given that the way the company worked was the cause of the problem, sending the email company wide would have caused more confusion that solve the problem.
knollimar 9d ago
"I don't know what it means to "own website issues"" made me irate. It was very clear! Read the issues and be accountable for fixing them?
- TulliusCicero 9d ago
  From what I know about MS, I can understand what they mean. Microsoft famously had teams at odds with each other, so if you "own" something across multiple teams and can't get them to actually work together or take a particular issue seriously, then you just have the shit end of responsibility without the authority to make stuff happen.
  - hylaride 9d ago
    For awhile under Balmer, Microsoft implemented a lot of Jack Welsh management philosophies. This included stack ranking, but also encouraging "internal competition" under the idea that it'll drive people to excel. In real life that caused friction, politics, sandbagging, and other problems that were not in the company's best interests. It's fine to be competitive, but in some competitive situations (team sports, companies, etc), the whole point is for the team to win, not individuals. Sadly, even though most of these philosophies have been discredited over the long term (stack ranking can be fine if you do actually need to do layoffs, so long as you realized there are exceptions to the rule), other bad management practices have also taken over. We're now squarely in the depths of all the worst aspects of "product driven" development, where nebulous metrics are measured for success (such as the bad VSCode decision to append copilot in commit messages, which makes it look like copilot is more heavily used than it is).
    - gigatree 9d ago
      Exactly. Jack Welsh’s management philosophy just further incentivizes doing what you can to bring everyone else (ie the company) down to make yourself look better.
    - marcosdumay 9d ago
      Ironically, they could have learned from Jack Welsh to separate the product divisions and make redundant teams on each one to solve the ownership issues. When people compete internally on Microsoft, what are they competing on if everybody works in a different horizontal?
  - ayewo 9d ago
    > Microsoft famously had teams at odds with each other, ... Instantly reminded me of this especially apt comic: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EyJfRwHWYAI0_yt?format=jpg https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EyJfRwHWYAI0_yt?format=jpg [1] Also available here: https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/6jw33z/internal_structure_of_tech_companies/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/6jw33z/int...
    - siddbudd 9d ago
      I am either misreading it or it almost makes me want to work at Facebook. If only their product wouldn't be so utterly disgusting.
      - disgruntledphd2 9d ago
        This comic was made a loooooonnnnnnggggg time ago (back when I worked at Facebook). It was actually a great place to work then, but that company no longer exists in any meaningful sense.
    - TulliusCicero 9d ago
      Exactly what I was thinking of too lol
- ytoawwhra92 9d ago
  Well, except then the person who volunteered to "own website issues" clarified that they meant one specific issue (download links) among the five or so that Gates identified.
LennyWhiteJr 9d ago
This is unfortunately par for the course at many big companies. I have re-lived this exact same thread so many times I've lost count 1. Leader escalates issue to his team 2. The team scrambles to come up with a solution 3. No one wants to take ownership. #NotMyProblem 4. weeks or months are spent on 'developing a plan' 5. nothinghappens.jpg
- Razengan 9d ago
  The Soviet Union didn't fall, it got merged into Microsoft
  - jryle70 9d ago
    Capitalism at its finest! Or wait, never mind
  - ViktorRay 9d ago
    It’s interesting how monopolistic corporations can fall prey to the same dynamics as authoritarian countries with centralized economies.
    - tancop 9d ago
      Both will eventually develop a strict hierarchy where you're only accountable to people up the chain of command, not down. There is no way to prevent that because it's a lot easier to keep one person satisfied than a whole team you're supposed to lead, so almost every manager naturally switches to working that way. The only thing that can prevent it is a flat organization but one that has enough structure so an unofficial hierarchy can't form. And making that work is hard.
- eddythompson80 9d ago
  I have seen that too many times too in big companies, but I wouldn't say that it results in nothinghappens.jpg It results in the equivalent of treating an infection with Tylenol rather than antibiotics. The exact symptom reported by a "Leader" will usually get fixed, but in a more of a "KPI hacking" rather than a fundamental fix to the problem. I have seen a "Leader" point to the staggering number of support tickets as a problem then have teams make it incredibility difficult to open a support ticket. The number of support tickets plummets and the first report to instruct their team to do so gets rewarded and all other teams follow suit. Have a leader point to complexity of the sign up process, and have teams "simplify" the signup process by just taking an email to create the account, then make the experience of doing anything post sign up a broken mess because you forgot to go into settings and filling up all the required details. Or have a leader complain about the install process like in this example, and have teams just bundle massive dependencies or make wide horrific modifications to the users machine to "simplify" the install process. Now suddenly installing a video editing software also modifies your default video player, your HDR or scaling settings, your audio device setup, and your keyboard layout (because why not?)
stackghost 9d ago
Agreed. From the comments, lots of people down-thread who clearly haven't worked in large orgs. They are arguing about not wanting to take ownership because they know the organizational structure is going to be an impediment. The problems Bill describes could not have been solved by Microsoft without a massive internal restructuring. We know this because Microsoft's UX is still abysmal. Nobody wants to have the inevitable failure hung around their necks by "owning" something that depends on the cooperation and coordination of departments that don't report to them.
georgemcbay 9d ago
> My favorite bit about this is how none of the execs want to take ownership of the change, but instead trying to put someone else in the hot seat and/or start a Committee. And with the exception of John Martin's reply (which recognizes that there are deeper problems they should think about, but seems resigned to the fact that that won't happen) the focus is pretty much entirely: "let's fix the exact issues Bill Gates ran into trying to download this one product we produce" (out of many hundreds/thousands) rather than "let's fix the root causes that caused us to arrive in this place to begin with". I haven't worked at any companies as large and siloed as Microsoft, but I'd assume this is pretty common for them, at least if they don't have a Steve Jobs-like tyrant who both has all the power and is singularly product focused.
- vjvjvjvjghv 9d ago
  It's very common. From a certain level up, execs rarely use the products they are responsible for. It's all about strategy, committees, meetings, plans and reports. For them the product is just an abstract thing. When I rented a Buick car, I thought to myself that there is no way any decision maker ever tried the car and thought that this is ok. I think one of the strengths of Apple during the Jobs days was that Jobs actually sometimes seemed to use the products himself and gave feedback. When I look at the blatant bugs MacOS and iOS had in the last years, I also think that the current Apple big shots never use their stuff or they would have noticed.
  - baud147258 9d ago
    > I also think that the current Apple big shots never use their stuff or they would have noticed. Or they do and they don't think it's worth their time and energy to get them fixed. I think they just don't care about their products, unlike Jobs.
    - pino83 9d ago
      If you'd take the Gates email and give them to my colleagues, saying "this was some random guy complaining about Windows", they'd all react along the lines of "Well, that's just an idiot who makes things up because he's bored and hates Windows. There are good reasons for everything he complained about. He just reports it in a quite dramatized way."
bestouff 9d ago
My fav is this : > Someone decided to trash the one part of Windows that was usable? The file system is no longer usable. The registry is not usable. This program listing was one sane place but now it is all crapped up. This is so true, and not only under Windows. Install any modern program under any modern OS and have a look at the filesystem, it's a flaming mess. Nowadays the only solution "smart people" have found is to install a complete system, complete with libraries and frameworks, for each program. I miss the days of simple executables.
- Seattle3503 9d ago
  Rust and Go can create a single statically linked executable and they are very popular. It could become a thing.
  - brianwawok 9d ago
    The difference in complexity between my go and my Python docker image is actually hilarious. 100s of files and package managers and npm and whatever else.. vs 1 file.
    - Seattle3503 9d ago
      Where does NPM play in to the build?
      - kristianp 9d ago
        Npm always finds its way in, usually for building web artifacts.
      - brianwawok 9d ago
        Beats me but somehow we do! Every day I drop 1k lines of Python code and replace with go. Will be fully go soon!
  - bestouff 8d ago
    I really enjoy single-executable Rust things - that's what I use for building web apps (SSR). But it's not that widespread (for now ?).
matja 9d ago
> every department is fighting for their lives against the others https://bonkersworld.net/img/2011-06-27_organizational_charts.png https://bonkersworld.net/img/2011-06-27_organizational_chart...
- CamperBob2 9d ago
  I love how Google looks like an MLP. I suspect their leadership would agree with that portrayal. You can imagine the activation functions: "Will this get me promoted?" "Will this get us bad press?"
- deleted 9d ago
  [deleted]
andai 9d ago
Somebody really oughta do something about this mess!
hintymad 9d ago
Curious why it is so hard to find an owner to the issue. Gates' experience started with the web UI, then I'd expect that the team who owns the microsoft.com or owns the experience. To them there are only two types of bottlenecks: their web pages (usability, JavaScript performance, ways to get backend data, and etc), and their immediate dependencies. So, they drive improvement on both types of the bottlenecks, and the owners of the immediate dependencies recursively handle their own. For instance, the web team will identify that calling the catalog API has a P99 latency of 5 seconds and the network is fine, then they ask the catalog API to improve the API latency. If the catalog team does not do the obvious, the team's manager gets punished. Of course, I'm being naive here, as I've seen too many companies fail to achieve such basic ownership. So, curious what I have missed. Of if the ownership is not a clean DAG, well, it goes back to Gates, as he was responsible for both the org charts and the company culture.
- Telaneo 8d ago
  It wouldn't surprise me that what seems like whole things from the outside are split up even further on the inside of Microsoft. There's probably no single person responsible for microsoft.com (nor was there at the time). Instead the front page is one team, Windows Update (at the time) was yet another team, and sales another, and then there are 5 other teams doing other things, and no single individual or group is responsible for the whole thing. They've all got permission to push things to the website and change whatever just from time immemorial, and not through any defined authority, since that authority doesn't actually exist. You can still see symptoms of this today. MS will (or at least would) spin up new domains rather than just update microsoft.com, or create newthing.microsoft.com, since both of those require talking to whomever is responsible for the main domain. Even if that person exists, knowing who they are in an org like MS is already a big ask when it's organised the way it is. Meanwhile, buying a new domain likely takes less than an hour, even if you include billing and such.
vismit2000 9d ago
Reminds of https://i.insider.com/4e0b340dcadcbbdd35120000?width=1300&format=jpeg&auto=webp https://i.insider.com/4e0b340dcadcbbdd35120000?width=1300&fo...
avinoth 8d ago
Yeah, and its extra funny with everyone agreeing Dave should own it, but he isn't on the email loop at all.

dmitriy_ko 9d ago

Microsoft is a company where you get promoted for playing politics, not taking ownership, improving things, fixing bugs.

motoboi 9d ago

Given that the way the company worked was the cause of the problem, sending the email company wide would have caused more confusion that solve the problem.

knollimar 9d ago

"I don't know what it means to "own website issues"" made me irate. It was very clear! Read the issues and be accountable for fixing them?

TulliusCicero 9d ago
From what I know about MS, I can understand what they mean. Microsoft famously had teams at odds with each other, so if you "own" something across multiple teams and can't get them to actually work together or take a particular issue seriously, then you just have the shit end of responsibility without the authority to make stuff happen.
- hylaride 9d ago
  For awhile under Balmer, Microsoft implemented a lot of Jack Welsh management philosophies. This included stack ranking, but also encouraging "internal competition" under the idea that it'll drive people to excel. In real life that caused friction, politics, sandbagging, and other problems that were not in the company's best interests. It's fine to be competitive, but in some competitive situations (team sports, companies, etc), the whole point is for the team to win, not individuals. Sadly, even though most of these philosophies have been discredited over the long term (stack ranking can be fine if you do actually need to do layoffs, so long as you realized there are exceptions to the rule), other bad management practices have also taken over. We're now squarely in the depths of all the worst aspects of "product driven" development, where nebulous metrics are measured for success (such as the bad VSCode decision to append copilot in commit messages, which makes it look like copilot is more heavily used than it is).
  - gigatree 9d ago
    Exactly. Jack Welsh’s management philosophy just further incentivizes doing what you can to bring everyone else (ie the company) down to make yourself look better.
  - marcosdumay 9d ago
    Ironically, they could have learned from Jack Welsh to separate the product divisions and make redundant teams on each one to solve the ownership issues. When people compete internally on Microsoft, what are they competing on if everybody works in a different horizontal?
- ayewo 9d ago
  > Microsoft famously had teams at odds with each other, ... Instantly reminded me of this especially apt comic: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EyJfRwHWYAI0_yt?format=jpg https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EyJfRwHWYAI0_yt?format=jpg [1] Also available here: https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/6jw33z/internal_structure_of_tech_companies/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/6jw33z/int...
  - siddbudd 9d ago
    I am either misreading it or it almost makes me want to work at Facebook. If only their product wouldn't be so utterly disgusting.
    - disgruntledphd2 9d ago
      This comic was made a loooooonnnnnnggggg time ago (back when I worked at Facebook). It was actually a great place to work then, but that company no longer exists in any meaningful sense.
  - TulliusCicero 9d ago
    Exactly what I was thinking of too lol
ytoawwhra92 9d ago
Well, except then the person who volunteered to "own website issues" clarified that they meant one specific issue (download links) among the five or so that Gates identified.

LennyWhiteJr 9d ago

This is unfortunately par for the course at many big companies. I have re-lived this exact same thread so many times I've lost count 1. Leader escalates issue to his team 2. The team scrambles to come up with a solution 3. No one wants to take ownership. #NotMyProblem 4. weeks or months are spent on 'developing a plan' 5. nothinghappens.jpg

Razengan 9d ago
The Soviet Union didn't fall, it got merged into Microsoft
- jryle70 9d ago
  Capitalism at its finest! Or wait, never mind
- ViktorRay 9d ago
  It’s interesting how monopolistic corporations can fall prey to the same dynamics as authoritarian countries with centralized economies.
  - tancop 9d ago
    Both will eventually develop a strict hierarchy where you're only accountable to people up the chain of command, not down. There is no way to prevent that because it's a lot easier to keep one person satisfied than a whole team you're supposed to lead, so almost every manager naturally switches to working that way. The only thing that can prevent it is a flat organization but one that has enough structure so an unofficial hierarchy can't form. And making that work is hard.
eddythompson80 9d ago
I have seen that too many times too in big companies, but I wouldn't say that it results in nothinghappens.jpg It results in the equivalent of treating an infection with Tylenol rather than antibiotics. The exact symptom reported by a "Leader" will usually get fixed, but in a more of a "KPI hacking" rather than a fundamental fix to the problem. I have seen a "Leader" point to the staggering number of support tickets as a problem then have teams make it incredibility difficult to open a support ticket. The number of support tickets plummets and the first report to instruct their team to do so gets rewarded and all other teams follow suit. Have a leader point to complexity of the sign up process, and have teams "simplify" the signup process by just taking an email to create the account, then make the experience of doing anything post sign up a broken mess because you forgot to go into settings and filling up all the required details. Or have a leader complain about the install process like in this example, and have teams just bundle massive dependencies or make wide horrific modifications to the users machine to "simplify" the install process. Now suddenly installing a video editing software also modifies your default video player, your HDR or scaling settings, your audio device setup, and your keyboard layout (because why not?)

stackghost 9d ago

Agreed. From the comments, lots of people down-thread who clearly haven't worked in large orgs. They are arguing about not wanting to take ownership because they know the organizational structure is going to be an impediment. The problems Bill describes could not have been solved by Microsoft without a massive internal restructuring. We know this because Microsoft's UX is still abysmal. Nobody wants to have the inevitable failure hung around their necks by "owning" something that depends on the cooperation and coordination of departments that don't report to them.

georgemcbay 9d ago

> My favorite bit about this is how none of the execs want to take ownership of the change, but instead trying to put someone else in the hot seat and/or start a Committee. And with the exception of John Martin's reply (which recognizes that there are deeper problems they should think about, but seems resigned to the fact that that won't happen) the focus is pretty much entirely: "let's fix the exact issues Bill Gates ran into trying to download this one product we produce" (out of many hundreds/thousands) rather than "let's fix the root causes that caused us to arrive in this place to begin with". I haven't worked at any companies as large and siloed as Microsoft, but I'd assume this is pretty common for them, at least if they don't have a Steve Jobs-like tyrant who both has all the power and is singularly product focused.

vjvjvjvjghv 9d ago
It's very common. From a certain level up, execs rarely use the products they are responsible for. It's all about strategy, committees, meetings, plans and reports. For them the product is just an abstract thing. When I rented a Buick car, I thought to myself that there is no way any decision maker ever tried the car and thought that this is ok. I think one of the strengths of Apple during the Jobs days was that Jobs actually sometimes seemed to use the products himself and gave feedback. When I look at the blatant bugs MacOS and iOS had in the last years, I also think that the current Apple big shots never use their stuff or they would have noticed.
- baud147258 9d ago
  > I also think that the current Apple big shots never use their stuff or they would have noticed. Or they do and they don't think it's worth their time and energy to get them fixed. I think they just don't care about their products, unlike Jobs.
  - pino83 9d ago
    If you'd take the Gates email and give them to my colleagues, saying "this was some random guy complaining about Windows", they'd all react along the lines of "Well, that's just an idiot who makes things up because he's bored and hates Windows. There are good reasons for everything he complained about. He just reports it in a quite dramatized way."

bestouff 9d ago

My fav is this : > Someone decided to trash the one part of Windows that was usable? The file system is no longer usable. The registry is not usable. This program listing was one sane place but now it is all crapped up. This is so true, and not only under Windows. Install any modern program under any modern OS and have a look at the filesystem, it's a flaming mess. Nowadays the only solution "smart people" have found is to install a complete system, complete with libraries and frameworks, for each program. I miss the days of simple executables.

Seattle3503 9d ago
Rust and Go can create a single statically linked executable and they are very popular. It could become a thing.
- brianwawok 9d ago
  The difference in complexity between my go and my Python docker image is actually hilarious. 100s of files and package managers and npm and whatever else.. vs 1 file.
  - Seattle3503 9d ago
    Where does NPM play in to the build?
    - kristianp 9d ago
      Npm always finds its way in, usually for building web artifacts.
    - brianwawok 9d ago
      Beats me but somehow we do! Every day I drop 1k lines of Python code and replace with go. Will be fully go soon!
- bestouff 8d ago
  I really enjoy single-executable Rust things - that's what I use for building web apps (SSR). But it's not that widespread (for now ?).

matja 9d ago

> every department is fighting for their lives against the others https://bonkersworld.net/img/2011-06-27_organizational_charts.png https://bonkersworld.net/img/2011-06-27_organizational_chart...

CamperBob2 9d ago
I love how Google looks like an MLP. I suspect their leadership would agree with that portrayal. You can imagine the activation functions: "Will this get me promoted?" "Will this get us bad press?"
deleted 9d ago
[deleted]

andai 9d ago

Somebody really oughta do something about this mess!

hintymad 9d ago

Curious why it is so hard to find an owner to the issue. Gates' experience started with the web UI, then I'd expect that the team who owns the microsoft.com or owns the experience. To them there are only two types of bottlenecks: their web pages (usability, JavaScript performance, ways to get backend data, and etc), and their immediate dependencies. So, they drive improvement on both types of the bottlenecks, and the owners of the immediate dependencies recursively handle their own. For instance, the web team will identify that calling the catalog API has a P99 latency of 5 seconds and the network is fine, then they ask the catalog API to improve the API latency. If the catalog team does not do the obvious, the team's manager gets punished. Of course, I'm being naive here, as I've seen too many companies fail to achieve such basic ownership. So, curious what I have missed. Of if the ownership is not a clean DAG, well, it goes back to Gates, as he was responsible for both the org charts and the company culture.

Telaneo 8d ago
It wouldn't surprise me that what seems like whole things from the outside are split up even further on the inside of Microsoft. There's probably no single person responsible for microsoft.com (nor was there at the time). Instead the front page is one team, Windows Update (at the time) was yet another team, and sales another, and then there are 5 other teams doing other things, and no single individual or group is responsible for the whole thing. They've all got permission to push things to the website and change whatever just from time immemorial, and not through any defined authority, since that authority doesn't actually exist. You can still see symptoms of this today. MS will (or at least would) spin up new domains rather than just update microsoft.com, or create newthing.microsoft.com, since both of those require talking to whomever is responsible for the main domain. Even if that person exists, knowing who they are in an org like MS is already a big ask when it's organised the way it is. Meanwhile, buying a new domain likely takes less than an hour, even if you include billing and such.

vismit2000 9d ago

Reminds of https://i.insider.com/4e0b340dcadcbbdd35120000?width=1300&format=jpeg&auto=webp https://i.insider.com/4e0b340dcadcbbdd35120000?width=1300&fo...

avinoth 8d ago

Yeah, and its extra funny with everyone agreeing Dave should own it, but he isn't on the email loop at all.